There is no advantage or disadvantage. Four years per turn simply makes the game go faster. Your characters age four years per turn instead of one. I play one year per turn because you can do more things with a single character before he dies. It takes longer for children to grow up though. In almost every case in this game, the commands you can issue are time and place dependent. In other words, you issue an audit command the same way you issue any other command, but the audit command button will only show up if you're in the right place or situation to use that command. Check your command buttons often, and you'll start to see what I mean. You choose between Protestant and Catholic at character creation, so it shouldn't be a mystery. The default is determined by your "class" I believe. The crosses are slightly different, so you can tell by looking at that too. Also I think there's a religion page in your ledger somewhere. Oh yeah, that. This is pretty unintuitive at first glance. Remember the person you bought the church bell blueprint from? The one in the guildhouse? That's the leader of your character's class guild. To turn in bells your character has to walk into the guildhouse and personally hand them over to the guild leader, one at a time.

It's a bit of a hassle, but the rewards are worth it.

EDIT: That doesn't mean you can only take one with you at a time. Take as many as you can carry if you have several to turn in. You just have to turn them in one at a time once you're in the guild house. Yes, when any current office holder is challenged it triggers an election. In the beginning that might take a few turns, but once the game gets rolling in a big city, it'll happen frequently.

Ixamyakxim and myself recently made a pretty long thread trying to figure out how to play this game. It would probably help you to read through it:

http://www.gog.com/forum/the_guild_series/renaissance_questions