Case Study: First Christian Church Santa Maria

About First Christian Church

First Christian Church serves approximately 1,200 in-person attendees across three Sunday services, plus additional online participants, making it one of the largest churches in their valley of about 90,000 people. Their annual budget is used to manage numerous ministries including adult, children's, student, missions, and more.

The Challenge

When Laurie Hale joined First Christian Church as their bookkeeper, they were using Sage for their accounting needs. The church had originally transitioned from paper ledgers to Sage in 2021, but Sage had proved to be unnecessarily complex for their needs. In fact, they had to work with an outside contractor to help manage their finances through Sage.

‍"Once I got familiar with how our church operates and what the board reports required, I realized we could do our accounting in-house, save money, and make reporting more timely," says Laurie.

Why Sage Wasn't the Right Fit

Sage presented several challenges for First Christian Church. First of all the software is built for more enterprise-level organizations. "I can see Sage being useful if you have multiple sites with different ins and outs. But for our kind of church where you take in tithing, fundraisers, dedicated accounts, and pay monthly utilities—we're not complex enough to warrant the financial obligation of Sage," Laurie explains.

Another difficulty that Sage presented was complex reporting. "Everybody here found Sage to be very confusing as far as reports. It took probably four months to really feel comfortable with Sage, and another four to five months to understand the data being pulled," says Laurie. "I wasn't 100% confident I wasn't missing something in the data."

Last but not least, software isn't helpful if it isn't user-friendly for everyone who needs oversight. Laurie is not the only person on staff who looks at financials – the pastors at First Christian Church need oversight as well.

"My pastors wanted real-time information and to see it more clearly. The front dashboards that were set up for them in Sage were unreliable, and they never felt confident in those dashboards when reviewing day-to-day."

Why They Chose Aplos

After evaluating several fund accounting options, First Christian Church selected Aplos for their accounting and financial management needs. Laurie shares five key ways that their church has benefitted from switching to Aplos:

1. Custom tagging for ministry-specific reporting

"One of the selling points for me, based on what my pastors want, is the custom tag feature. We do a lot of camps, fundraisers, and mission efforts. Our pastors would like to have a P&L specific to each of these events, which the custom tag feature in Aplos allows for in a way that's easier to pull on a report than what we were trying to find in Sage."

2. User-friendly interface

"In a staff meeting the lead pastor, office manager, and operations staff, we all had a walkthrough of Aplos before signing the contract. Everybody liked the overall easy look of it—pretty simplistic, pretty straightforward. They don't have time to pull three reports to get one set of information, which is the experience we had with Sage."

3. Custom reporting capabilities

"I like the fact that you can make custom reports exactly the way you want them. These custom reports are also easy to locate thanks to the ability to 'favorite' reports in the quick access starred section. I have a lot of saved reports that are exactly what I need to report to our board."

4. Accounts payable functionality

"I like having the accounts payable feature in Aplos because it's designed with churches in mind. I can get our vendors properly set up in the system, they accept the invite one time, and now I can just pay their bill through Aplos and everything gets properly updated."

5. Built by and for churches

"We love that Aplos was originally started by someone at a church, so they really understood the necessity for an accounting platform that works for churches needing fund-based accounting. To me, it's evident that Aplos is built for what a church needs."

Final Advice

When asked what advice she would give to others deciding between Aplos vs. Sage, Laurie was clear: "If somebody were to ask me questions about these two systems, I would tell them to think about their transaction level and the size of their organization. If you have one location, Sage is too much. Sage is a corporation-type software with fund accounting capability."

"If you have in-house staff that really understand fund-based accounting, Aplos is easy to use and navigate through."