Vintage Church LA Financial Systems Case Study:
Data That Tells A Story
Vintage had averaged roughly 30% annual attendance growth over five years, opened a second location, and become substantially more complex. Its financial structure had not kept pace.
During a transition between bookkeeping providers, I worked with Vintage’s finance director and ministry leaders to understand how the church actually operated, redesign its chart of accounts and reporting dimensions, and move the new structure into Sage Intacct.
The result was a financial architecture that could distinguish locations, ministries, events, and funds consistently. Reporting that had previously required separate spreadsheets could be generated natively in Intacct in moments.
Vintage Church LA Case Study
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In many churches, pastors’ wives have often been expected to serve the church alongside their husbands, usually without pay. When my wife, Laura, joined the staff of Vintage Church LA, I discovered that there was also such a thing as a “church husband.” I often teased Laura that I was being voluntold to help, even if that was not my true attitude toward it.
The culmination of my church-husband duties came when Vintage’s finance director asked Laura whether I could help manage the transition from one third-party bookkeeping provider to another.
Vintage had averaged roughly 30% annual attendance growth during the five years Laura worked there and had also opened a second location, launched a new, substantial discipleship initiative and become substantially more complex.
I am a licensed CPA, and I liked both the church and the finance director, so I agreed. The new bookkeeping firm specialized in larger and more complex churches and nonprofit organizations. It supported both QuickBooks Online and Sage Intacct but expected to transition most of its clients toward Intacct within the next three to five years.
As the finance director and I reviewed Vintage’s existing system, it became clear that the church had already outgrown the way QuickBooks was being used. Simply transferring the existing structure to the new bookkeeping provider would preserve the current problems and likely leave Vintage facing another major transition several years later.
I recommended moving to Intacct immediately and using the bookkeeping transition as an opportunity to redesign the church’s underlying financial structure. Vintage’s leaders sometimes joked that the church was not growing from a puppy into a dog; it was growing from a puppy into an elephant. The finance system needed to make the same transition.
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The existing structure had accumulated inconsistencies as Vintage grew and new needs were added over time.
QuickBooks Online provided only two useful reporting dimensions—accounts and classes—and there had never been a clearly defined rule for what belonged in each. Earlier locations and church plants were represented through the chart of accounts, while the newer location was represented through a class.
One class had become a catch-all for several finance- and revenue-related items, and other classes had been closed and later repurposed for entirely different uses.
Giving types could be represented either through accounts or classes. As a result, ministries, events, funds, locations, and organizational functions could not be separated or compared consistently without significant manual interpretation.
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I had some idea of how Vintage worked internally from listening to Laura talk about her job—as good spouses do— but I wanted to understand it for myself.
The finance director and I met with every ministry leader or pastor who was responsible for a budget. I asked how they built and managed their budgets, which parts of their jobs and ministries touched money, what would make their budgets easier to understand, and how the financial system could work better for them.
Based on those conversations, I redesigned the chart of accounts to reflect Vintage’s operations and financial structure. I separated locations, ministries and departments, events, and funds into distinct dimensions.
I then mapped the redesigned structure to the previous five years of historical data and converted that data into the new structure.
Data validation and upload came next. The new bookkeeping provider and I reviewed and validated the converted data, and I handed the current-year data off to them for upload.
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Before the redesign, the finance director had to create reports using separate spreadsheets. Afterward, the reports could be generated natively inside Intacct in moments.
Leadership could view each location’s version of a ministry or event separately, while still seeing how those activities fit into the church as a whole.
The new bookkeeping provider could also generate ad hoc reports when leadership needed them.
More importantly, the church now had a consistent methodology for making coding changes and a robust chart of accounts and dimensional structure that could accommodate new locations, ministries, events, and funds as Vintage’s needs changed.
Unfortunately, the historical data required more cleanup than could reasonably fit within the scope of the project. I was able to establish increasing levels of accuracy as the data moved closer to the present, but reports covering the earlier years still need to be treated as approximations. Over time, as more activity is recorded consistently in the new system, Vintage’s historical reporting will become increasingly reliable.
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Helping Vintage led me to a broader conclusion: if a church with a competent board, an attentive finance director, and good and faithful staff could develop these problems, there are likely many other organizations facing the same issues.
Financial systems can gradually stop reflecting how an organization actually works, even when leadership is responsible and the bookkeeping is getting done, if no one with sufficient financial expertise is actively overseeing the structure.
I created the Financial Visibility and Stewardship Plan to help churches identify those problems, redesign what is no longer working, and give leadership a practical path forward.