How church giving platforms connect to QuickBooks Online

Your bank feed in QuickBooks Online shows one deposit from your giving processor. 

Behind that single line can sit dozens of gifts across several funds, some by card and some by bank transfer, with processing fees already taken out. Someone has to turn that line back into gifts by fund, or the books don’t tie.

How much of that work lands on your bookkeeper depends on how your giving platform connects to QuickBooks. Pushpay and Tithe.ly sync directly. Planning Center hands you an export. Aplos takes a different route and replaces QuickBooks with a fund ledger that accepts gifts itself.

How gifts reach QuickBooks, platform by platform

Direct sync or CSV export?

A direct integration posts giving into QuickBooks Online on its own once you’ve mapped your funds. A CSV export leaves posting to a person: someone downloads the file for each payout, then imports it or enters a journal entry.

The two workflows fail in different ways. With a direct sync, an error in the fund mapping repeats on every sync until someone catches it, so the first month-end closes after setup deserve a careful review. With a CSV export, the errors are transcription and timing. A payout gets skipped, a fund gets keyed to the wrong account, or the entry waits until whoever does it has time.

A CSV can go into nearly any ledger, including ones a direct integration doesn’t support (Tithe.ly’s integration, for example, works with QuickBooks Online only, not Desktop). Every entry also passes a human review point. The price is bookkeeper time at every payout, for as long as you use it. A direct integration moves that time to setup and a periodic review.

Planning Center and the CSV export

Planning Center’s giving page says it has no QuickBooks integration and offers CSV exports that most accounting software can import.

Its guidance to bookkeepers is to keep individual donations in Giving and post summary journal entries to the general ledger. The payout report breaks each deposit into Giving totals by fund, and you can export an itemized list of the transactions in any payout. Churches that want each gift in QuickBooks are told to export the CSV for each payout, so gifts are dated by deposit date rather than by the day they were given.

Every payout means someone reads a report and enters a journal entry, or imports a file, by hand. Third-party connectors can automate that step, though each one adds another tool and another login to maintain.

Planning Center pays out to a single bank account, and its help center says Giving may not fit a church whose bookkeeping requires a separate bank account for each fund. Payments run through Planning Center Payments, with Stripe processing behind the scenes. Setup creates a new Stripe account for your church. You can’t connect a Stripe account you already have.

Tithe.ly’s two sync modes

Tithe.ly’s integration connects directly to QuickBooks Online and doesn’t add a fee to your Tithe.ly bill. It works with QuickBooks Online only, not Desktop.

Setup starts with the sending mode:

• Deposit mode: Each day’s deposits roll into one QuickBooks deposit, which keeps the register tidy.
• Transaction mode: Every gift becomes its own sales receipt in QuickBooks.

Then you map funds. Each Tithe.ly fund points at a QuickBooks income account, and processing fees go to an expense account you choose, so they’re recorded instead of netted out of income. Anything from an unmapped fund falls to a default deposit line item. The first sync looks back 30 days.

Tithe.ly’s documentation says counted cash and check batches sync only in transaction mode. A church that chooses deposit mode for a tidy register, and still collects a meaningful plate offering, keeps entering those batches by hand.

Choosing transaction mode to close that gap has its own cost. Every gift lands in QuickBooks as a separate record, and Tithe.ly’s help center says the sync creates a QuickBooks customer record for any giver it can’t match to an existing one. Donor names and gift histories then live in your accounting file as well as your giving platform, visible to anyone with access to the books.

How Pushpay handles the QuickBooks integration

Pushpay’s QuickBooks Online integration starts from a decision about which records belong where.

• What goes to QuickBooks: Fund batch totals, sent automatically.
• What stays in Pushpay: Giver data, where the donor relationship lives.

That’s the same fund-level summary Planning Center tells bookkeepers to journal by hand, posted without anyone typing it. Your ledger gets money by fund to reconcile against the bank deposit, and your congregation’s giving histories stay out of the accounting file.

Cash and checks go through Pushpay’s Gift Entry, which takes cash, card, ACH and check gifts individually or in batches. Batch Entry adds tools for the counting team:

• Faster entry: Batches start with preset defaults. Entry begins by searching for the giver rather than typing the amount, so existing givers fill in automatically and duplicate records are reduced.
• Built-in checks: Subtotals calculate automatically.
• Tracking for audits: Each batch is tracked from the service to the bank.

Pushpay’s announcement of Batch Entry says those batches send to QuickBooks Online automatically, so the plate offering follows the same path as online gifts.

Pushpay is also an Intuit Authorized Reseller, with access to discounted pricing on certain Intuit products. If you need to move up to QuickBooks Online Plus for class tracking, ask during the demo whether that pricing applies to your tier.

Your choice of ledger also stays open. Pushpay’s integrations directory lists Aplos and Sage Intacct as general ledger connections alongside QuickBooks Online, and all three cover both the ChurchStaq® and ParishStaq® platforms. A church that outgrows class-based fund tracking can change ledgers without rebuilding its donor records or asking givers to set up their gifts again.

Replacing QuickBooks with Aplos

Some churches remove the connection by moving their books out of QuickBooks. Aplos is a fund accounting system with giving built in, and even its $79 Lite tier produces a balance sheet and income statement by fund, the report QuickBooks approximates with classes.

