Who Can See Giving and Donations

Giving is the most sensitive information your church holds. TimelyChurch lets you decide exactly who can see it -- without taking away anyone's ability to do the rest of their job.

The short version

• Finance roles (Finance Admin, Finance Manager, Accountant) always see giving. That is what they are for.
• Administrators see giving by default, because an administrator has every permission.
• Everyone else -- team leaders, ministry leads, Sunday school directors, volunteers, members -- never sees another person's giving.
• Every member can always see their own giving in the member portal, including their year-end statement. That is separate from staff access and is never restricted.

Restricting donation access to finance roles

Many churches want administrators who can run people, events, groups and settings -- but who should not see what members give. There is a setting for exactly that.

Go to Settings → Church Settings → Donation Privacy and turn on "Restrict donation access to finance roles".

When it is on:

• Administrators keep every other permission -- people, events, groups, check-in, settings, everything.
• Administrators stop seeing donation records, giving reports, giving statements, pledges, funds, budgets and accounting.
• The Giving tab disappears from member profiles for them.
• Finance roles are completely unaffected.

The setting is off by default, so nothing changes for your church until you turn it on.

Who can turn it off again

Any administrator can turn the restriction on. Turning it off requires an account that already has donation access -- a finance role, or an administrator at a church where the restriction is not enabled.

This is deliberate. If any administrator could switch the restriction off, view the giving, and switch it back on, the restriction would not mean anything. Ask a finance admin or the church owner if you need it removed.

Someone who needs both admin and finance

A person can hold only one role. If your bookkeeper also runs the office, you have two options:

• Leave them as an Administrator and do not turn on the restriction (they keep everything).
• Ask us to create a custom role -- for example Administrator + Finance -- that lists the administrative permissions and the finance permissions explicitly. The restriction never applies to a role like this, because its finance access is a deliberate grant rather than a side effect of being an administrator.

A note on what changed

Before August 2026, the Giving tab on a member profile appeared for anyone who could open that profile, as long as the church's plan included giving. That has been corrected: seeing another person's giving now always requires a giving permission, on every screen.