 Okay, welcome to the class today. Let's, I'm sorry, we have a few minutes behind schedule. But anyway, let's pray and then let's get started. And I'm sure the others will join the class. Darryl, could you please lead us and pray? I will start. Sure, Master. Master, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Loving you, Father. Thank you for this wonderful morning of Father God. Thank you for adding one more day in our lives, a lot of Jesus. As we gather, dear, a lot of Jesus for the class. You'll be with us. You'll lead us and guide us to Father God. I pray for people who have joined. And people who haven't joined. Bring them up to Father God. On time, a lot of Jesus. Also pray for faster. And you submit this into your session, into your hands, a lot of Jesus. You pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, thank you. All right, so we are talking about in the area of church and ministry administration. We are, we've been talking about accounting. And I've just been sharing about some of the policies, practices, procedures that we use here at all people's church. In this whole area of managing finances, managing money, and it is a very important area. And so it has to be done well. It has to be handled with a lot of care and a lot of, you know, being very diligent about money, managing it. So today, I think will be our last lecture in this third lecture and last one as we talk about managing finances. I have put out the PDF that this has an outline of what we're going to cover and also shared a couple of Excel sheets as sample documents that you can download and just have a look. I will also share it on, you know, on the call today. All right, so let me just go ahead and share the PDF and we'll have a look here. So we covered, you know, this is a quick review. We talked about a biblical perspective of money. We talked about software systems, how you keep accounts, you know, what the finance department will look like or looks like for us. What we're growing into, I emphasize the two person rule. And there were two people involved in this whole process. And we covered these things, the previous class on, you know, when we are receiving offerings, how we be careful. And then we looked at the policies and procedures that typically we do in terms of, you know, the whole accounting department and how we process payments and so on. Now, I want to talk about some other aspects as part of the financial management within the Christian church and ministry. We talk about budgeting, auditing financial reports. What do you do with surplus funds and some some thoughts on fundraising for special projects. So let's see, hopefully we cover these things today or maybe we will spill over to another class and finish it off on Friday. So another important part of what we do with with money with managing money is budgeting. That is, you know, you have, you kind of have to have some sort of an estimate budget, you know, meaning this is how much we need to spend for certain projects, certain areas of ministry, etc. Right. So you have an overall church budget. And then you have amounts that are specific to certain programs or minister areas of ministries. And then there is also, you know, amounts that you want to allocate for special, special offerings and so on. Now, I have to admit that I will share with you a spreadsheet, but I have to admit that these last two years have been very different. Right. So that is 2021 this current year and 2020. That means, you know, this whole this whole budgeting thing just just was disrupted. Because we just couldn't do, you know, the usual or the regular ministries and things that we would normally do when things that we, you know, as a church, so we couldn't do all of those things. And instead we had to take on different things, you know, and all of these was not what to say. It wasn't pre-planned. It wasn't something we thought of before. And so these were just things that came up, you know, and I will mention, you know, so let me mention, so for example in 2020, as soon as the, you know, we had to shut down and the city and the nation and many countries went into lockdown. One of the first things we did was to set up. We had a generosity fund, which was money that we would keep aside to help people in the church inside the as part of ABC to help them financially. This was usually used for, you know, education, paying of people's fees and all that. But immediately we had to kind of, you know, make that generosity fund a bigger thing and we had to have a proper way to screen people. So that became very important last year. And then in a lot of other things, programs, ministries were shut down. We couldn't do it. And then so that that was something new. It wasn't planned. It wasn't there. We had, we had it in a small way, but that became very important because we had to help people. And then we this year, we had a COVID relief project. So that was again not planned. It was something very big to help pastors and leaders. So what I'm going to show you is what we would do under normal scenarios. Okay. These two years 2020 2021 has been very different. So these, whatever I'm showing you did not happen these two years. This was say, prior to that. So here's your budget. All right, so how do we do our budgeting and I've put this sheet out there and this is, you know, you don't have to worry about the numbers. You just have to get the idea of how we do it. So what we do is we typically, typically look at, okay, there are various various areas. So administrative. These are for various outreach churches. These are various mission things, you know, we do, we go, we have mission conferences and so on. These are expenses for our different church locations. These are for the different ministry areas. These are for our publications. These are for special events and things that happen here in in Bangalore, right? Okay. So here's, so basically this, this column here is listing the normal things that go on, you know, in the church through the ministry. Now some of these things we have discontinued, like for example, the TV ministry we stopped in December 2019 because we felt people are moving away from just television and consuming content