Wow, this was a major task that had built up over the past 22 months. It took me 6 weeks to enter $350,000 worth of business & personal expense receipts, but Hallelujah, I completed the task today.
I'm usually on top of the detailed financial entries, but the past 2 years have been a whirlwind of activity that kept pushing the entries back month after month. It started in January 2017 when we were in Costa Rica for nearly 3 weeks running a huge mission trip. Then we returned to one of our largest retreat seasons ever that lasted till May. Then it was off to run the summer camps. Then it was calling off the wedding, running our fall events, and preparing for the banquet. Then I found out I had to relocate so it was immediately on to looking for a new place, attending open houses, applying for a home loan, packing up everything, and moving - all while running our winter & spring retreats. Then it was off to TN, GA, & NC to run our summer camps. Then it was out to Utah to run our out-west trip. As the months flew by so did the opportunities to enter the expense receipts. I was up to date on entering all of our income and paying our monthly bills, and I had a working understanding of our general monthly expenses. Thankfully the IRS gave us an extension until Nov 15th to file our corporate taxes. But to file our taxes (and get caught up-to-date) I had to tackle the mammoth job of entering 1/3 of a million dollars worth of business and personal expense receipts from a total of 14 accounts for the past 22 months. That's 308 months worth of statements (14 x 22 = 308). Each statement averaged about 45 minutes to complete which totaled about 230 hours (or six 40-hour weeks) of detailed data entry. I wasn't looking forward to this at all. But day after day I kept chipping away at it, and praise God, today I finished!! I feel so liberated... so free... so caught up!! And the greatest part is that I only have 2 months left in 2018 so I will actually have this years finances completed and ready to turn in as early as January!! Man, that feels so good! And it frees me up to get to the real work of the ministry - building / maintaining relationships and running God-awesome events!
