Greetings again from the office of the Treasurer and Director of Finance and Planning. I appreciate the opportunity to share details of the church's finances with you once again.
Last time I mentioned my hope that income in November would rebound dramatically from a lackluster October. As you can see in the report below, by comparing October's daily mail income average of about $130,214 to November's daily mail income average of $132,443, the improvement was only marginal.
These monthly daily mail income average figures don't tell the whole story however. As I have mentioned previously, our yearly daily average mail income (as opposed to the monthly average just mentioned) has been budgeted at about $150,000 a day.
Even though the last two monthly averages have been far below our yearly average projection, the yearly average is still a small amount above the projection at about $155,042. A bad December could bring this average down below projections for the year, however.
In addition, even if December is good enough to keep the yearly daily average mail income above the $150,000 level, we will still probably run a deficit of about $2 million for the year.
This is because we dropped our income projections numerous times during 1996 but were unable to drop expenses as fast as income dropped.
Dropping an income projection is a simple matter of changing a figure on a piece of paper. However, cutting expenses to meet those lower projections is another matter, because expense cuts take time to implement (in other words they lag), causing us to overshoot the income if the income falls too quickly. This is what happened this year and why we project a deficit.
The most important conclusion we can reach from this analysis is that a robust December income is not only desirable but needed. Often December is a good month because people wish to make their contributions before the end of the year for tax reasons. Our hope is that December's income will follow in this tradition.
If the income for December does not move up, then we may have to recast our 1997 budget projections downward. In turn this would almost certainly mean more cuts in field ministers.
Please continue to pray with me that December's income will increase and help relieve some of our budgetary pressures.
Dec. 17, 1996, Worldwide News, page 3
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