content. Online through the video distribution channels or platforms. So we discontinued that so it's no longer there. So this is an old spreadsheet, right? So don't, don't worry about the numbers, but just get the idea, right? So what we have done is we've listed all the areas of ministries that are going on and this will differ from church to church and ministry to ministry. Then we have the previous years of previous financial years, what we have spent. So we usually take the last three years so we can have a trend on this. Now if something has discontinued, yeah, it's discontinued, but this is it, right? So what you spend and then here's your average. Okay. So based on these three, here's the average we've been spending on these areas of ministry. What if we do 5% increase? So if there's a 5% increase or a 10% increase, what should be the amount that we should look at, right? So we look at say a 10% increase that, okay, this year, you know, whatever the coming year, you know, we may spend 10% more on that particular area of ministry. So you can do a projection 10% or 5% or a 10% increase for that area of ministry. And you will know that, okay, that's the amount that's been spent or is, sorry, is needed at 10% increase for that particular area. So what you do is, so this is something you work internally, right? So your accounting department, with the help of your accounting department, you can do it. They will show you these, they'll give you the spreadsheet, you'll arrive at these numbers. So you know that based on the last three years, here's your average. And if you do a 10% increase, this is how much money you should budget for that particular program or area of ministry. So you have an idea. So as you're preparing for that event in the new calendar, new financial year, as people, you know, people are planning and all that you say, you can give them. Look, keep the expenses for that particular program within this range, right? So you would give them the 5% to 10% range, right? So within 5% here, between here to here. It also depends on, you know, how you're planning to grow in that particular area, right? So, but you have these numbers in front of you. And you know what to tell the team that's in that area, you know, working. So keep your expenses within this range. Plan all that you're doing. Sometimes you may want to grow much more. So you may give a 20% increase or 30% whatever the, you know, the growth is that expecting for that particular area. Sometimes it may not be very big growth. So you can keep it within 5%, 10% increase for that particular area. And of course, it also depends on the money coming in to the charts. And I will show you, we track that as well. I'll show that to you. So if you want to go into, you know, more details, you can look at, you know, you know, where exactly money was spent, you know. So we did it. So this is in the youth and we did a youth conference in down. This is happening for the teens and twenties meeting. Where is the money going, you know, for in this particular area of ministry, how much was spent, you know, in that. The next calendar, the next, the next financial year and then the following financial year for you. So you get a view of, okay, where is money going internally for these various programs? Okay, we can schools, other programs and so on. So that's also helpful. And then you could look at it for television miss like, you know, as I mentioned, we've stopped our television ministry, but you know, you can actually look at it. And then for each year, you see, okay, this is how much we've spent. So we can, you know, cut down on things and so on. But even so we decided in 2019 to stop TV ministry because people were moving into other things to look at videos and so on. But this is something that, you know, as as a church, this is how you can do your budgeting. One way is, you know, you look at the trend and then you project saying this is how much we will spend. Now, there are, of course, other things that impact your budget, which is your income. So if your income has dropped for whatever reason, then you would instead of doing a 5% increase, you may say, you know, we have to do a 20% decrease. We want to spend less in these areas. Okay, so it really, you will have to make that call based on the knowledge of what's your income is. Okay, and I will share with you a little later on how you will know that income. So this is about budgeting, right? Now, the other thing we do, so this is at overall church budget, this is and we also looked at event and programs that are specific. The other thing that we do is we have special offering allocation. That means we say that what we have been doing, this was before till the end of 2019, 2020, 2021 things changed. But what we used to do before is we said, okay, you know, every year we want to give five lakhs. That is about 500,000 Indian rupees. We would give it away as that was our mission's budget. That means this amount is going to go to other ministries to just support other missions work in India. They don't have to do anything with the APC. It's just a gift that we give to help other missionary mission organizations. So over the course of the year, and we usually work through people that we know whose ministries we know and we are comfortable with. We don't want the money to be misused. So usually it's mission organizations and mission leaders that we know and we know their ministry. So then we distribute this up to five lakhs, sometimes six lakhs. We may give one mission organization two lakhs, which is 200,000. We may give another mission organization 50,000. We may give another mission organization 100,000, whatever. So we distribute it like that. So this is just money to bless other things. So we keep that aside. So that's how we have that budgeted amount. Then out of that we keep giving through the course of the year. And so we know that we've given totally so much. Now the other thing is auditing. The audit simply means to keep in check on what is happening within your financial management. I may have shared a little bit about this earlier. But what we do is we have weekly audits, monthly audit. We have a semi-annual audit and then we have annual audit