Aligning Business Office & HR Practices for Church Growth

2025 Leaders Gathering Breakout Session: Common challenges, scalable processes, and other strategies for success.

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BREAKOUT Q&A SUBMISSIONS

DEVELOPMENT

What is your people development strategy?

In general we develop our staff through recurring meetings, staff chapels and our annual staff gathering event. For broader development, we have a leadership pipeline that identifies talent throughout our organization and creates opportunities for young leaders to develop in our environment in their skills and their call to ministry.

FINANCE

Do you have a budget for each area? As in, this amount for children's ministry, this amount for Serve Day initiatives, etc? And do you share that budget with the leaders of that area so they know what they have to spend? Or do you wait for them to ask for a need?	Yes we do. We set this annually after the board meeting in October and meet with every ministry leader/budget owner individually.
What time of year do you start your annual budget process and does your annual budget factor in capital expenditures?	We start the budget cycle in October after the annual board meeting.
Would you recommend getting an audit as a smaller church? It’s been several years for us.	Getting an audit as a smaller church might be beneficial but a minor step prior to that you could take is getting a third party consultation on your internal controls for someone to just review how you currently operate and where some gaps in your workflows could be.
Do you have opportunities to do a one-on-one training with your budget, HR team? Example: setup expense report emails, budget department setup, who has an expense credit card.	Yes. If you become a budget owner or credit card holder we will put the employees through training one-on-one and we also cover a broader overview of these areas in onboarding for new hires.

HUMAN RESOURCES

How do you afford the DISC & Strength Finders evaluations for each applicant?	The DISC assessment can be found online easily for free and for Strengths Finders we put this in a Recruiting program that sits in the HR budget at the disposal of the HR team to easily access funds needed for these tests to be distributed to candidates when the need arises.
Have you ever done a time audit with your team to ensure they are allocating time to their role in the most effective way? If so do you have a template that worked best for that.	We have not done time audits but we do role map/clarity procedures more. These document what the employees job description entails and has them outline what they're currently doing to see any discrepancies or updates to their job description that need to happen.
You mentioned making sure we are legal, is there a place we can look to to ensure that our practices in finance and HR ARE actually legal and not just beneficial?	We would recommend consulting with a local attorney for any higher stake items or there are other resources you can filter your policies through for legal compliance like Church Law and Tax.
What system or systems do you use for HR management?	We are integrating Home Run for applicant tracking and Paycom is our HRIS.

TECH

What software system or platform have you found to be more effective for staff and volunteers when it comes to ChM Management, Giving, Attendance, Growth Track, Training/Development, Engagement, etc.

We currently use Rock RMS for these items to track volunteerism and ongoing engagement.