The Challenge
Rearview Planning
The main financial challenge of organizations on a journey to be a Good Place Organization is evaluating the value that money holds in our minds and hearts in accomplishing the main aims of the organization. We must focus to keep a Biblical perspective on money and be intentional to keep money as just one criteria of success in the organization.
Every organization has an accounting function that reports the revenue, costs, and taxes according to generally accepted accounting principles. The challenge is moving the accounting function beyond rear-view accounting of the money and asset. Our aim is to better steward the data of financial outcomes and results, and with wisdom be mindful of the overall financial impact of decisions throughout the organization.
The Aim
Redefining the Goal
The Bible guides us to a different and more impactful way to determine success, where money becomes a tool to accomplish success, not success itself. One criteria of success at Good Place Organizations are economic regeneration. This means the organization is financially viable and sustainable. The surplus resources produced are used to reinvest back into the organization to enhance more health, growth, innovation, and improvement to value more people and build up more Good Places. Financial Management keeps this at the forefront of the minds and hearts of the leaders of the organization.
Financial Management is a specifically applied system that serves to accurately account for financial-related outcomes and results. It ensures the use of finances are aligned with the purpose of the organization and teaches the financial impact of the decisions made, the work that they do, and equips them to make wise financial stewardship decisions.
Financial Management also provides the financial-related data produced by the systems of the organization, allowing leaders to engage directly with the managing, monitoring, learning, and improvement of financially related key outcomes and results of their systems.
In order to be wise and prudent in our finances according to the purposes for money found described in the Bible, we apply financial principles and values derived from the Bible to numerous financial topics.
The Result
Economic Regeneration
The outcome of Financial Management is to use finances to achieve success as the Bible defines it in a Biblical economy and to be wise and prudent in organizational finances. It produces a finance function within an organization that as a baseline, accounts for the money and assets and additionally applies the collective knowledge of data & information to the financial outcomes and results of the organization, helping to ensure wise financial decision making at large.