When Should the Church Open Bank Accounts?

On this episode of Church Planters Ask Podcast, host Danny Parmelee answers the question, “When should the church open bank accounts?”

Here’s an easy answer to this question: as soon as you can! However, there are some important things to remember as you create your church plant’s bank account.

Whatever you do, DO NOT set up the church bank account at the same bank where you do your personal banking.  

There are 2 reasons for this:

First it can (and likely will) become a nightmare because your personal and church accounts will get messed up.  This happened to me twice.  Once through Wells Fargo, and secondly through Chase. 

You will need to give your personal social security number to open an account, and so somewhere down the line there will be a crossing of paths that will be frustrating.

I will spare you all the details, but boy do I have some interesting stories of Wells Fargo linking my accounts and sending my mortgage history to the church office and Chase refusing to unlink my accounts.

So trust me on this, DON’T do it.

You want to avoid any appearance of church and personal money mixing. We’ll talk about handling money in a future episode, but you shouldn’t be making any deposits anyway.

I can’t express this enough: you want to be far away, physically AND digitally, to any of the church money.  

Listen to the entire episode to learn more about the things you should be doing when creating a church bank account!

Guest Josh Lassitor has worked as a Community Banker for Simmons Bank, as well as Wilson Bank & Trust. He is also involved in a Church Plant in the Nashville area.