Giving overview
Giving is Planning Center's solution for donation management, allowing you to receive online donations, record offline gifts, run reports, and issue tax statements. Whether you're just setting up your church finances or you're a large church with well-established processes, this article will help you understand what Giving is, what it's designed to do (and not do), and decide if it's a good fit for your organization.
What is Giving designed to track?
It is important to remember that Giving was designed to track donations only. This includes tax-deductible monetary donations, in-kind donations of physical items or stock, and nondeductible donations received from a donor-advised fund or a qualified charitable distribution.
What can't Giving do?
Giving is not a general ledger; you'll need another software to track income and expenses, cut checks, and manage payroll. Transactions such as ticket sales, reimbursements, and event payments should not be processed in Giving.
Giving is designed to collect and manage donations for non-profit 501c3 organizations. As the IRS puts it, donors receive ‘no goods or services in return for these contributions except intangible, religious benefits.’ If this doesn't describe your organization, Giving is not appropriate for you.
There is not an integration with a bookkeeping software, such as Quickbooks. However, you can export donation information and payout (deposit) reports and import them into your general ledger software.
How donations are received and processed in Giving
Donations flow into Giving in two ways: online donations received on Church Center, and donations entered into batches. You can also create pledge campaigns to help you organize and track larger donation goals or special projects.
Online donations
All online donations initiated on Church Center are processed with Planning Center Payments, which is powered by Stripe. No financial data is stored on Planning Center servers. The data is handled by Stripe and stored on their PCI Level 1 compliant servers, which keeps all financial data safe for your organization and your donors.
Donations are given through your online donation form on Church Center, which you can configure to best fit your organization's needs. You can also choose to allow your donors to donate through text2give (US customers only) or express giving.
Batch donations
Any donation received outside of Church Center, such as cash or checks, donations from digital wallets, or nondeductible donations from donor-advised funds or qualified charitable distribution are entered into Giving through batches.
If you plan to use another donation software alongside Giving, check to see if there is an integration to connect both systems together.
Donation imports
If there are historical donation records you'd like to add to Giving when you switch to Planning Center, use the donation import tool to import a CSV file. Importing donations allows you to track all donations in one place and avoid issuing two tax statements.
Reports and statements in Giving
After donations have been added to Giving, you can create reports to review fund totals, giving trends, and more. Several report options are available in Giving, and you can read about each one in Giving reports.
In addition to reports, Giving also provides a tax statement generator that allows you to send donors an emailed statement or printed copies. Statements can be configured to fit your organizations needs, and for Canadian customers, tax statements (tax receipts) are CRA compliant. You can read more about statements in Create and share donor statements
Feature availability by country
Giving is available for churches in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While most features are available in all countries, some features are limited to only some. Review the table below to see which features are available to you.
US | Canada | Australia | New Zealand | |
Text2give | ✓ | |||
In-kind donations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Cover the fee | ✓ | |||
Bank transfer donations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
Credit/debit card donations | ✓ | ✓ - Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, and Visa Debit; Interac unsupported | ✓ | ✓ |
Donor statements (Tax receipts) | ✓ | ✓ - Official CRA format | ✓ | ✓ - Official IRD format |
Donor-advised fund donations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Qualified charitable distributions | ✓ |