Minimize the Boring Stuff!

Sometimes I repair computer systems that are broken.  Other times I get to take something that is good and make it great.  Recently I got to work on making our ministry expense handling system and try to make it great...

Now you might be wondering: what’s a “ministry expense”?  It’s what companies call a “business expense”, but we’re not a business, we’re a ministry.  :)  So for example one of our staff needs a new laptop or some thank-you notes for their ministry - that’s a ministry expense.  They just need to document why it’s needed for their ministry and DiscipleMakers will pay for it (or reimburse the staff).

Sounds pretty boring and tedious, right?  It is!  So why don’t we leverage the power of computers to automate it and make ministry expense handling be as small of a part of our lives as possible?  Bingo!  That’s what I’ve worked on lately.  My goal is to help our staff who are submitting ministry expense reports and the ones who are approving them to spend as little time on it as necessary so they can move on to other more important things - like fulfilling the Great Commission of Jesus Christ!

We’re now beta testing a nice web & mobile app called Expensify which unifies and streamlines our ministry expense handling procedure.  It’s been fun working with the Expensify crew as I ask them for help and overall I’ve been very impressed with their product.  It’s a great fit for a ministry like DiscipleMakers and I hope that it saves our staff lots of time and energy in the years to come!