reports. So weekly audit is basically on a weekly basis. Every week there are a lot of transactions happening, money coming in, money going out. On a weekly basis there's an external accountant coming in who looks at everything that has happened the past week, looks at all the money that has come in, money that has gone out. What has this money gone out for? Do we have the bills for it? Do we have the proper invoices that have been sent in by the vendors against which amounts have been paid? And then these are entered into the software system. So this happens every week on a weekly basis. So we have a short accounting window there. So if anything is wrong, they can check and say get me this, these bills are not there. These bills have to be there. Then so that happens on a weekly basis they get into the system. Then we do a full monthly audit. So at the end of the month, again, so we have an internal accountant, we also have an external accountant coming. So the external accountant will sit and will look at the whole month's thing. So you've got all the transactions for the month. So can all these transactions be accounted for? So much money has come in, so much money has gone out. These are all the bills. Is everything tallying? Now because the work has been done on a weekly basis, the monthly audit is also, you know, can be done a little faster because on a weekly basis everything has been checked. But on a monthly basis, everything is checked. And at the end of the month, there will be reports that are sent and I will show you the reports. So every month the accountant will send two reports to me and of course to our accountants. The external accountant will send these reports. That means he has checked, he has summarized it and then he's sending it back to us like saying look, your accounts are in proper order. Our internal accountant is there, but the audit is being done by an external accountant. And so he sends these reports every month. So I will share that with you. And then twice a year, we have another independent auditor. So we have our internal accountant, we have our accounting firm, we have a third independent auditor accounting that come. People who come, these people will do every six months. Okay. Now I have to acknowledge that last year we couldn't do it, or this past financial year, we couldn't do it at the usual six month period. You know, there's a lot of these problems COVID related and people not available or so many things. So we are actually doing it at nine months and 12 months instead of the six month and 12 month period. But otherwise normally what happens is it happens every six month, six and 12, a semi annual audit. That means every six months, everything is checked once again. And now we actually have more than one person, like a team of people looking at everything. Everything that's been done the last six months, checking all the accounts. And they say, okay, everything is there. If there's any corrections, you know, what is missing so on. And at the end of the 12 months, they will generate a detailed annual audit report. Right. So this is the report has all the details, everything. So it's usually a little thick piece of document, many pages filed and so it's all checked. Now, this is an annual audit report so on. So that means this is done again by an independent third auditing firm that's auditing checking all the accounts saying yeah, everything is not a so on. Okay. So we are weekly monthly six months and 12 months reports. Things that are being done internally things that are being done by external people so that we keep everything in check. Right. So that's how the checks happen as far as the finances are concerned. And then so let me talk about reports now. So what happens is we have our monthly reports and we have an annual report. So monthly every month there are two spreadsheets that are sent to me by the external accountant to him. So he does he does the work and he will send a spreadsheet. Now I just deleted the numbers so the numbers are not there. But this is what it looks like. Okay. There is a there is an income expense statement. All right. That means he has all the income. All right. This is money that's coming in. Right. And so he will, you know, list all the amounts here now this this code relief fund is not normal. That means it just happened this year. But this won't be there normally. It'll just be whatever's come, you know, money has come in. This is all our expenses. You know, so you can see these are the ledger heads subheadings. We track these things. Okay. So he or you'll have all the amounts here. Then this is the amount that is in the bank balance. So these are the bank accounts. These are the amounts. This will be the amounts that are there. And then, you know, what we do with that surplus funds is we put it in fixed deposits. And I will talk about that a little later. But, you know, we'll say, okay, these are all our fixed deposits. These are numbers. So we know what is in fixed deposit, how much is there. And then these are again, these are things that are very specific. You took over it. Right. From here to here is very specific for COVID. Like we said, like I said, you know, we ran this code relief project. So we, this is a quick summary of what came in, what went out. And this is the generosity fund. That means this was money given to people within APC who maybe lost their job during COVID. They were temporarily without pay. Sometimes some people were part of companies that didn't pay. So they didn't have income. So we have them, a lot of educational institutions closed. So people were teaching, didn't get their normal, you know, their normal pay. So a lot of things like that. So generosity fund was mainly for people within church. Then this is upper missions contribution. Like I said, about five lakhs, what do we do? Sometimes this goes more than that amount. So how is that meant? So this spreadsheet comes every month, end of every month. Let me say this, but the seventh of the new month, this will come to me for the previous month. Right. This is the income. This is called income expense statement. So you know what's income, what's expense. Then there's also what is called the total