MR MICAWBER, in the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, was an optimist when it came to finances. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” Balancing the books is one thing, but even his positive outlook might have been challenged by life as a modern church treasurer. Online banking, Charity Commission compliance, anti-money-laundering regulations, bank closures, cashless payments, Gift Aid — all examples of the PCC’s financial remit, which tends to fall on one person.
“We’re grateful for treasurers; for they time they give and all that they do,” the Leeds diocesan secretary, Jonathan Wood, says. “We couldn’t manage without them.” He describes it as “a volunteer role with a daunting amount of skill; so it’s a tough call. All the bills come the treasurer’s way; so it can be a difficult place to be, yet also very important.” He notes how the diocese has 464 churches with a treasurer, and that the 41 churches that do not have one “really struggle”.
Except, it’s not only bills: the job comes with many tasks. Don Shrimpton, the treasurer of St Thomas’s, Goring, calls it “an interesting job”, and likens it to “running a small business”. His church, one in a benefice of three, hosts the administrator; so it means that he has to make payments on behalf of the other churches, but then make internal recharges. The detail quickly becomes granular when handling items such as the administrator’s salary, phone bills, paper, printing, and even website hosting costs.
Doug Barkin, at St Pancras Old Church, in London, is in his second stint as a parish treasurer. He describes it as “a privilege”, and experiences the same complexities. A former financial analyst who concluded his career in the commercial finance department at Sainsbury’s head office, he uses an online accounting system designed for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). He inherited an Excel-spreadsheet method from his predecessor, but prefers a commercial bookkeeping package.
It can also be time-consuming. Engaged with his various responsibilities, Mr Barkin estimates that he spends up to a day-and-a-half each week on “normal stuff: reviewing and logging invoices, making payments, compiling the regular accounts to give a monthly P&L (profit and loss)”. More time is required at year-end, he says, when the annual accounts must be prepared and formatted thoroughly.
Mr Shrimpton’s workload is similar. He attests to “a good five days per month for writing-up and checking”. Some weeks, he can spend up to three days on parish finances, made more complicated by the closure of local bank branches. “When we have cash, I take it into Reading,” he says. “So that’s a train journey, and the other day, when I went, it was closed for training; so I had to return another day.” Even though the average monthly cash amount is “just a few hundred pounds” for his parish, it can be as high as £2000 when there has been a concert or similar event where people are more likely to use cash.
Fortunately, Sarah Skitt, the treasurer at St Barnabas’s, in Gloucester, works in a bank and understands the cash component. In theory, this should help when it comes to paying in, except her parish uses a different bank, and their opening hours are the same, meaning that she often makes cash deposits via the Post Office. “A lot of people don’t know about this, but it’s really convenient.”
THESE treasurers all observe how cash has decreased significantly in parish life. “The majority of giving used to be cashed, but that has now reduced to a minor part of our finances,” Mr Barkin says. Cashless devices and card consoles have become the way forward.
The diocese of Leeds has recently piloted a scheme giving out a large number of digital devices to parishes to help with their move to online finances. Part of the national Church’s Digital Giving Rollout initiative to encourage stewardship by contactless giving, Mr Wood says that the technology has been embraced, and that parishes noted an immediate difference. “And when people give digitally, they tend to give more than they would in cash,” the director of Giving at Church House, Jonathan de Bernhardt Wood, says.
These units were funded by the Church Commissioners to enable “digital giving” and more than 2000 churches have one. The project has been overseen by National Giving Team, which has a strategy to: (1) enable more churches to be supported by diocesan giving advisers; (2) embed digital giving in more than half parishes; and (3) improve support, guidance and training for clergy, parishes, and dioceses.
Courtesy of Church of England National Giving TeamA Digital Giving rollout event in diocese of Manchester
Other programmes to support parishes and their treasurers are in the pipeline, Mr de Bernhardt Wood explains. “The rollout of the Digital Giving units has been enormously successful, and it is very good to offer practical support like this. There are other ways we want to help and simplify, such as finding a commonality in financial reporting, giving guidance on Charity Commission registration, training where required, and advice on how to enable as much giving as possible across the whole of the Church of England.”
His key ambition, he says, is “enabling people to be as informed as possible”, and that data are crucial. “It’s fantastically important in understanding what works and is useful in shaping the guidance and advice we can offer — certainly from a giving perspective. It helps to show where something works well, where there are role-models, how we can improve learning and share best practice. We can all learn as quickly as possible from what’s coming through, and all through the value of data.”
“DATA” can be an unpopular word for church treasurers. Mr Shrimpton speaks of an increased requirement for “more parish returns, for example the new ‘energy return’ — there’s a constant demand for more information”. He also found the Charity Commission questionnaire this year to be “three times longer than it was five years ago”. When his parish exceeded the annual threshold of £100,000 income, thanks to some large-scale fund-raising campaigns for the organ and church tower, it necessitated formal registration. This was not particularly problematic, he says, but “another job to do on top of everything else”.
