And those situations will be true whether one uses story to advance the wealth of the covenant or whether one uses accounting rules to do it.
One can do the micromanaging of covenant resources, any player can do it in any of my sagas, but if you fall behind, it's incumbent upon me to explain that with a story. Especially if the desire of the troupe and the player who fell behind, is to set things back to square. I'm not going to micromanage it, I'm going to put up a story where characters might win back what they "lost" or lose even more. That story will establish a new baseline from which I do not need to concern myself with managing covenant resources; players can give up time to improve covenant resources and/or they can volunteer for stories to acquire said resources. In almost all cases, unless one is particularly diligent about tracking silver income, story based approach will win out over micromanagement...