income sheet where there be track. So we go back from 2016. I've deleted all the numbers, but usually all the numbers are there. So from 2016, we know month by month. Right. So January, February, March, April, every month we know this was the income. This was the expense. This is a difference. What's the total income total expense for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. So this, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a view that, you know, we can look at and we know, okay, how about we doing as a church? You know, so I would look at this very quickly, see how we are doing. Right. So 2021 house 2021 compared to previous years, this month. Now, if something is wrong, we have to ask the question why, you know, so this immediately gives us a good assessment on the financial side of what is happening with the church, you know, what we will, you know, you can, you know, and they can also see trends. Okay, month of April and May, you know, is there an increase or a decrease of funds? Okay. It has been happening every year. That's why there's a decrease. Okay. We understand. So those kinds of things you can see in terms of what is happening. Right. But it's important to keep an eye on this so that you know, okay, this is what's happening. And then, you know, and what we have seen here at APC is every year we've been growing. Right. So we can always look back at 2016 and say, okay, 2017 was better than 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. So we are growing. So, you know, what was amazing was, I think, okay, last year, 2021, for example, and I'm just saying this, just to testify, not to boast, but, you know, in 2020, after the call, after we had this lockdown, our trustees will, you know, meeting the people who were legally responsible for APC were concerned like, okay, you know, what happened? I mean, you know, has the money dropped because, you know, COVID and we didn't have services and everything. And what was interesting was last year, 2020, I think it was the month of August. If I remember correctly, we had the highest ever income that one month on a monthly basis. So in the middle of COVID, and this was not, we were not doing any special fundraising or anything. We had the highest ever income in the middle of COVID season in that month ever, you know, from the time we started APC. So that was like, wow, that in the middle of a crisis, God is, you know, we have more income than before. And then definitely 2021, you know, in January of 2021, we decided to give money away to churches within Bangalore. So we did that. We helped many churches in our city. We kept aside 15 lakhs. So we said from the surplus of 2020, we are going to bless churches. So in January 2020, we kept aside up to 15 lakhs, you know, so that'll be 15, yeah, 15 lakhs. We gave our rupees and to give away to churches and we invited churches to send in their information and we screened them and then we gave, yeah, we gave, I think finally we gave away around, I think it was 7 lakhs or 8 lakhs, something like that. You know, because we had to screen the churches and those with genuine needs were applied. We gave, so even though we kept aside 15, we actually gave less than that because those were the churches that kind of when qualified or went through our screening process. So we helped churches in Bangalore. Then later on this year during May, May, June, July is when we did the code relief project where that was the biggest project ever in the life of APC. And so that was again, you know, wonderful thing. So basically this is a spreadsheet that comes. This is the main thing. So I quickly look at this, see how things are. And a lot of these deposits here are money that is part of our building project, you know, so we have a separate account for building projects. So these deposits are basically most of these are building project related because we have been setting money aside for the building buying the land and getting ready for it. So that's why this money isn't fixed deposit. Another report that comes every month is the receipts and payments. So these like your, your, your ledger shows you, okay, these are all the money received where the money is coming in. And these are all the payments. This is another view of money, but then it tells you exactly where the money went. Where did we pay? We have consultants, professional fees, salaries, the taxes that were paid. And this is what we have with us. And these are all our expenses. So this is also a view of our income expense receipts and payments. And we know what is the balance here. Okay, so these are two reports that come in every month that we look at. And then we also have reports that are project based that, or let me say that are project or event based. So every time we have an event or we're doing a project, as soon as the event is over, I will get a report. That means example. Suppose we do a conference, the end of the conference, we have a report. Here's, here's all. So before we do the conference, there is a budget. I mean, that means the person going to do it says, here's how the money is going to be spent, or whatever the project is, this money is going to be spent. We approve that. At the end of it, we get the actual. So before the project or the conference happens, the budget is based on, you know, we've done the budgeting here. So we tell them, look, you can only spend so much example, two lakhs. So give us a budget, give us a proposed expenditure based on two lakhs. So they'll give us the initial budget, we approve it. At the end, after the conference is over, okay, the report, the report says what was actually spent. So those reports happen based on every conference, every project that happens at the end of a conference, we'll get it. So those things keep happening throughout the year, as and when events and conferences happen. So we know what is being spent. And then the annual report goes on our website. So for those of you who are familiar, let me go here. So if you go to apcw.org slash financials, we put out our reports. So, you know, till the last financial year, from the very first year till the last financial year, our annual reports are available online. And we tell