Client background

The Bridge Church is in Spring Hill, Tennessee with two additional campuses in Columbia and Franklin, Tennessee. It is a movement for all people to know God, find freedom, discover calling and make a difference. Since 2011 it has grown from 200 weekly parishioners to over 3,000. The Bridge has a long-term goal of growing to be ten campuses in the greater Nashville, Tennessee area.

When the organization decided to transition towards greater focus on growing the church versus the day-to-day operations of its accounting, outsourcing made sense. “Before God called me to The Bridge, I was an attorney practicing law. It’s through The Bridge, and with God’s direction, that I’ve found my calling of strategic organizational leadership. Under the advisement of our CPA firm, CapinCrouse, we started to explore outsourcing our accounting.” Trent Linville, director of finance at The Bridge.

After an internal controls review, CapinCrouse recommended a new accounting software platform and suggested the idea of outsourcing their day-to-day financial transactions. “At the time we were using ACS church accounting management software, and nothing integrated with it. We had to manually enter in expenses, it handled restricted income poorly, reporting was terrible and worst of all, it could not handle multilocational organizations.”

The business challenge

With the backing of their CPA firm, The Bridge started the search for a new accounting software platform and outsourced accounting alliance. They researched several platforms and interviewed similar multilocation churches. Half of the organizations they interviewed were using Sage Intacct. Baker Tilly came highly recommended as a vertical leader in the faith-based world. In addition to providing Sage Intacct, Baker Tilly provides outsourced accounting services through its Managed Accounting Services.

The Baker Tilly not-for-profit managed accounting services team has over 30 years of Christian-focused financial experience and has implemented over 140 churches, missions and Christian camps on Sage Intacct. “After meeting with the team at Baker Tilly and seeing Sage Intacct, we saw the value that outsourcing our accounting on a best-in-class financial environment would bring to our organization. It was an easy conversation with our board, we would get an experienced full-time controller on software that was proven to work for our organizational structure and set us up to scale as we grow. Baker Tilly and Sage Intacct checked all the right boxes.” Trent Linville, director of finance at The Bridge.

Strategy and solution

After implementing Sage Intacct and onboarding Baker Tilly’s Managed Accounting Services, The Bridge saw an immediate improvement on how they were reporting its financials. Baker Tilly accounting specialists and Sage Intacct streamlined accounting procedures, improved days to close by roughly 50%, and integrated with Expensify and Bill.com.

The Bridge Results:

• Improved days to close from 12-27 days to 12-15 days, roughly a 50% reduction
• Improved overall efficiencies and simplified and streamlined key accounting processes
• Directors can access their budget anywhere and anytime
• Created reports and dashboards tailored church attendance
• Eliminated manual reporting of expenses

In addition, the Director of Finance was able to transform into a more strategic role, focused on growing The Bridge. “I’m spending less time preparing the financials and more time analyzing them. By outsourcing our accounting to Baker Tilly, I’m able to be more of a CFO and spend less of my time being consumed with day-to-day operations of running an organization. Now when a new challenge or project comes up, I’m able to put all my energy into solving it instead of focusing on the minutia.” Trent Linville, Director of Finance at The Bridge.