It’s Mint for Churches… Sort Of

I’m a huge fan of Mint, the personal finance site.  If you don’t know about Mint then perhaps this post has already served it’s purpose.  Mint takes all your financial services data (banking, credit cards, loans, etc) and brings it all into one place.  Beyond that, Mint shows you your financial data in a visually pleasing and non-accountanty way.  It’s great.  You can see your stuff in real-time and you can set up all sorts of email alerts.

Mint is so great that I’ve often thought somebody should build something like that for churches.  Well, the good news is that the folks over at inDinero have done built something like Mint for small businesses and it works very well for churches too.

inDinero brings in all the financial data for you church and presents it in an easy to understand and digest format.  Think of it as a financial dashboard that gives you an up-to-the-minute view of exactly what’s going on with the money in your church.

Obviously, this is never going to replace good monthly reports like a P&L report but in smaller churches, with smaller operational margins, a month is a very long time to wait for good reports.  inDinero steps in and augments those standard reports with real-time charts, graphs, and alerts.  It especially excels at projecting cash flow issues.

Yes, just like Mint, you have to give inDinero the keys to your financial accounts for all the data to be aggregated but the site uses state of the art, banking-level security so that’s no big deal.  Just get over it and start using the service.

I’ve been resisting the temptation to make a “it’s so easy a senior pastor can use it” sort of joke but the truth is that inDinero is going to help most senior pastors make a lot more sense out of the financial data they have on hand.  Let’s be honest.  Sometimes the reports that Quickbooks and/or accountants generate can leave a pastor cold.  inDinero can be a good tool to help manage the day-to-day finances of the church.

The basic service is free.  If you have more than 50 transactions a month, however, you’ll need to upgrade to use the powerful transactions feature.  (This allows for categorizing, budgeting and budgeting alerts.)  Even if you don’t upgrade, the rest of the functions still work.

My only wish is that inDinero had an iphone app but perhaps we’ll see that down the road.

Check it out at https://inDinero.com.