Mrs Skitt has been a treasurer for three years, and speaks of her “real passion” for the “hugely enjoyable” position, and loves what she calls “the black and whiteness”; she has also found it increasingly complicated. She feels that the position requires about six days per month, and more during the intense financial accounting period. Her church’s annual income is £120,000, against expenditure of £140,000.
“Yes,” she sighs, “it’s a deficit. Giving is not at the same level as it used to be. We have to dig into reserves, and [we] get the occasional bequest, but the situation is difficult. Expenses are looming, such as a new heating system, which means a new boiler with green-energy-scheme requirements. We are trying to make grant applications, which is a specialist skill, and there does seem to be a reluctance around giving grants to churches.”
They acknowledge the Parish Giving Scheme (PGS) with admiration and relief. It was, unsurprisingly, the idea of a former parish treasurer. Benjamin Preece Smith was the head of finance at Christian Aid and treasurer at St Saviour’s, Pimlico, before he moved to the Gloucester diocesan office. Aware of the need for a better process around bank mandates, Gift Aid donations, and annual requests to increase giving, the PGS was born. His main aim, he says, was to reduce the burden on treasurers.
Parishes can sign up to a programme that, through critical mass, uses the direct-debit approach — meaning that the donor’s giving level can be varied with a simple agreement and little in the way of administration (unlike standing orders). Donors can also go through their Gift Aid registration at the same time, and the parish is specified. The PGS then collects the money each month, and pays it into the parish bank account. Each year, it handles the Gift Aid component, too, and remits it to the parish in the same way. An annual suggestion is made to the donor about an increase in giving — in line with inflation or a stepped percentage — and many people take it up.
“The biggest obvious benefit to the way the PGS operates was during the pandemic,” Mr Preece Smith, who is now the diocesan secretary, says. “Clearly, worshippers were not in church, but the scheme allowed their giving to continue in a regular and structured way.”
The system now has more than 5400 parishes enrolled, and is managed centrally by the National Giving Team. They report that more than 80,000 people use the scheme, and that the number is “going up all the time”. In July, more than £8 million was distributed to parishes; for 2024, it expects to handle about £95 million. Mr Barkin calls it “a joy, because so much is dealt with”. Mr Shrimpton agrees, and wishes “we could encourage everyone to move on to it”. Mrs Skitt’s parish is on the scheme, too, and she finds it helpful.
In the diocese of Leeds, 170 of its 450 parishes have signed up. “We want to do as much as we can to reduce the burden on treasurers,” Mr Wood affirms, “and this is one way of doing it. We know from experience that the PGS reduces work in the long run. We recently launched a Treasurers’ Forum in the diocese, which 56 people joined, and we’re looking to run this every couple of months. Another initiative we have is a survey to ask treasurers what they need, what they’re facing, what levels of experience they have, and how we can build in more support.”
THE levels of personal responsibility can make the treasurer’s job feel onerous, and even lonely at times. “When it comes down to it, you’re the only person doing the job,” Mrs Skitt says. She has joined a deanery WhatsApp group for treasurers, which helps her to tap into what she calls “the hive mind”. Acknowledging how much she appreciates the relationship with her vicar, she feels that “too much falls into the treasurer’s lap” — so much so that they are now looking at a sub-committee or a special group for the parish finances to consider various aspects, including budgets and banking arrangements.
“The job is certainly less simple and more complicated,” Mr Shrimpton says. “Even going online, which should make life easier, is not always straightforward.” Contracts, copyright licences, and insurance certificates all get passed to the treasurer. He points to the diverse sources and platforms that show up in church bank accounts: “Sum-up, Just Giving, Try Booking, Give a Little — they all need to be attached to a particular activity or event.” Furthermore, monthly, he has to use at least 12 different websites, each with their own log-in and password.
Courtesy of Church of England National Giving TeamA Digital Giving rollout event in diocese of Manchester
Security is paramount, because online scams and phishing attempts are a growing issue online, and churches are not immune. Mr Barkin has had fake emails and calls purporting to be from the parish’s bank, asking for transactions to be checked, and seeking specific details. “It’s exactly the same as when they try and do it to individuals, and it can look plausible. So that’s another thing to be alert to.”
One parish treasurer spoke anonymously about the problem of theft. So many people had keys to the vestry, and thereby the safe, that, once the money had been counted by two people and verified, it was not left anywhere in church overnight. Earlier this summer, one London vicar reports, a rough-sleeper who had spent the night in the church porch came in after the Sunday eight-o’clock service had begun. They quietly removed the iPad which was fixed into a stand (used to handle purchases of church merchandise and online donations), and disappeared with the device. It was not, he said, worth claiming for on the insurance because of the excess which had to be paid.
Janet Jenkins (not her real name) was the treasurer of an urban parish for almost 25 years, before she moved to another church. She resigned before the pandemic, and felt “great relief, because it was so much work” and took “at least a couple of days a month, with more needed at annual reporting times”. She had also, for some of that time, been a churchwarden, but found the job of treasurer to be more demanding. “So much work is out-of-hours and away from church. In a way, you need to have a natural feel or interest for being a treasurer. I enjoyed it, but, in the end, I found it too much like my day job as a civil servant, and there was a lot of exposure. You’re responsible for major assets, and it’s a big responsibility.”
