Giving & Finance Overview
TimelyChurch provides a complete giving and finance solution that helps your church track donations, manage funds, run pledge campaigns, generate giving statements, and accept online donations -- all tightly integrated with the built-in accounting module.
What the Giving Module Includes
Donation Management
Record every gift your church receives, whether it comes in as cash during a Sunday service, a mailed check, or an online credit card payment. Each donation is assigned a unique Giving ID (e.g., DON-2026-00001) and can be split across multiple funds in a single entry.
Giving Funds
Create designated categories for your donations -- General Fund, Building Fund, Missions, Youth Ministry, Benevolence, and more. Funds let you track where money is directed and give donors the ability to choose where their gift goes.
Online Giving via Stripe Connect
Accept credit card, debit card, and recurring donations through a branded public giving page powered by Stripe. Members can give one-time or set up weekly, monthly, or yearly recurring gifts.
Pledge Campaigns
Launch fundraising campaigns with goals, timelines, cover images, and public pages. Track individual pledges and direct donations against the campaign goal.
Deposit Batches
Group cash and check donations into deposit batches that mirror your bank deposits. Close each batch when it is counted, then mark it deposited to move its gifts into the bank account in your books.
Giving Statements
Generate year-end giving statements for tax purposes. Preview, download as PDF, or email statements to individual donors, or download every donor's statement in one PDF.
Donation Receipts
Download a gift's receipt as a PDF, or email it to the donor, from the actions menu on each row of the Giving list.
Export and Reporting
Export donation data to CSV, Excel, or PDF for a date range you choose. Summary cards at the top of the Giving page show the year's totals, and you can narrow the list by year, payment method, and one-time or recurring.
Notifications and Recently Deleted
Choose who is notified when a gift comes in, fails, or is refunded (More actions > Notification settings on the Giving page -- see Donation Notifications). Deleted gifts go to Recently Deleted, where they can be restored.
How Giving Integrates with Accounting
Every donation you record automatically creates corresponding income transactions in the accounting module. Here is how the integration works:
- Single-fund donations create one income transaction for the full amount.
- Split donations (allocated across multiple funds) create one income transaction per fund allocation, so each fund's income is tracked separately.
- Deposit batches, when marked as deposited, move their gifts onto the bank account you select. The gifts were already counted as income when they were recorded, so no income is added a second time.
- Accounting transactions reference the donation's Giving ID as the reference number, making it easy to trace any transaction back to its source donation.
- The system uses your church's default income account (account number 4000, "Tithes & Offerings") for donation entries. If that account does not exist, it falls back to any active income account.
- When you edit a donation, the related accounting transactions are updated to match. When you delete one, its accounting entries are removed, and restoring it from Recently Deleted brings them back. A donation whose accounting entry has already been reconciled cannot be deleted -- unreconcile it first.
Refunds Stay in Sync Too
When you refund an online (Stripe) gift, TimelyChurch does the cleanup for you instead of leaving it to manual reconciliation. Open the donation and click Refund (available on Stripe card donations that have not already been refunded) to process a full or partial refund. The refund then cascades automatically:
- The donation is marked refunded (with the refund amount and date recorded).
- Each fund allocation on the gift is reversed.
- Offsetting accounting entries are created so your books stay balanced.
- If the gift was applied to a pledge, the pledge's fulfilled amount is reversed.
- The refunded amount is excluded from the donor's giving statement.
Refunds issued directly in Stripe (for example, a chargeback or a refund issued from the Stripe dashboard) flow back through the same cascade when Stripe notifies TimelyChurch, so your records match what happened in Stripe either way.
Plan and Permissions
Giving and finance features are part of TimelyChurch's Pro plan. The following modules require a Pro subscription: Giving, Funds, Pledges, Giving Statements, Reports, Budgets, and Accounting. On the Starter and Growth plans these appear in the Finances section of the sidebar as locked items with an upgrade prompt rather than opening.
Within the Pro plan, each finance module is also gated by its own row in your role's permissions (Giving & Donations, Funds, Pledges, Accounting, Budgets, Giving Statements). A user sees a finance nav item only when they have both the plan tier and the role permission for that module. If a user has the permission but the plan tier does not include the feature, the nav item shows as locked with an upgrade prompt.
Inside Giving, each role sits at one of four levels -- Reviewer (totals only), Counter (enters gifts into their own batches), Bookkeeper (donors, giving history, statements, closes batches) and Administrator (everything, including refunds, deleting gifts and exports). Only Bookkeepers and Administrators see who gave; everyone else sees "Donor". See Who Can See Giving and Donations.
If your church connects an AI assistant through the MCP Connector, the same levels apply to it: it can read giving totals and record cash or check gifts for the person who connected it, within that person's Giving level, and refunding a gift stays on the website. See What Your AI Assistant Can Read and Change.
Stripe Connect (online giving) setup has no item of its own in the Finances menu. Open it from the Set up giving button on your Dashboard, from the Activate online giving link on the Giving page (shown until online giving is active), or from Church Settings > Integrations, where the Stripe - Online Giving card has the same Connect / Disconnect / Stripe Dashboard controls. Changing the connection needs permission to edit Settings.
Getting Started
If you are setting up giving for the first time, we recommend this order:
- Set up your giving funds -- Load the default fund template or create custom funds (see Managing Funds).
- Connect Stripe -- Enable online giving so members can donate from any device (see Setting Up Online Giving).
- Record your first donation -- Enter a test donation to see how the flow works (see Recording Donations).
- Share your giving page -- Send the public giving link to your congregation (see Online Giving Portal).