Why complete the Return of Parish Finance?
Alongside church attendance, the annual Return of Parish Finance (RPF) is another window into our church’s health and sustainability. This finance return summarises your church accounts into a standard format.
This Return of Parish Finance (RPF) data is widely used in the diocese to support parishes looking at their finances. We also generate bespoke finance dashboards for every church – containing additional information that compliments the dashboards from the national church. The finance data is also used to create deanery and diocesan financial summaries. The data is sent to London to prepare national church statistics.
When do we complete our finance return?
The Return of Parish Finance form is a summary of the church’s annual accounts. As soon as your annual accounts are ready the RPF can be created and submitted. Please make your finance return as soon as it’s ready; the earlier, the better.
The national church deadline for finance returns is the end of June, after the APCM and around the time of the Archdeacon Visitation services. Please. Don’t. Wait! You don’t need to send your form in at the Visitations.
How do we complete our finance return?
Online is best using the national church Parish Returns website. It’s flexible, accessible and simple to use. Click to the national church Parish Returns website, login with your personal username and password and you are good to go. In Larger Single Parishes check in with your Support Services team for the local process.
For guidance on setting up a free account and using the Parish Returns website click to Parish Returns: online.
Once London open Parish Returns for finance submission it stays open and available until the deadline passes. It’s flexible. You can complete the form over time, edit and amend as much as needed. Once you click Submit you won’t be able to enter or amend data.
Once you have submitted your form you can still ask the support teams at St James’ House to make changes right up to the submission deadline. In fact, there is a short window for the diocese to make changes after the deadline. After that, you can still submit your finance forms and amend data by asking St James’ House staff to request the changes by London on your behalf.
Handy to Know
If you can’t use the online Parish Returns website, PDF and MS Excel forms are available from early December each year and can be found at the bottom of this web page.
- For handy guidance on where information in your accounts should be entered on the Return of Parish Finance check out Accompanying Notes download at the bottom of this web page.
- You may also like to download the Excel version of finance return to work on before entering your data into Parish Returns.
- If your church uses MyFundAccounting.Online you can submit almost all of your finance return directly from this powerful software. It just needs a couple of tweaks to generate the data in the Liverpool format. For guidance please visit our Parish Returns: online guidance page
- Please DO NOT use downloads from Parish Returns. They are not the correct ones for Liverpool.
- Once the Parish Returns website closes, parishes cannot submit finance returns online. Please use the download forms below and return to St James’ House to record for the diocese and send to the national church.
Downloads
Please email completed Excel downloads to: visitation@liverpool.anglican.org.
Paper returns from the printable PDF forms can be posted back to::
Visitation: Central Services
St James’ House
20 St James’ Road
Liverpool
L1 7BY
Help and Advice
For further advice and support in completing and submitting your Finance Return, contact the Resources Team resources.team@liverpool.anglican.org , 0151 705 2180