Five years on, the association remains, because the parish has still not removed her from its account, and the bank statements still come to her home address, along with diocesan communications. “I don’t open anything. I just pass it on,” she says. “But there might be confidential information, and it should probably go to the incumbent if it goes anywhere.” Mrs Jenkins has ongoing concerns about how parish clergy, diocesan finance advisers, and treasurers overlap, “because, at the end of the day, treasurers are only volunteers.”
Mr Preece Smith at Gloucester sees this. “The isolation and the burdens of treasurers need to be met with more admin support.” His diocese is looking to set up “market-town hubs”, which may, he says, be “more granular than deaneries and, in some cases, mission areas”. He describes treasurers as people who “bring order and rhythm to a situation; many are longstanding, and perhaps long-suffering” and “admin can be a local cacophony” for them.
THE treasurers’ situation is recognised. Both Mr Wood, and Mr de Bernhardt Wood with the National Giving Team, are equally committed to making life easier for treasurers. Leeds encourages treasurers to join the Association of Church Accountants and Treasurers (ACAT), and the diocese will reimburse the cost. Videos have been produced on how to fill in parish returns. Pro-forma spreadsheets for accounts have been devised and circulated. The National Giving Team knows that, by 2031, all parishes will have to register with the Charity Commission, regardless of income levels, and preparations are under way to help with this.
In turn, the treasurers welcome these initiatives, and see them in some way as providing value for the parish share contributions. They all say that training, guidance and advice, standardised systems, and requests for essential data only would all be desirable. Mrs Skitt senses that the tipping-point has been reached for treasurers, that “it cannot get worse”, and Mr Barkin concurs: “Some parts of the job are easier now, others have become more difficult — but we’re on a fairly level playing field.”
The treasurers likewise express gratitude for a strong sense of solidarity, with their incumbents, PCC members, other treasurers, and diocesan staff. They said that it was particularly rewarding when PCCs understood and “owned” the accounts. Good communications, answering queries when raised, seeing the breadth of the treasurer’s responsibilities, and respecting process and protocols were all referred to as good practice, in their experience. They likewise acknowledge how rising costs — especially energy bills — alongside squeezed levels of giving, mean finding more income streams, which is a joint effort.
As important as getting the bills paid, they say, is finding a successor. The job has become professionalised, in their collective view, and needs someone with the aptitude and time to take it on. They all have advice for new treasurers: “Make sure you like spreadsheets and have a feel for numbers. Sign up to the Parish Giving Scheme, and use Parish Buying (parishbuying.org.uk). Use whatever software works best for you. Know that it will take more than you think. Involve others in the job to help with things like meter readings and banking. Always ask for help, and someone, somewhere, will know the answer. Work closely with the incumbent.”
The importance of better joined-up thinking is a further plea. This includes the collaborative work between the national Church and dioceses as evidenced in the distribution of digital giving units. Treasurers think that more of this can be done, and it can show added value when parish-share requests are discussed. One suggested a national accountancy solution designed for churches in the form of a bookkeeping package that can incorporate restricted funds, scan documents, and have other features. Another asked for more training. Advice and guidance, they all said, particularly with buying, audits, regulation, and compliance, were always welcome.
FOR the time being, banking arrangements will continue to be a problem very much in need of a solution. The treasurers were concerned at how fees were charged, at how basic changes related to addresses or signatories were excessively complicated, and that banks didn’t seem to care about PCCs because their business was “too small”, or couldn’t be understood. “The constant excuses about money-laundering are just that,” one treasurer said. “We’re not talking about huge amounts of money; our accounts are transparent; and we’re certainly not making strange transfers overseas or anywhere.”
In November 2023, the three Charity Commission chief executives for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, wrote a joint letter to chief executives of UK banks “to request urgent action to help hard-pressed charities”. With reference to the legal obligations of charities — which includes all PCCs — they highlighted how “current stresses for charity trustees are heightened by avoidable frustrations at the availability of bank accounts and substandard service from banks”.
The letter asked for improved banking services with more thought, targeted training for bank staff, and greater responsiveness to how charities open accounts and need to change signatories without “avoidable delay driven by misunderstanding within banks”. The Commission was emphatic: “Working with charities is key to acting as a responsible business within our society, and the best way that banks can do so is by streamlining services to help charities operate in a way that does not create serious governance issues for them.”
Despite these challenges, week after week, treasurers continue to safeguard parish finances and support churches’ mission. It is an act of witness in its own unique way: treasurers are “fantastic people”, Mr de Bernhardt Wood says. “We’re incredibly grateful for the time they put in and the commitment they have. It’s a true ‘giving ministry’. Their support is invaluable, and they are key in connecting ministry with community impact and the need to fund it.”
Mrs Skitt considers herself a happy treasurer. “It needs some creativity and flexibility, but it’s very rewarding when the books balance. Remember you’re doing it for God, and go for it with that mind-set.”
There might be something of Mr Micawber’s happiness in the job, after all.