In this my 3rd and final post about Planning for Margin, we’ll take a look a the Margin Model I use to get the “Pre-Budget” conversation started.

The model is based upon a simple concept…the church spends less than it  receives and plans for the margin left over.

Start with the current set of circumstances in your church and use the model to talk to leadership about where the church is and where the church wants to be in terms of its desired future. (Talked about this here)

Ultimately, when you meet with Pastor and the Leadership Team, the goal is to emerge with a consensus on Acceptable Ranges and Ideal %’s so work can begin to develop plans to get to:

• the top end of the Acceptable Ranges ( for the areas where you are currently over)
• the low end of the Acceptable Ranges (for the areas where you are currently under)
• then develop a plan to get as close to Ideal as possible when possible

I’d suggest putting together the current %’s first, eliminating anything unusual and begin looking at data from other churches, studies, benchmarks, etc. to develop the Acceptable Ranges and Ideal %’s. One thing to consider would be the previous conversations you have had with your SP and Team.

One other thing you can do to help your team is to lay out the next 2 or 3 years given an assumed top line giving % increase to give prudence to how long it may take to reach your Leadership Team’s Ideal %’s. If you’ve got some area %’s that are really out of whack (like staffing), then God may call your church to make some really hard decisions.

Modify the model to fit your church. Know also it will change over time anyway as goals and visions are realized and you start developing plans for other dreams and goals God has for your church.

Model notes:

• The current circumstances and future vision of your church obviously can vary greatly from what I have in this model but you can customize this for your own church.
• Take a look of the data input tab and go from there. Green cells are data entry. The other tabs are the analyses generated to share with your team.
• Feel free to change the names of categories and to add more that I don’t have currently.
• On the report tabs, hide rows not needed.

I believe the model is self-explanatory for the most part, but if have questions, please leave me a comment or shoot me an email at robert@robertddial.com.

One more note, in the past, I’ve incorporated other major funds into the model, such as Building Fund. If you’d like me to put a model out there like that, leave me a comment and I’d be glad to make it available.

Download the Margin Model here. [download id=”341″].