Business managers cope with many pressures

Parish business managers, bookkeepers and accountants work behind the scenes to make sure the parish renders unto Caesar what is Caesar's, so the parishioners can continue to render unto God what is God's.

Parish business managers are responsible for the nitty-gritty financial aspects of running a parish. Like Nancy Uruskyj, the full-time business manager of St. Pius X Church in Loudonville, they often have a lot on their plate.

"You have to be very conscientious to be in this job," Ms. Uruskyj said. "You have to be a person who loves details. With a place as large as this, you have to really be the kind of person who wants to know 'just where is that dollar?'"

Count on her

Ms. Uruskyj, like many business managers, counts herself responsible for all of the money -- except school tuition, which is handled by a tuition management agency -- that arrives at and leaves the parish.

She handles banking and depositing, pays the bills, records payroll hours, and processes collection money. And, like all business managers, she reports regularly to the parish finance committee.

"You have to be sensitive to privacy issues as well" to be a good business manager, she explained. "Money is a very personal thing. You're privy to a lot of sensitive information, and you have to be the sort of person who can respect that."

Ups and downs

"What really defines this job for me," she noted, "is the fact that I come in here on any given day, and I have no idea what is going to happen. You can have your whole day planned out, and if the [computer] server goes down, all bets are off."

She considers her job, at times, to be a treasure hunt. She says it helps for a business manager to have an "obsessive-compulsive attention to detail" in that regard.

"Maybe Father comes in and says to me, 'Could you find out how many envelopes we bought in 1996?' You have to go back and reconstruct what happened" using records, she said.

Keeping books

Although Margaret McManus of St. Mary/St. Paul's parish in Hudson Falls is officially the parish's "business manager," she prefers to be called a "bookkeeper."

"'Business manager' makes it sound more glamorous," she joked.

Mrs. McManus works part-time for the parish. Monday mornings, she reconciles the weekend collections, handles the accounts payable, runs payroll, and orders liturgical materials "and anything else Father wants done."

She began to work at the parish in 1985, starting out by processing 30 checks a month for a few hours a week. By 1990, the parish had become computerized, and Mrs. McManus' duties had increased substantially.

Rewards and not

Like many business managers, Mrs. McManus is detail-oriented and likes to stay on schedule.

She enjoys the atmosphere of a church, and loves hearing the stories and having the company of parishioners who come for morning Mass or adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

She doesn't like malfunctioning equipment -- such as what happened on a recent afternoon, when the accounting program on her computer crashed and lettering ceased to print correctly on a number of checks.

"If I'm not on schedule for some reason, it drives me crazy," she said.

Duties

John Kirkland, business manager at St. Clare's Church in Colonie, came there after retirement from an auditing job at GE. He supervises the capital campaign, Building Fund and Bishop's Appeal fundraising efforts within the parish.

He also serves as the staff representative on the finance committee -- which he has been involved with in some way for 25 years -- and monitors parish savings while reconciling parish checking accounts.

In a way, he said, parish business managers are required to be Renaissance men, noting: "At General Electric, no one person would do everything I do. I do all the financial reports, pay all the bills, pay all the staff."

(2/4/04)