How Many Line Items Should be in Your Church Budget?

Proper Breakdown

We recommend that a church break up their budget (Chart of Accounts) into the following “parent” accounts:

• Administrative or Operations – this encompasses items like dues/subscriptions, advertising, bank charges/fees, IT, office supplies and software, professional fees, etc.
• Personnel – all things related to staffing payroll
• Property – all things related to maintaining your property both facility and sound/audio (if renting may make more sense to lump this in with Administrative/Operations)
• Ministry – church services and different internal ministries of the church
• Giving – any sort of giving to missions either local, national or international and benevolence

How many line items should you have for each parent account?

We have seen budgets that included line items that have $25- $50 amounts for the entire year. This leads to too much information. If you are more detailed we recommend that for churches with a budget of less than $500k to not include line items that would have less than $500 for the year. For churches over $500k we would not recommend including anything that would have less than $1,000. For less detailed churches we recommend that you do not include line items that do not make up 1-3% of your total annual budget.