From time to time you will see in the headlines someone embezzling money from a church or nonprofit. Often they are caught stealing over $100,000. How do they do this? Are they a criminal mastermind with a complicated scheme?
Mostly they are just cutting checks to themselves or to pay personal bills. How would you catch this? With an independent bank reconciliation!
Do you know the most difficult fraud to detect? It’s when people steal cash from the offering plate. Sometimes we put people in a very difficult situation where they are responsible for counting the cash alone. Yikes!
Here’s some tips on how to avoid this situation.
I know some people are a wary about paying things electronically, but this is becoming the main way of moving money. QuickBooks Online can make it quick and easy to pay vendors and reimburse volunteers electronically.
For a church or nonprofit, a good process for receiving, recording, and depositing donations is absolutely necessary.
In this post, I cover the basics of a good process that will protect your workers and the donors.
For a long time, only the treasurer had access to the accounting program. The accounting program was usually on the oldest computer in some corner of the church where only the treasurer was brave enough. With QuickBooks Online, anyone can have access from anywhere so who should have access?
The other day I had a church call me up asking about how the pastor should be submitting mileage for reimbursement. That got me thinking…why have I not shared my mileage log and expense voucher templates? Well, here they are as well as my thoughts on documenting expenses.
This is starting a series on the Art of Being Cheap. Hopefully you’ll learn a little about thinking like a cheap accountant in order to save money on things that are unnecessary. We’ll start with looking at church credit cards.