The Church Answers Podcast

Dealing with a Well-Meaning But Not-So-Competent Financial Secretary in Your Church: An Interview with Steve Chaney

Thom interviews Steve Chaney, founder and CEO of Chaney and Associates, the premier CPA firm for churches of all sizes. In this episode, Steve and Thom discuss the challenges of a church secretary or bookkeeper who might not have the necessary skills to do the job.

Duration:: 13m
Broadcast on:: 22 May 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney & Associates. Chaney & Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. Welcome to the Church Answers podcast sponsored by Chaney & Associates. We've already recorded two of these. We've dropped all three of them. This is the third one, so they're all downloaded. We have with Steve Chaney, the Chaney & Associates. And you've heard it in the sponsorship, in the front, in the end, the bumpers. But you hear they are the accounting firm for the church. That's what they do. That's all that they do. So Steve, two things. Welcome. And just give a quick overview of how you are all things for the church. I just want to hear about Chaney & Associates one more time. Yeah, great to be with you, Tom. Thank you for letting me be part of this. And ultimately, what we do is accounting and payroll services for churches. That we call it collaborative stewardship, so we work with your internal staff as well, or we can do all of it. But ultimately, we pay the bills, we do the bank reconciliations, we do the annual report, we do all the payrolls. All of this is virtualized in software. There's nobody present. And we leverage technology to save you money and to bring stewardship to the local church. Our mission is to make the local church grow and to have less administrative burden. That is a great mission. And boy, I think some pastors are probably thinking right now, wow, I could use that help. A lot of churches have, they go by different names, financial secretaries, bookkeepers. You could probably add tons of names to the internal person that I'm talking about. And let me just give you my example for today, Steve, and then I'm going to let you give all of your examples. I was talking to a church that has this looking for a consultation from church answers. And the financial secretary who was also the regular secretary of the church was in there. And she started talking about how they do their accounting and how they keep records of people's giving. I'm not going to go into the details because we'd probably identify that church from the conversation I had at least to the church. But I got to tell you, it was a horror story. And now I'm going to be talking to this pastor about talking to you, or your firm, I should say, just simply because when it's all said and done, when it's all said and done, sometimes well-meaning people don't do well. And I know you've heard, you have all kind of examples. Oh, for sure. I mean, it's just quite amazing to see. We've actually had one of our churches set it up completely backwards. They had all their debits going in as credits and their credits going in as debits. I said, I don't know how you make a system do that, but this person did. And I was like, oh my goodness. So basically, income comes in and it's taken away from the records and expenses act like income. And so, let me tell you the reason why that is, is because a lot of churches say, but this person was a banker. She worked at a bank and she knows how to do accounting. Well, did you know a bank does accounting exactly the opposite of how a business does? Because what you call a deposit, which is a debit, is actually a liability for them. It's credit. She was a banker accountant, but she was not a good church accountant. And I'll say this, Steve, I came from a banking background before I went into the ministry as a fifth generation banker and all of my sons were bankers before they went into ministry. I don't think all bankers know accounting. I just will tell you that. There are a lot of them just because you know something about finance does not mean you know how to do accounting. Correct. Well, and then other things that we find a lot of is with, and sometimes the financial secretary could be the treasurer of the church, he could also be a volunteer. And we just say, you know what, just because it's free, doesn't mean it's not going to cost you something. It can cost you a reputation and a heartbeat, right? Right. If I can tell you that there are two things, sexual morality and financial matters that a pastor is going to pay the price for. I don't take care of the first, but I'll take care of the second. And on that financial matters, it's that it's even a lot easier. What I say today is people will forgive you for the first, but it's hard. People do not forgive for financial and providing. And you lose all credibility. You lose all integrity. And so when you have these people do this kind of stuff, and then they say, well, I don't know, I'm a volunteer, or I don't know, this is what the pastor told me to do. No, no, it's not. The pastor didn't tell you to do this because if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't have done it. Even if he told you to do it, you wouldn't have done it. So a lot of things that we find that is hard for a pastor is there's nobody to help support him. Right? Meaning this, like the pastor rarely gets a star increase. Pastor rarely gets a bonus. Right? Nobody even looking out for them, or they'll say, well, pastor should make the kind of money. So we come in, and what we do is when our budgeting process, we say, wait, let's analyze the pastor's payroll. We do 6,500 pastors payroll. We have W2s for that. So we have data to show in your area, how much a person should get paid? What should be the increase? What's the cost of living adjustment for that area this year based upon that education? And a whole bunch of stuff that we could look at where nobody is looking for that for the pastor. And the pastor sitting over in his mind, he's screaming, is somebody even going to bring up the fact of what I get paid or how I do this? So unless he brings it up, it's not done. And so what we do is look for that. And that's one thing that we find a lot of is we are the advocate for the pastor, right? And for the church, because the Bible says the person teaches and preaches well is worthy of a double honor. Sometimes people are getting a quarter on it. And then he's sitting like, I can't bring this up. What am I going to do? And so we bring this kind of stuff, tools to the person. And ultimately, the financial secretary, the bookkeeper on the side of the treasury is like, they just don't know. Nobody goes to a church to become the treasurer of a church. They went to a church because they said, I like this church. I like this pastor. And then somebody says, would you please be on the board? And they're like, oh Lord, I didn't want to be on the board. But they go beyond the board and they don't know what they're doing. And it's frustrating to know in, right? And so we just, we just take all that out and we can talk about it. You know, I talk about Chaney and Associates in a