All the help you could need
When I joined the Parish Support Team in 2010, one of my earliest tasks was to create a simple Excel spreadsheet to help our treasurers to complete the Return of Parish Finance (ROPF) form, which each parish in the Church of England is asked to complete.
Over the following twelve years and with feedback from numerous treasurers in that time we have established the Parish Accounts Workbook (PAW). This is a free Excel spreadsheet which enables PCC treasurers who prepare their accounts on the receipts and payments basis to produce not only the ROPF form but also the annual accounts in the correct statutory format, ready for inclusion within the PCC’s annual report.
We provide the workbook and guidance notes on the Diocese website to download and in addition to this, we can provide one to one training (either face to face, or via Zoom) as well as email and phone support ensuring that help for our valued treasurers is always available.
We find that for those parishes that use the workbook it can aid succession planning as it is one less new task that an incoming treasurer is expected to master straight away, as they will have the comfort of knowing they have ongoing support from the finance team.
After three years, the most recent version of the workbook, PAW 3 will be going live towards the end of 2022 on our website. Due to some of the complex background work that automatically occurs within the workbook, this has previously meant that only treasurers with a licensed (paid) copy of Microsoft Excel on either PC or Mac have been able to use this.
However, we are currently working on creating a version of the workbook which will be compatible with Google Sheets to ensure that a free, cloud-based option is available to treasurers which can be used and shared across multiple devices.
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