If you are a house of worship technical leader, budgeting and accounting may not be at the forefront of your thinking on a day-to-day basis, but properly managing your technical budget should be considered one of the most important parts of your job. Not only are you managing a portion of your congregation’s money, but as a technical leader, it’s in your best interest to make your annual budget go as far as possible each year.
First of Year Projections
At the start of each year, I do some initial budget projections based on historical data as well as the upcoming year’s activities. Most years are fairly predictable and we’ve settled into a routine for how we spend money over the course of a year. Our church is fortunate that we have a very generous annual technical budget, and I’m careful to spend this money wisely. I try to be as frugal as possible with every purchase we make.
The first purchases of the year are often to replace stock of expendable items. This can be rather costly, because it includes projector lamps, gaff tape, batteries, gel, haze fluid and other expendables. As you know, these things add up fast and will typically amount to thousands of dollars by the time I’m through ordering. I always have critical expendables such as projector lamps in stock. If a lamp needs to be replaced or goes down unexpectedly, I need to have a replacement on hand at all times.
Tracking Every Expenditure
My team is meticulous about tracking every expense. Many years ago, I learned the hard way not to rely on anyone else to track expenditures. Although we have a wonderful finance manager on our staff, I simply will not rely on anyone but myself to track my budget. The method that we use it simple and relies solely on the individuals involved to follow-through with tracking each and every purchase.
Everyone on my team is part of a shared Google spreadsheet that we use to track expenses. When a purchase is made, we immediately enter the relevant information into our shared Google sheet. The benefits of doing it this way are probably apparent to most of you. By using a cloud-based service like Google Docs, we can work collaboratively on our budget. I can enter data, and so can other members of my team. We all can see each other’s changes in real time. By logging purchases immediately when they are made, we have a grasp on our budget balance at all times. I know that sounds surprisingly simple, but I’m amazed how few people actually manage their budget this way.
One mistake I made in the past was to make purchases on our corporate Amex card and not enter those particular purchases until the end of a billing cycle. By doing this, I quickly lost track of our balance and realized that we had to do better. This was especially problematic towards the end of the year when we were trying to spend our remaining budget but not go into the red. Now, with our current system, we know our remaining balance down to the penny at any given moment, even when multiple people are making purchases from the same set of accounts.
Over the years, we have modified and improved upon the information that we track for each purchase. At this point, I feel that we’ve settled on a good balance between tracking necessary information and not making it too cumbersome to enter. For each purchase, we enter the following information into our Google sheet…
• Date
• Purchase or Repair (selected via a drop-down menu in each cell)
• Category (selected via a drop-down menu in each cell, including)
New Asset
Equipment Replacement
Expendable
Shipping
Software Subscription (i.e., Dropbox, Adobe Creative
Cloud, etc.)
Rental
Other
• Vendor
• Price
• Description
• Receipt Date
• Receipt Name (see description below)
Virtually every purchase we make has an associated invoice or receipt. Each one is converted into a PDF and filed in a shared folder with a specific naming convention. The naming convention that we use is YYYY-MM-DD-VENDOR-DESCRIPTION. This receipt name is entered into the “Receipt Name” column of our Google Sheet for easy cross-referencing between the two. Soon, I hope to add the additional functionality of having direct links to our PDF receipts in the Google sheet, so they are one click away at all times.
Everything I just described above is in addition to the budget tracking and accounting work that our Finance Manager does. This is especially valuable, should there be an accounting error at the end of the year. I’ve had several instances where someone else’s purchases were erroneously charged to my technical accounts, putting me into the red at the end of the year. Those situations were easily correctable, because I kept my own independent records that could be cross-referenced against finance’s records.
Large Capital Expenditures
Our church is in the midst of a campus-wide renovation effort that consists of several construction projects and a major A/V overhaul. This project has been years in the making and involved a capital campaign and a lot of different people. These types of large capital projects sit outside of our annual operating budget and require separate tracking. Even when we aren’t in the midst of a sweeping project like this, we typically make a few major capital purchases in a year, such as a console, a speaker system, a camera, a projector or a lighting upgrade. In such cases, I’ll typically use separate spreadsheets to track these types of large purchases that are independent of our annual operating budget.
Vince Lepore is the technical director at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando and teaches live production at Full Sail University.
