THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ALL SAINTS’ FINANCES IN 2025
I’m brand new to the parish and/or to this whole “church” thing. Where does our money come from?
There are three major revenue sources for All Saints’.
- Rental income: primarily the CPE Dorval, but also other community groups that rent our spaces.
- Investment income: we have approximately $1.2 million invested in the Anglican Fund of the Diocese of Montreal (generally referred to as “the endowment”). We receive 4% in dividends on this income annually.
- Pledges and other giving: People give, both regularly and occasionally, to the parish. This is by far our most significant source of income, as much as or slightly more than the other two put together.
What’s the difference between capital and operating expenses?
Operating expenses are bills, basically. They’re expenses that we know we’re going to have to pay every month/quarter/year, like utilities, insurance, and salaries. Capital expenses are one-time costs, usually aimed at maintaining or improving our physical facilities, such as (to name just a couple of recent examples) waterproofing the tunnel or installing the elevator (though not all capital expenses are that large!).
When I look at our financial reports, it’s really confusing that capital and operating expenses are lumped together. Can we do something about that?
The Finance Committee is actively working on it!
Didn’t we have a bunch of money left over from the kitchen project? Can we do cool stuff with that windfall?
The kitchen project (long-promised as part of the merger, and much anticipated!) came in three weeks ahead of schedule and $25,000 under budget relative to the $200,000 that we had taken out of the endowment to pay for it. Long term, that $25,000 needs to go back into the endowment and keep generating income.
I keep hearing about a Capital Campaign. Is anything actually happening on that front?
Definitely! We’re currently in a phase where not much is happening publicly, but the Corporation and other leadership are actively working on gathering the necessary information to move forward (mostly, finding out how much things are likely to cost). We plan to have an all-parish meeting in January to decide on our priorities for the campaign.
Do we have to fundraise to pay ourselves back for the kitchen renovation before we can have a capital campaign?
Fundamentally, this is really a moot point. The money for the kitchen renovation came out of the endowment, so “paying ourselves back” would constitute fundraising to put money back into the endowment. The endowment is also the fund into which we will deposit capital campaign monies as they come in, and pay for any campaign projects as we undertake them. So whether $175,000 of what we raise and spend constitutes “paying ourselves back for the kitchen” or not, doesn’t really make any difference to how we approach the campaign. We want to end up with a balance of at least $1.2 million long term; how we manage that is immaterial.
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