“I went directly from ARC into hardcore fundraising church planting mode, and didn’t really have a whole lot of time to manage books.”
Note: The following is a lightly edited transcript of the above video.
My name’s Jake Johnson.
I’m the lead pastor of Manna Church in Stafford, Virginia.
We’re just about 45 minutes south of Washington, DC near Marine Corps based Quantico. We met Parable at the ARC conference in 2021. So I met the team and they told me what kind of services Parable provided. And it sounded great.
I went from there [ARC] directly into hardcore fundraising church planting mode, and didn’t really have a whole lot of time to manage books. So the way I knew how to do it—I had a Google sheet and every dollar we got in, I would try to log it in. I would use different fields, and every time I had a new category, I’d just create another column. It was kind of a mess. We had a lot of money coming in, and a lot of money going out.
There wasn’t a whole lot of oversight or accounting. I knew that I needed some help.
So I reached back out to the Parable team after we got to a point where our finances had grown, where we got a bank account, and it was great. They have taken our budget. They’ve updated it a couple times because we really didn’t even know what our budget needed to be. And they did a great job of working with us as we grew.
Jason was awesome to work with. And they connected us with other resource partners.
They connected us with a company called Divvy and a fantastic resource. We actually used that for all of our purchases. Now we have Divvy cards. It’s tied to Parable’s services, and they went in and made it easier for all the people in our church to actually make charges and tie it back to our budget. So that way we have a really healthy accounting for it. So great company. I would strongly encourage you if you’re looking for an accounting team to give them a call and just have a discussion with them. They’re great people, and they’ll treat you well.
I would strongly encourage you, if you’re looking for an accounting team, to give Parable a call and just have a discussion with them. They’re great people, and they’ll treat you well.
Jake johnson