Riverstone Finance Press
Resources to help Churches, Pregnancy Resource Centers, and other non-profit organizations
improve their accounting systems and internal control.
Riverstone Finance Press is dedicated to helping religious, tax-exempt organizations improve their accountability and internal procedures. Our heart desire is to help you develop good internal controls and improve your operations which in turn allows you to have a more effective ministry.
There are many wonderful resources available to explain accounting and internal control issues. They usually are 150 or 200 pages long. Not many people have the available time to read about that much internal control. If you have the available time to read something that long, please get the resource and dive in! The resources you will find here are intentionally short, so you can quickly get the basic information you need.
Riverstone features resources written by James Ulvog, a CPA located in the
The author is now blogging on non-profit issues at www.nonprofitupdate.info. His other blogs are www.attestationupdate.com, which focuses on issues of interest to CPAs, and also www.learngreaterthanchange.com, where he discusses the need we all have to learn at a greater rate than the radical change that is taking place all around us.
Featured resources: Written specifically for local churches, this primer will help you step up to the basic internal controls and procedures every church should have. Key topics: · Why bother putting good procedures in place? · Fundamental financial procedures. · How internal controls protect your staff. · Basic internal controls that can be easily developed in the context of a local church. · Watch out for these frequent tax issues for a church. Bonus in the appendix: · Questionnaire to identify specific areas to improve your church’s operations Wherever level your church is on, this guide will help you step up to the next level of accountability.
Churches Step Up to the Next Level
A Guide for Local Churches to
Improve Their Accounting Operations
and Internal Control
Once Upon Internal Control:
A tale of good and bad ways to implement internal controls
in a local church
Once upon a time, there were
two churches....
...One did not pay attention to putting in place good procedures. They will pay a sad price for the lack of internal controls.
You may be thinking, why should we bother with all that internal control stuff in our local church? After all, our finance staff is very good at what they do. We trust them completely.
Through two simple stories, this fable shows why that is not enough. We should bother to set up good procedures to protect our churches, our staff, and ourselves.
Step Up to the Next Level:
A Guide for Pregnancy Centers to
Improve Their Internal Operations and Prepare for an Audit
This is the book that started the "Step Up" series. Written specifically for local pregnancy resource centers, this is a primer that will help you step up to the basic internal controls and procedures every pregnancy center should have. It then describes the audit process and key information to help your center step up to the level of getting a financial audit. Key topics:
- Why bother putting good procedures in place?
- Fundamental financial procedures
- How internal controls protect your staff
- Basic internal controls that can be easily developed
- Overview of what the audit process looks like
- Describes what a pregnancy center looks like to an outsider. (This helps potential auditors understand your center so they can be comfortable bidding on the audit.)
- Ideas to help an auditor plan an efficient audit of a pregnancy center
Bonus in the appendix:
- Questionnaire to identify specific areas to improve your center’s operations
Wherever your pregnancy center is at, this guide will help you step up to the next level of accountability.
