Church treasurer job description
A ready-to-adapt job description for the church treasurer — the volunteer officer who safeguards your church's money. Download it, swap in your church's details, and you have a clear role to recruit and onboard for.
Plain text — opens anywhere, paste it into your bylaws or a posting.
Key responsibilities
- Oversee receipts and deposits, with two-person offering counts
- Pay approved bills and reimbursements against proper documentation
- Reconcile every bank and credit account monthly
- Keep the books using fund accounting (restricted vs. general)
- Present a monthly treasurer's report to the board
- Help prepare the annual budget
- Issue year-end giving statements to donors
- Coordinate the annual audit or financial review
- Ensure tax filings are handled — payroll, 1099s, and other returns
- Safeguard financial records and uphold segregation of duties
The download also covers purpose, qualifications, term, and time commitment, all with bracketed placeholders to fill in.
How to use it
- 1. Download the template and fill in every [BRACKETED] placeholder — church name, reporting line, term, and time commitment.
- 2. Trim or add responsibilities to match your size — a small church may combine roles, a larger one may split them.
- 3. Check it against your bylaws so the term and reporting line agree with how your church is governed.
- 4. Use it to recruit, to set expectations at election, and as a checklist when you hand the role off.
- 5. Review it every year or two as your church's finances grow.
A couple of things to get right
Build in segregation of duties. No one person should handle a transaction from start to finish — the person who counts the offering shouldn't be the only one who deposits it, and whoever approves a bill shouldn't be the only one who pays it. That's why the qualifications note that the treasurer shouldn't be a close relative of the bookkeeper or a check signer. For more on the controls a church needs, see the guide to church bookkeeping.
The treasurer is not the same as a bookkeeper or accountant. The treasurer is an elected officer who owns oversight and reporting to the board (the full church treasurer role guide walks through it); day-to-day data entry and reconciliations can be done by a paid or volunteer bookkeeper, with a church accountant brought in for the audit or complex filings. Spelling out who does what keeps the treasurer accountable without overloading one volunteer.
This template is a starting point, not legal advice. Want the books, reports, and giving statements behind this role to run themselves? Start free in Vestrybooks.