ATLANTA – August 8, 2019 – Sage (FTSE: SGE), the market leader in cloud business management solutions, today announced that Faith Promise Church leveraged Sage Intacct to boost productivity by 35 percent, reduce finance staffing needs, and save $85,000 annually despite rapid organizational growth. By using a modern, cloud accounting software to gain real-time management and reporting on multiple church locations, Faith Promise Church was empowered to improve decision-making with access to more complete, accurate data found within Sage Intacct.
Tennessee-based Faith Promise Church offers weekly services for nearly 7,500 people on six campuses. The church also runs an Internet-based campus, two prison ministries, and supports numerous local and global ministries. Previously, Faith Promise had been using ACS Financial as its accounting system, but as the church grew the software wasn’t scaling at the same level. The finance team struggled with manual and often duplicate data entry, paper-intensive processes, and a lack of visibility into its financial data.
After deploying Sage Intacct, a solution available in Sage Business Cloud, the finance team gained greater visibility into historical spending information which helps tremendously when the church is planning new campuses. Based on past data, Faith Promise’s finance team can confidently develop a viable long-term financial plan and ensure they’ll have the funds available. When Faith Promise adds a new campus, the finance team simply adds a location dimension in Sage Intacct and doesn’t have to worry about a whole new chart of accounts or department structure.
“As we’ve evolved, it’s been easy to make minor configuration changes to Sage Intacct with clicks versus having an IT person write code for us. The system simply fits our changing needs; not the other way around. With the efficiencies we’ve gained through Sage Intacct, we’ve kept our staff size low, even as we doubled in size,” said Aaron Goin, CFO of Faith Promise Church. “By using the system to manage all our day-to-day bookkeeping, we’re saving $85,000 or more a year in salaries and benefits, while doing deeper analysis and more extensive reporting.”
After implementing Sage Intacct, the Faith Promise Church finance team realized significant benefits, including:
- Improved automation: Sage Intacct enabled Faith Promise to greatly simplify and speed its financial processes and dramatically improve productivity. The time that Goin and his finance assistant spend entering data has dropped from 40% to just 5% — even as the church’s membership and budget have grown about two-fold.
- Finance team has time for deeper analysis: Goin’s team has been able to take on additional responsibilities, including HR, facilities, legal, IT, a retail store, and construction project management. And the team can invest more time in analytics through Sage Intacct dashboards and reporting.
- Consistent growth without additional headcount: Most churches with a congregation the same size of Faith Promise have five or more full-time finance staff. With the efficiencies gained through Sage Intacct, the church kept its staff size low even as its congregation doubled in size.
“We pride ourselves on being nimble, being fast, and I think part of the reason we’ve seen so much growth is that Sage Intacct ensures we have accurate information that we can get to the right people quickly,” Goin said. “Churches tend to be slow in processing decisions, but we can be very fast in our decision-making, which gives us a great advantage in trying to move into communities that may not have a church like ours.”
For more information on how Faith Promise Church uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study.