people, you know, you're welcome to come ask questions, etc. Those are members and others. So all our annual reports are available for people to go and see what is happening. So those are the reports. So there are monthly reports that are project based or conference based reports, and there are these annual reports. Okay. A few other things I just want to talk about is, you know, when you have surplus funds, what you do with that money is very important. So what we are allowed to do here is to put it in fixed deposits. So our APC as a trust does not permit us to put money into anything else. Like you can't put it into the stock market or you can't put it into, you know, now you can buy land and buildings, but you can't invest that money outside in other things. So we just keep it in fixed deposits. What the wood advice is do not use church money to invest in private businesses and all that. You cannot use, you know, this is in some ways public money. It's money that has come in from people who have given to the church. So you can't go and put it into private businesses. So you have to be very careful. Sometimes churches have done that and they have lost money. Basically you've lost the money of, you know, what was given for the work of the ministry. And it's, you know, it's, it's really painful. So do not use church money for private business things. Right. And lastly, I do want to say, you know, fundraising you to be very careful, especially for special projects. What we do is basically you just share the project with people. So hey, we are doing this if you want to give you give. Right. So example, then we had to do COVID relief. We sent a single email to people saying, look, this is what we're planning to do. There are so many pastors who need help. If you'd like to give your gift. That's what people gave. Right. Now one, one important thing that we are very careful about is that we do not want any competition between ministries within the church. Trying to compete for money. So as a policy, we do not let individual ministries in the church raise money directly. Only for we do this for special projects, but not for individual ministries. All the money goes into the general fund and from there they're allocated to individual business. Otherwise what will happen is they become competition between ministries who can pull more money from the people for their own ministry. And we don't want that. Right. So we don't let any of the ministries raise money on their own for their work. No. We present the need. People give to the general fund. Then it goes. If people want to give to a designated ministry like maybe publications, maybe missions, maybe outreach churches, maybe a certain conference. Okay, they can give it, but it's because they want to give and not because we are, you know, pulling money from them for those ministries. We just let people know, look, if you want to give, you want to designate you're giving a welcome to do that. We don't let, you know, different ministries do presentations and urge people to give and then it becomes a sense of competition between ministries. So we intentionally have stayed away from that. Some churches may do it differently. Some churches may permit ministries to raise funds and all that. Okay, that's okay for them. For us, we have stayed away from that. This money comes in general fund, then we allocate to different ministries and let the ministries grow based on what is available. The last thing is that, you know, as an organization, you have to file whatever is required by the government. So every month we have to pay our professional tax for all our staff. And then we also have to pay what is called as employee provident fund, which is like a retirement fund. So we have to pay for all our staff based on, you know, whatever the regulations are, we have to calculate and pay that. And we have to file all our documents with the tax department. As a church, we don't pay tax, but we do have to file our returns. We still have to submit all our documents every year. So these are required by the government. So every month these payments are made to the government. Every year the papers are filed with the government. So the government knows that, okay, this organization is managing. It's finances well, they are being responsible and they are making the payments that you're supposed to make as required by law. All right. So this kind of just gives us an overview of, you know, the other pieces of managing the finances that go off the church as an organization. And I've shared some of these documents with you. It's good to know these things. All of the work is being done by the accountant and the people are doing the accounting. It's good to know so that as a leader, as a pastor, you keep an eye on these things. A lot of decisions you make will be based on, you know, the money that's there and how you manage it. What projects you do, what projects you should stop. You know, those are decisions and one part of it of course is the money. Of course, ultimately God leads us, but God also wants us to be good stewards of the people and resources that he has placed in our hands. Okay. So any questions you would like to ask here as far as the accounting part of the church and the ministry. Any questions? Okay. Okay. Anyone? Okay, everyone's fine. Okay, so we bring this to a close. We finished everything that I wanted to share here on the accounting side just to give you an idea of, you know, what can be done. And let's close and pray and we will dismiss after that. Conan, are you okay? I wasn't sure. All right, Prince, why don't you pray and dismiss us please? Do you have any further? I pray that we help us to learn this whole thing, Lord. Thank you for that. We continuously minister to God. And I also pray for each of the students and pastors. All things that are very important to us, these accounting things and use in our ministry as we said. Thank you, Lord. I submit to the rest of the day in your hand. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you, everyone. God bless. We'll see you again on Friday by now. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you, Darrell. Thank you, Prince. Thank you, Conan. God bless you. Bye.