Salary Reports are designed to empower church leaders with the robust data needed to make fair and informed compensation decisions. This guide outlines the simple process of generating your report and understanding the three essential steps it helps you complete: setting the range, tuning the range, and placing the employee within that range.
Running a Salary Report
Salary Reports are included in the Basic, Expanded, Pro, and Pro+ tiers of ChurchSalary, and can be run at any time. In order to begin generating reports, a few setup steps are required.
Note: If you do not have one of the subscription tiers listed above, you can view this article on how to run and pay for a single Salary Report.
Complete Your Church Profile
Your Church Profile holds basic information on your church- denomination, budget, location, etc. All of these factors influence the salary recommendations made by the Salary Report, so setting it up correctly is important.
After creating your account and signing in, you'll be immediately prompted to create your Church Profile.
Or, if you have already created your Church Profile and need to make any updates, you can do this from your Dashboard by clicking the edit icon.
If you need more specifics, you can find a full guide on setting up your Church profile here!
Complete Employee Profiles
Once your Church Profile is complete, it's time to start creating Employee Profiles. Each Employee Profile represents one real employee at your church. You will enter information like the job title, desired salary, background, experience, benefits, etc to create a comprehensive compensation profile for that employee. This information will be pulled on to run salary reports and different dashboard tools across ChurchSalary 3.0.
Once you have created your account and created your Church Profile, you'll automatically be prompted to create your first Employee Profile. There are 5 sections you'll need to fill in. Any category marked with a red * is required, and others are optional. But the more data you enter, the more insights you'll get from your account!
If you need specific guidance, check out our full article here!
You can add new Employee Profiles or edit existing ones any time in your Dashboard. Simply scroll down to the Employees section and either click the Edit Icon or + Add Employee.
Launch Your Report
Once your Church Profile and at least one Employee Profile are set up, you're ready to generate Salary Reports! Simply return to your Dashboard, scroll down, select an employee, and click on Salary Report. It's that easy!
Manually Editing Your Report Criteria
Your Church Profile and Employee Profiles make it easy to generate Salary Reports, but what if you want to manually adjust one of the criteria of a Report without changing it for the account as a whole? No problem!
On the Salary Report, just click either one of the Edit buttons to adjust your criteria. When you're finished, click Generate Report. This will create a report using your adjusted data, but will not save that data to your Employee Profile or Church Profile.
Pro Tip: Salary Reports generated on ChurchSalary 3.0 default to budget-only reports to increase accuracy. This means that you church's budget is not included in the criteria, which significantly increases the sample size. If you would like budget to be considered as a factor, you can make that adjustment to the criteria for your report. You can use the slider, or click Set current size to automatically select the size you have set up in your Church Profile.
Interpreting Your Report: The Basics
Now that you've generated your Salary Report, you'll want to know how to interpret the data! Make sure to visit the Understanding My Reports and Understanding the Data sections of our help center for full information. But below, we'll walk you through some of the basics to get you started.
Nationwide Salary Summary: This section is designed to establish the boundaries for compensation. It provides salary data for similar employees nationwide, featuring a distribution chart and percentile figures (10th, 25th, 50th/median, 75th, 90th).
Key Insight: For an average employee, compensation should typically fall within the middle 50% range (between the 25th and 75th percentiles). The median serves as the basic reference point or midpoint.
Localized Salary Recommendation: This powerful section is included in reports for full-time pastoral positions. It accounts for four variables—Region, Cost of Living Index (COLI), Population Density, and Median Household Income—to provide a localized salary average and range based on real salaries from real pastors serving in similar communities.
Salary Comparison: This section presents average salaries based on various compensation factors—such as education, experience, ordination, and geographical setting—for similar employees at similar churches across the country. These averages guide the church in deciding the monetary value to attach to these differentiating factors.
Employment Profile & Benefits: These sections provide demographic breakdowns of the average employee for that position and detail common benefits offered by similar churches.
Cost of Living Comparison: This section provides COLI figures for your county and metropolitan area, helping you evaluate how far a salary will stretch locally.
Comparable Jobs: This feature provides salary ranges for similar positions in the secular marketplace within your economic region, offering an additional benchmark for competitive compensation.