Counting Collection

  • Thread starter Thread starter willkmn
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
W

willkmn

Guest
Do any other parishes count the collection during the Liturgy (Mass)? For as long as I can remember ours has; the ushers go to the basement during the sermon and reappear for Communion, and it seems a bit irreverent, as well as being a security issue.
 
Best to check with your Diocese. They have procedures and policies in place about how the offerings are counted.
 
Yes, we are a Byzantine Catholic church. Our Sunday service is the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
 
The collection is placed in front of the altar after it has been taken up and counted after Mass has finished. Two persons count, fill in the document and sign it. It is then placed in the safety cupboard.
 
Collection comes up front with the gifts. Collection stays at the foot of the altar for the duration of Mass. After Mass, it gets brought into the sacristy and put into a deposit bag to go to the bank. The priest takes it with him, presumably to lock it up at the main parish, so that it can be deposited the next business day.

Have you traveled to other Byzantine churches in your area? In other areas? What have you seen there?
 
“As God is my Witness” is a good rule of life. During the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, not so much.
 
Ours ushers have numbered bags for each collection. They put the Saturday and early Sunday collections into the bags, seal them, and put them into a locked cabinet. The counting team, which is separate from the ushers, arrives mid morning, get the bags and count them. There is generally 5 people on the counting team with a minimum of 3 needed to count. All cash is counted twice and the checks are totaled twice. While the team is there the later Sunday morning collections, again in the sealed bags, are brought over by the ushers. Once the counting is done the collection is locked in a deposit bag and two people take it to the bank. Each counting team only counts one weekend a month except for months with 5 Sundays.

I think it’s a pretty good system since there are a lot of checks and balances.
 
I wish my parish had the people/resources to institute a system like that. As a former bank officer, I am very much aware of the importance of audit controls. I have to say, however, that we have never had a problem with the collection “disappearing.”

Our collection is bagged and dropped into a safe after mass then counted by a two-person team on Monday morning. (In most cases the two-person team consists of a husband and wife.) The office secretary then takes it to the bank when she has the time. There are very few, if any, checks and balances.

We were recently visited by auditors from the diocese, and the lead auditor almost had a stroke when she observed our “system.” So, she very helpfully outlined some new (and very cumbersome) procedures which we “would be following” from now on. What she failed to appreciate was the fact that all of the counters are retired folks who volunteer their time to count. When informed of what they considered to be needlessly complicated procedures, they all decided to retire from collection counting too.

By the following week, everything was back to normal.
 
Yeah I can see the balance that has to be considered. All of our counters are volunteers as well and some are retirees. Ours is a larger parish so we have a large pool of people to draw from.
 
TheLittleLady said:
They have procedures and policies in place about how the offerings are counted.
Click to expand...
Not really.

And the procedures certainly do not call for collection to be counted during mass. The offering should be brought forward at the offertory.
 
fredystairs said:
Ours ushers have numbered bags for each collection. They put the Saturday and early Sunday collections into the bags, seal them, and put them into a locked cabinet. The counting team, which is separate from the ushers, arrives mid morning, get the bags and count them. There is generally 5 people on the counting team with a minimum of 3 needed to count. All cash is counted twice and the checks are totaled twice. While the team is there the later Sunday morning collections, again in the sealed bags, are brought over by the ushers. Once the counting is done the collection is locked in a deposit bag and two people take it to the bank. Each counting team only counts one weekend a month except for months with 5 Sundays.

I think it’s a pretty good system since there are a lot of checks and balances.
Click to expand...
We are similar, but as a small parish with one mass a weekend we have 3 people (a rotating group) who count the money right away after mass, log the individual donations and plate on a form, put the deposit in a tamper evident bag, and then give it to another person to deposit. They take it to the bank and put in night depository. Our instructions for the diocese are not to hold money on premises overnight.

I’m the book keeper so I cannot have anything to do with counting the money. I do the G/L entries, bank reconciliation, and key in the offerings for tax records.

We too have good checks/balances and segregation of duties even though we are a tiny parish.
 
Last edited:
Every Diocese I have worked in has specific policies about the counting of collections. These are in place to keep everyone above suspicion.

It is worth a phone call to the Diocese to ask.
 
TheLittleLady said:
Every Diocese I have worked in has specific policies about the counting of collections. These are in place to keep everyone above suspicion.

It is worth a phone call to the Diocese to ask.
Click to expand...
Yes they have money handing procedures. But they do not say “when” to count the money, such as during mass, after mass.
 
1ke said:
that is a no-no in our diocese.
Click to expand...
It should be a no-no anywhere audit controls are needed. In fact, this was one of the things the diocese auditors had a real problem with. But what are we going to do? By splitting up the married couples you are kind-of-sort-of doubling the volunteer time of the family. At least that’s how the counters looked at it. We finally came to the conclusion that having counters with less-than-ideal audit controls in place was better than having no counters at all.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top