Church Treasurer Training: What Every Volunteer Treasurer Should Know
Most church treasurers didn’t apply for the job, they got asked, said yes because someone needed to, and are now responsible for a church’s finances without ever having been formally trained for the role. If that’s you, this isn’t a criticism. It’s just the reality of how the treasurer role usually gets filled at most […]
How Small Churches Can Handle Payroll Without a Finance Team
Most payroll advice assumes you have someone whose job it is to handle payroll, an office manager, a bookkeeper, an HR person. A lot of small churches don’t have any of that. It might just be a bivocational pastor doing everything between sermons, or a volunteer treasurer squeezing payroll in around a full-time job elsewhere. […]
QuickBooks for Nonprofits vs. QuickBooks for Churches: What’s Actually Different
Here’s a question worth answering plainly before you spend any time comparing options: there is no separate “QuickBooks for Churches” product. What people usually mean by “QuickBooks for nonprofits” is standard QuickBooks Online with nonprofit-specific terminology turned on, sometimes accessed through a nonprofit discount program, not a fundamentally different piece of software built specifically for […]
How to Set Up Designated Funds in QuickBooks Online for Churches
If you’ve already read our general guide to setting up QuickBooks Online for churches, you know the Class feature is how most churches track designated and restricted funds. This post picks up exactly where that one leaves off — a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of setting designated funds up correctly, not just knowing that you should. […]
Accounting Help for Dioceses: What Catholic and Orthodox Churches Need to Know
Most church Accounting Help guidance, including a lot of what’s on our own site, assumes a single, independent congregation making its own financial decisions. That model doesn’t describe how Catholic or Orthodox parishes actually work. Parishes operate within a diocesan or jurisdictional structure, reporting to a central authority, often sharing tax-exempt status through a group […]
Payroll for Religious Organizations: Not Just for Christian Churches
Search “clergy tax rules” or “housing allowance” and almost everything that comes back is written as if “religious organization” only ever means “Christian church.” It doesn’t. The tax provisions that govern clergy payroll, dual tax status, housing allowance, automatic tax exemption, are written around the function a religious leader performs, not the specific faith tradition […]
Clergy Payroll Explained: What Makes Pastor Pay Different From Other Staff
If your church runs payroll for both a pastor and, say, an office administrator, and both are set up the same way in your payroll system, one of those two setups is almost certainly wrong. Clergy payroll and standard staff payroll aren’t variations on the same theme – they run on genuinely different rules, and […]
Church Payroll Services in Maryland: What Local Ministries Need to Know
Prospera is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, which means we’ve spent a lot of time in the weeds of Maryland-specific payroll rules – not just the federal clergy tax basics that apply everywhere, but the state-level details that trip up churches from Baltimore to Southern Maryland and everywhere in between. If your church is anywhere in […]
Church Credit Card Policies: How to Set Guardrails Without Slowing Ministry Down
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and your children’s ministry director needs poster board and snacks for Sunday. She doesn’t have a card, so she pays out of pocket and submits a reimbursement request. It sits in a folder for two weeks. Meanwhile, your facilities manager does have a card, uses it for a $4,000 HVAC repair without […]
How Churches Should Handle Restricted vs. Unrestricted Funds (A Plain-English Guide)
Restricted funds are donations given for a specific purpose, a building project, a missions trip, a benevolence need, that legally can’t be spent on anything else. Unrestricted funds are general giving your church can use for any ministry purpose, like payroll, utilities, or day-to-day operations. Mixing the two, even by accident, breaks donor trust and […]
