Steward: Treasury Intelligence

As Treasurer of Jacksonville Southpoint SDA Church, I lead a treasury assistance team responsible for counting collections, managing deposits, and recording accounting entries. My personal responsibility extends beyond the team: I'm accountable to the Board for comprehensive financial reporting.

Board reporting was a tedious manual process: re-entering all bank transactions, all accounting system transactions, and reconciling from fulfillment. Every month, this consumed 2-3 hours of meticulous manual work. The process was not only time-consuming but error-prone and offered no historical perspective for financial planning.

The discovery process focused on understanding what the Board actually needed versus what they were getting. The existing reports were flat: numbers on a page with no trend analysis, no ministry-level breakdowns, and no ability to ask questions about the data. I identified that the real value wasn't just automating the existing report, but building an intelligence layer that could transform how the church leadership understands its finances.

I also recognized that an AI-powered chat function would allow Board members to ask natural language questions about financial data (comparisons between ministries, trend analysis over periods, and planning questions) without requiring them to become spreadsheet experts.

I chose to build a Streamlit application with AI integration rather than a more complex web app because the primary users are Board members who are not tech-savvy. Streamlit provides a clean, simple interface that feels approachable. The AI chat function uses Claude to enable financial planning questions in natural language.

The auto-categorization system was designed to improve over time: starting at 75-80% accuracy and improving to approximately 95% through a learning loop. The remaining 5% are manually adjusted during the upload workflow, a deliberate design choice that keeps a human in the loop for edge cases.

Tech Stack: Python, Streamlit, Claude AI, Make.com, Smartsheet

Key Features:

• Upload transactions; the app processes and matches all transactions automatically
• Scrubs out personal data
• Reports at ministry level and organization level
• Three years of history for trend analysis
• AI chat function for financial planning questions
• Standard evaluation questions for the most recent month
• Chat supports general questions about particular ministry, time period, or comparisons
• 75-80% auto-categorization initially, now improved to ~95%

• Monthly treasury work reduced from 2-3 hours to 15 minutes
• Auto-categorization improved from 75-80% to ~95% over time
• Board initially hesitant (members are not tech-savvy) but after using the tool, feedback was overwhelmingly positive: the system "really promotes good transparency from our Treasury operations"
• Change management success: hesitance to appreciation
• Three years of historical data now available for trend analysis and financial planning