Price the seats before you compare. Lite and Core include two users, and each user beyond that adds a monthly fee. If you already run giving on another platform, Aplos can serve as the ledger behind it instead.

Fund accounting and donor restrictions

When a member gives to missions, that gift carries a donor restriction. Under FASB ASU 2016-14, it belongs in net assets with donor restrictions until the church spends it on missions. No integration makes that call for you. Your fund mapping does.

That makes the mapping step during setup the place where donor restrictions are either preserved or lost:

• Map every restricted fund on purpose: Point each one at its own income account, or its own class if you track funds with classes. On Tithe.ly, any unmapped fund falls to a default deposit line item, which mixes restricted gifts into general income.
• Keep board designations separate: When your board or finance committee sets aside unrestricted money for a new roof, that’s a board designation, not a donor restriction. It stays in net assets without donor restrictions, so it shouldn’t share a mapping with donor-restricted funds.
• Record the release: When restricted money is spent for its purpose, the restriction is released. In QuickBooks Online, that release is a journal entry you post yourself.

Fund accounting systems like Aplos track balances by fund natively. That’s the reason some churches choose them over QuickBooks. Our church accounting software comparison walks through that decision in detail.

Processing costs and platform pricing

Compare giving platforms on a full year of cost. For each platform, add up:

• Card processing: Card giving multiplied by the card percentage, plus the per-gift fee multiplied by the number of card gifts.
• Bank transfer (ACH) processing: The same calculation using the ACH rate.
• Subscriptions: Twelve months of the giving platform, plus your QuickBooks tier. Class tracking requires QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced.
• Bookkeeper time: Monthly hours spent entering, importing or fixing what the integration doesn’t handle, multiplied by what that time costs you, paid or volunteer.

On a single $100 gift, published processing costs look like this:

Moving givers from cards to bank transfers lowers processing costs on every platform in the table. A platform that syncs directly to QuickBooks also shrinks the bookkeeper-time line to setup and periodic review for everything the sync carries, while an export-based workflow keeps that cost every month.

For a fee-by-fee breakdown by platform, see our church plant giving software comparison.

Test it before you trust it

Before you retire the manual process, run the integration through two month-end closes and check each of these:

• Tie one deposit. Take one bank deposit. In the giving platform, pull the gross gifts by fund and the fees for that same payout. Gross minus fees should equal the deposit, unless refunds or disputes came out of that payout.
• Check the fees. Confirm processing fees landed in an expense account. If they were netted against income, both your giving income and your expenses are understated for every month it happened.
• Post a cash and check batch. Watch where it arrives in QuickBooks. If it doesn’t arrive, you’ve found your manual step.
• Check fund coding. If you track funds with classes, open the synced transactions and confirm each one carries a class. An untagged deposit drops out of your fund totals.
• Check historical coverage. Find out how far back the first sync reached. Anything older is still yours to enter or journal.

Frequently asked questions

How do direct QuickBooks integrations compare with CSV export workflows? 

A direct integration posts giving into QuickBooks Online automatically once your funds are mapped, so most of the work moves to setup and a review of the first two month-end closes. A CSV export needs a person to download, import or journal every payout. CSV works with nearly any ledger and keeps a human review step. A direct sync saves that time every month after the mapping is confirmed.

How should churches compare subscription and processing costs? 

Add up a full year for each platform: card and bank transfer processing at your real mix of gifts, twelve months of subscriptions including your QuickBooks tier, and the bookkeeper hours the integration doesn’t cover. Comparing headline card rates alone leaves out both the per-gift fees and the labor.

When does a church need built-in fund accounting? 

When keeping every transaction tagged to the right class takes more discipline than your bookkeeper can sustain, or when your board or auditor asks for balance sheets and net asset balances by fund, which QuickBooks doesn’t produce well from classes. Our church accounting software comparison covers that decision.

Should a church integrate giving with accounting or use an all-in-one system? 

An integration keeps the giving decision and the accounting decision separate, so you can change either one later without rebuilding the other. An all-in-one system removes the connection but ties both decisions to one vendor.

Which option is easiest to set up? 

Direct integrations like Pushpay’s and Tithe.ly’s take a one-time setup, and after that the gifts they sync post without a person moving them. On Tithe.ly, that excludes cash and check batches unless you use transaction mode. Planning Center needs a person at every payout, or a third-party tool. Aplos removes the connection, but it means moving your books.

How do historical imports work? 

It varies by platform. Tithe.ly’s first sync looks back 30 days. For any platform, ask what the first sync covers and plan a journal entry for anything older.

Does this work for a small church? 

Yes. A handful of funds and one bookkeeper is a manageable setup for QuickBooks Online plus a direct integration. Connect it from an administrator account the church controls rather than a volunteer’s personal login. QuickBooks assigns each connected app an owner, and Intuit’s help center walks through transferring that ownership before you remove a user, so plan that handoff whenever your bookkeeper changes.

Connect and test the integration by October. The October and November closes give you your two test runs. December’s year-end giving then posts through a process you’ve already checked, and your year-end close, along with anything you hand an auditor, runs on the synced books.