Nancy Church
Nancy is an experienced financial professional with over 25 years of financial leadership experience for non-profit organizations in low-income housing, social services, consulting, and environmental organizations. She started her career with eight years in public accounting where she was responsible for both audits and consulting engagements. She excels in all aspects of accounting, from bookkeeping to the design and preparation of reports for management and boards, mentoring staff, to discussing cash flow with management and preparing budgets. She can efficiently identify which facets of an accounting department are running smoothly and which are not, and she works well with both accounting staff and management to design solutions and improvements. She communicates with each team member in a transparent way while maintaining the level of confidentiality consistent with their role. She has helped improve working relationships between accounting and development teams. With a particular interest in preventing fraud and error, she considers internal controls in every aspect of her work.
Nancy is committed to finding the most efficient path to building dependable accounting teams that produce timely and accurate information. She successfully redesigned an accounting system to save more than ten hours a month on data input and improve the efficiency of reporting so management and grant reports could be produced directly from the system, without manipulation in Excel. She assisted a client in bringing their accounting in-house, saving them thousands each year and increasing the timely availability of management reports. In every assignment, she has ensured that financial accounting standards are followed, and that each member of the team understands and follows through on what is required.
In the 2010s, having noticed that many errors were made by bookkeepers who weren’t fully conversant in the nonprofit world, she wrote and self-published Not-for-Profit Accounting: A Very Practical Manual for Bookkeepers, Accountants, and Finance Directors of Small Nonprofits as a guide and a reference for them; readers responded with positive and grateful comments. (The book is currently out of print.)
Nancy holds a BA in English, cum laude, from Lewis and Clark College and completed her accounting studies at Portland State University, passing the CPA exam in 1986 and served as a licensed CPA until 2022. When not working, she enjoys gardening, hiking, race-walking (she has completed the Portland to Coast race eleven times with a top-ten team), singing, and studying Reiki energy healing.
