Parable case study

At a Glance

Accounting package:

Favorite features:

• Copilot
• Receipt scanning
• Credit card import
• QuickBooks Online direct integration

The best part:

• Cutting time clients spend on their expenses with Expensify

Partner since: 2011

Church accounting made easy

“It’s important to us that the tools we recommend align with our mission and values and Expensify helps us deliver our promise to our partners,” says Brianna Wheeler, Account Advisor at Parable. Parable is a team of financial storytellers with superpowers in accounting, bookkeeping, and consulting. They provide church accounting services and work with churches so that church leadership can focus on their mission. Brianna works directly with partners (how Parable refers to their clients) to ensure that her partners understand their books without having to sacrifice time away from their mission. 

“We see a lot of partners who are doing their expenses on paper. They’re downloading and printing spreadsheets, coding off these paper spreadsheets, cutting paper checks, and storing everything in a filing cabinet.” Brianna continues, “[Church leadership is] spending so much time gathering receipts, reconciling data manually, then trying to figure out who needs to get paid back. This becomes a problem quickly because churches often rely on a very small team of internal staff and lots of volunteers to help them do their work. As a result, when we take on partners, we make sure they adopt Parable’s processes, which include using Expensify for receipt scanning, expense management, and corporate cards.

Parable works with partners of all sizes, whether they are just getting started with their church, growing fast and scaling, or just need to modernize their processes. Parable provides financial help for new churches as well.

Church accounting services from a former pastor

Dan Pourbaix, Business Development at Parable, knows all too well the stresses church leadership undergoes. He first discovered Expensify in a previous role as an Executive Pastor (XP). “Every church is structured differently, but as the XP, there is always just so much to do,” he says. “One of my responsibilities was overseeing our finance committee, which included church accounting. If I was lucky, I was able to get a volunteer to help me wrangle in receipts from team members and volunteers. It was a hassle to get everything together and I knew there had to be a better way.”

Oftentimes potential partners come to them when the IRS is knocking on their door, and that’s when the Parable team rolls up their sleeves and gets to work. “With Expensify, we save 3-4 hours per partner. That’s why we’re so adamant about partners who are open to change, and we always make sure that the decision maker is on the call so that we can get to work right away” says Brianna. “We’re able to provide our partners a streamlined process from receipt to reimbursement, and make sure that our partners can meet all their monthly financial deadlines.” 

With Expensify, Dan and Brianna love that they can give each individual partner their own Expensify Card. There’s no need to stress about what expenses belong to who, and it keeps the church’s accounting neat, categorized, and easy to search.

Standout Expensify features every church needs

Firms providing financial help for new churches as well as growing and established churches can all take advantage of Expensify’s time saving features.

“The Copilot feature is amazing,” says Brianna. “As an Account Advisor, I can quickly log in and see what’s going on with a partner’s account, see what information is missing, and ping the individual for any missing paperwork. I also love the QuickBooks Online integration; the fact that information automatically syncs between the two systems with the click of a button is such a time saver!”

For Dan: “I love showing people how easy it is to take a picture of the receipt and send it in. You can see their ah-ha moment click in their minds instantly — they get how useful Expensify is in saving them time almost immediately.”

“We don’t just tell our partners to do what we recommend, we use all of our recommended tools for our internal business as well,” Katie remarks. “All of our leadership team has their own credit cards that import into Expensify, which makes expensing easy. And then we sync all of that information straight into QBO.” 

Benefits of being an ExpensifyApproved! accounting partner

Not only does Parable recommend Expensify to their partners, but they use Expensify internally as well. “We love working with our partner manager, David. Anytime we have an issue, whether it’s a billing question for one of our partners or need clarity on a new feature, we know that he’s available to dig in and help us get clarity so that we can keep things running smoothly for our church accounting partners,” says Katie Shilts, Mission Control Lead.

In addition to a dedicated partner manager, as an ExpensifyApproved! Partner, the Parable team also takes advantage of partner discounts and exclusive opportunities, and all members on the billing side are certified. “[After all], we couldn’t handle as many partners as we have if we had to do everything manually without Expensify,” concludes Brianna. “And that’s why we recommend this powerful app to all of our partners.”