Business Assessment

|| Summary || Marketing || Production and Distribution || Business Processes || Banking Processes ||

|| Auditing and Accounting || Taxation || Law || Customer Relations || Security and Authenticity ||

Summary

Here is a brief summary of what the church does now and how it earns it's income:

Grantham Heights Uniting Church is a non-profit organisation which acquires most of its income through donations. Donations are collected through a collection plate, which is passed around during the sermon. On Sunday afternoons, the church hires out its hall to a Tongan congregation. The Uniting Church Property Trust owns a number of properties around Sydney which it rents out to the general public. The church does not sell any products such as bibles or crosses.

One member of the parish records each weeks sermon on tape and provides a copy of the tape to whoever wants one. However, he only asks for money to cover the cost of the tapes needed as it is a non-profit venture.

The income from donations goes into the General Account, which pays for the minister and secretary's wage. The income from the hall hires and from the rented property go into the Property Account, which pays for the upkeep of the church and any maintenance it may need from time to time. The only other income acquired by the church is by special services such as weddings, which require an obliged "donation."

That is basically all there is to the business procedures of Grantham Heights Uniting Church. Below is an assessment of how ecommerce could potentially change the business, for better or for worse.

Marketing

At the moment, there is no real way for the church to market themselves to potential new patrons. The only way new people can find out about the church is via word of mouth. However, this will change with the introduction of a church website. Home users who discover the website (either by linking to it from a search engine or from another site), will read about the church and may be inclined to join the congregation. In this way, the church website can be used not only for ecommerce purposes, but also as a promotional tool to promote their own business.

Production and Distribution

The only possible business process that could concern production and distribution is if the church were to sell the sermon tapes online and to have them home delivered. If this was done, a way of delivering tapes is needed. Seeing as the members of the church would all live around the same area, it might be a lot less hassle if they were delivered by a church staff member, rather than hiring out a third party delivery company. This way, the only added cost would be the cost of petrol, and the time it would take to drive from house to house.

Business Processes

Our client, the minister, has expressed his desire to have an online copy of the weekly newsletter available online, along with a text summary of that weeks sermon. This is to be set out with the most recent copy of the sermon or newsletter displayed automatically after clicking the link, but also with a link to an archive of older copies. Getting the newsletters and sermons online will require a change in business processes. First, the newsletters:

Every week, content is gathered for the newsletter that is handed out every Sunday at the service. Once the content has been collected, the secretary enters the content into a computer document, which is then printed out and photocopied. If an online version of this newsletter were to be made available, there would have to be a few extra steps in this process. First, while creating the computer document, the secretary saves two copies without any formatting as a plain text documents. One of these is named news.txt, and the other is the date in a yyyymmdd format (such as: 2002-10-15.txt). Then, these two files are uploaded via FTP to a designated folder in the website, where they can be accessed by the PERL script which displays the most recent document, or displays an archive of older documents.

The reason two copies need to be uploaded is so that the script can access them both for the respective pages they will appear on. The Current Newsletter page uses a script, which finds the text document called 'news.txt' and displays that on the page. The Archived Newsletters page uses a script which, finds all the other documents and lists them on the page in order from oldest to newest. The process of uploading the summaries of the sermons is very similar. Two plain text files will be uploaded to designated folders, one called news.txt and the other with the date.

For this process to work correctly, it will require the secretary to undergo some very brief training on the basic functions of an FTP program. This training would be done by Joshua.

The only other ecommerce venture which would impact a business process is if the church website had online donation capabilities (which is explained below).

Banking and Financial Transactions

With the introduction of an ecommerce website, one possible venture is the creation of an online donation system. Users can use this to transfer money from their account into a Church account created specifically for online donations. How this will affect the church is that at the end of each week when the collection plate donations are counted and deposited into the General Account, at the same time money can be taken out of the online donations account and also put into the General Account. In this way, the church can still keep track of how much donations they get from the collection plates, and how much from their website.

Auditing and Accounting

The introduction of an online ecommerce system may have an impact on auditing and accounting. As far as accounting goes, it will be one extra bank account for the treasurer to keep track of.

Taxation

The implementation of an ecommerce website would have no effect on the current state of taxation on the church. They would still be able to claim the GST back as they can now.

Law

The only part of ecommerce that may concern law is in regards to an online donation system. If this were implemented, it would require the church to collect and store information about the web users. This information is subject to privacy laws and should not be disclosed to any other businesses or third parties without consent of the web user (unless permitted by law).

Customer Relations

The only customer relations that might be required for a church ecommerce website would be technical support regarding the functionality of the website. The website will contain links to the email address of the minister, and Joshua, depending on the inquiry of the user.

Security and Authenticity

If the website were to implement an online donation system, it would be important to consider a reliable form of money transfer. People need to feel reassured when it comes to their money, so having a strong, secure website with competent authentication is important.

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