lot of ways. And one thing I've got to say more frequently is you can be the pastor's advocate because the pastor needs to advocate for pay. The pastor needs to advocate for, hey, this is legit. We're spending here. It's not bad. The pastor needs to advocate for, hey, we need someone to run this system better. You said this on a previous podcast, but just one more time. How did you get into the business of being the CPA firm for the church? I know what it had to do with playing a piano, but it's, I mean, is that it? Is there, is there, is there a little bit more to that story? There is a lot more, but the, ultimately I became a CPA or accountant from Sac State and Sacramento, and I was a pianist for this large church for 25 years. And one day the senior pastor came to me and goes, we need a CPA on the board. And I said, I'm 26 years old out. Nobody'll vote for me. And he says, well, you play all the hymns, they'll vote for everybody who plays the hymns. And so sure enough, I get on the board. And the first year, the guys on the board tell me, you're wet behind the ears. You should just listen. And so I listen for that first year. And here's this great pastor, they bring in about $10 million a year between the schools, the colleges, the church, everything that they do. And the pastor is constantly saying, I wish I'd known that. I wish I'd known that. I would have done something different. And so the Holy Spirit started speaking to me about starting to do this for churches. So when Arthur Anderson shut down, that's where I worked. In three months, I had 10 churches. And now we have 1,100 churches. We're in all 50 states of America, and we do this all over the place. We find many different examples of how to apply it. But here's what we do. We go on to say, we're going to be the pastor's best friend. We do not want to be the hero. We want the pastor to be Luke Skywalker. We want him to be the hero, right? We want to be the person in the background coaching and guiding. And when something goes wrong, we talk to him and tell him why or how to stay out of that pitfall and not do that, right? Again, most pastors are like saying that no pastor goes into a decision to say, I want to make the wrong decision. They want to make the right decision. And they might say to themselves, oh, I heard from God on this. But then there's also in the council of many, there's wisdom, right? And sometimes they say, you just got to have a good financial report to make a good decision, right? Because you can have all the faith in you want. But even Jesus said, well, tell me what you have. And they said, five, loads and two fish. He started at the point of need and then blessed it. He didn't start at the point of blessing and then say, okay, now you got it. So when you say five, loads and two fish, when Jesus says, how much do you have a pastor might say to himself, I don't know, I haven't got a financial statement of 45 days from my financial secretary. Or Steve, in the case of many of the pastors we serve, they don't know how to read a financial statement. They need someone to say, this is what this means for you. And just having someone like Cheney, and it says just to come along and not to be little someone who doesn't understand any type of financial statement would say, this is what this means. Well, yeah. And also too, you got to think about it like this from some of the largest churches in America from like Joel Steens of the world to whoever. The same law applies to a church plan or church and existing church of a hundred that's been around forever. Right. Right. The same thing. So everything in between that they have the same payroll issues, they have the same financial issues, they have the same financial reporting issues, right? They have the same budgeting concerns. They just get bigger when you get larger, but like they all the same things, the rules apply. Well, who's going to have a lawyer on staff? Nobody. You're going to have a lawyer. You pay a retainer too. Now what we do is we have it, we don't do believe it by the hour. We do a fixed fee. And so we don't want the pastor. We want the pastor calling us. We want the pastor emailing us. We don't want him to think every time he touches us, we're going to hit the buzzer and start billing him. Right. With the fixed fee every month, there's no surprises. And so that's what we do in a nutshell, and we want to help that person. We also want to support that financial secretary, the bitkeeper on site, right? Sure. We want to make them value at it. That's what they want. That's why they're working at a church. They are also to help the local church and grow the kingdom of God. That's why they're desired. That's why they're there for, but they just don't know sometimes what we do. I love it. We're talking with Steve Cheney, founder, CEO of Cheney and Associates. Cheney and Associates, church answers developed a relationship with them at our request. One time ago, because they are the accounting firm for the church, church answers wants to serve the churches, Cheney and Associates wants to serve the churches. And that's why you will hear me say again and again, why I'm the big advocate for Cheney and Associates, because that's what they do. That's all that that's all that they do. And I'll say this, Steve. And many of the smaller churches that we serve, they pay a piano player as much or more just to play on Sunday morning that they would pay Cheney and Associates for the base rate going in. So it is highly affordable, highly affordable. Steve, every one of these three episodes have gone too quickly. I just want to keep on talking because every time I listen to you, I get fired up and I'm ready to go conquer the world. But thank you for not only the partnership that we have with church answers and with Cheney and Associates, but thank you for taking your time, your valuable time to be on this podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Look forward to it again. So you've been listening to the church answers podcast. You are watching us on YouTube. Give us a thumbs up or there's a thumbs up and subscribe to us. If you're listening to us on our favorite podcasting out, give us a rating and review Cheney and Associates is Cheney Associates.com. You'll hear that again as we close out and also just keep in mind that they are the advocate for the church. And you hear me talking about them every time on church answers podcast. I don't do any type of ministry with people or organizations unless I totally believe in them. And I believe in Cheney Associates. I'm so grateful for them. As always, thank you for being a part of the church answers podcast. You now have three downloads available and you're going to love everyone of them if you haven't listened to them already. Thank you for being a listener, you YouTubers, thank you for being a viewer. We'll see you on the next episode of the church answers podcast. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Cheney and Associates. Cheney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Cheney will focus on finances. Also please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) [MUSIC]