Jerod Beck is the Pastor of Administration at Emmaus Church, a gospel-centered church from the Acts 29 Network in Buford, Georgia.
Founded 14 years ago, Emmaus Church attracts around 800 attendees each Sunday.
As Pastor of Administration, Jerod oversees the church's administrative operations. His responsibilities include managing back-office tasks, serving on the pastoral team, and ensuring the smooth functioning of the church's financial systems, including bookkeeping and accounting.
Given the church's significant size and complex operations, these financial duties are critical to its success.
The Challenge
“Around 2019, we reached out initially for bookkeeper service [through BELAY],” Jerod remembers. “We had a great bookkeeper – a person local to us that was known by the church.
“As the church continued to grow, though, we found ourselves in a place where there began to be a little bit of a scope mismatch [with] what that service provider was offering.
“And so we landed in a place of trying to find a new option. We turned over some rocks in that area, [and] explored the path of hiring someone onto our team. BELAY came across our radar and we saw a lot of value in the third-party nature of your business in terms of the accountability [and] the setup with independent contractors.
“We were also looking to modernize – being able to bring things into the cloud, and begin to use some more up-to-date software solutions for things like bill pay, accounts payable, and expense reporting as well.”
And that’s when BELAY paired Jerod with Bookkeeper Jon Lee Rabette.
“It was a pretty quick process once we learned what [BELAY was] all about and since that time we've had [the same] bookkeeper, which is awesome. We're super thankful for that. Super thankful for our bookkeeper. He got to know us; we got to know him. We've had a really great relationship ever since.”
The Solution
“The idea of a third party was great to us,” Jerod says. “It helps us with the accountability side of having someone who's effectively completely disconnected. We don't see a bonafide need for someone providing bookkeeping services to be in our office, especially with the transition to some of those more modern tools that are helping us with Expensify and things like that.
“They're all in the cloud, and that makes it easy for us to interact with our bookkeeper by using all those tools. They could be on Mars, and I think it would still be OK.
“There might've been, with some of our team members, a slight, ‘Wait a minute, we're working with who and where are they? How does that work?’ But it didn't take long for people to see the value in an independent third-party offering a great service.”
Jerod began to see the value of having a Bookkeeper who could help modernize their systems and processes fairly quickly.
“We were using some old school processes for things like expense reporting and getting bills paid,” Jerod says. “And with the modernization that came with it, a lot of the people that we regularly interact with were pleased to see just how much quicker we were able to get them paid, whether that was a childcare worker that was doing paid babysitting for some kind of event or even people who are doing construction projects or cleaning services for us.
“We were able to process their payments way quicker and do so in a way that also made the accounting of it easy.”
Jon Lee’s tasks include weekly payroll processing, statement reconciliation, adding budgets in QuickBooks, and more.
“He stays on top of all that, which we're super thankful for,” Jerod says. “It's one of those things where I can stay out of most of it and focus on other things that are here on the ground because of what he's taking care of for us on an ongoing basis.
“You don't even have to ask him. It's just being done. The confirmations come in and it's great.”
Building trust with Jon Lee was easy for Jerod, too.
“I don't remember it taking very long for me to feel comfortable with what Jon Lee was doing,” Jerod says. “I could see right away that he was committed to doing things the right way. He was asking questions early on, learning about us. He cared about what we were doing, and he wanted to make sure that it was done in the right way.
The Result
“Jon Lee is a learner,” Jerod says. “He's demonstrated to me that he always wants to improve and be making sure that he's doing things in the right, the best, the most efficient way.
“Not long after we started our engagement with him back in 2019, we were also jumping into basically the first set of financial statements and a pseudo audit that we had subjected ourselves to with an accounting firm.
“The church had never done anything like that before, and he was right there with us the whole time, not just providing the things that we needed or helping provide the things that we needed for that audit, but he was also like, ‘I want to learn everything I can about church finance’ and this accounting firm that we had been with.
“We can see that he is really striving to do it better all the time and keep learning along with us.”
Jerod was able to quickly see value in having Jon Lee by his side.
“There are 16 of us on staff, and almost every person on our team has a church credit card, so there's transactions and the movement of money happening a lot as we're buying supplies and getting ready for ministries to happen and things like that,” Jerod explains.
“There's a lot of volume of transactions, and so taking that reality and then applying the systems and then Jon Lee's attention to detail and care for all of it. It was very quick.
“It was a big deal to just have more assurance of like, ’OK, the books are being kept well, and we can have assurance that when we pull those reports, we know they're accurate. We know they're up to date as much as possible, and we can depend on them.
“When I pull the report and go to our leadership and say, this is where we stand financially, I can have confidence in those numbers. I don't have any shadow of a doubt that what I'm presenting to them is accurate and usable, so that's a big benefit.
“Stewardship is a massive deal. It can't be overlooked. People are giving money to this church [with] the full hope and expectation that it's being used for kingdom purposes. And so it's one thing to do that, and it's a whole other thing to be able to show, ‘Hey, yeah, it's really being done.’ And to be above board in that way [is] a big value for us.
And having the service that's being provided by Jon Lee is certainly adding value there.”
Exciting days are ahead for Emmaus Church as they’re seeking to purchase a new building.
“We are going to be possibly purchasing a new building to worship in that is a lot bigger than the one that we're in right now,” Jerod says. “We've been renting for 10 or 11 years now, and the Lord has brought growth to this place, and we want to have a space that's suitable for people to come and worship and be a part of what God is doing here.
“A big next step is to jump into a building project and to ask our church to participate in that financially, and so look forward to the opportunity to do that. And I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Jon Lee will be right there with us through that entire thing to manage it as we think we're complex today. Undoubtedly, when we get into that, the level of complexity will only go up, but I don't have any reason to doubt that he'll be able to take it all in stride.
“We feel so blessed to have him [and BELAY] as a resource.”