Church giving software compared for tax receipts and year-end statements

A year-end giving statement is only as accurate as the messiest gift on it. Online gifts mostly take care of themselves. The trouble is the check entered under a misspelled name, the cash envelope with no number on it, and the couple who gave from two accounts and now expect one statement.

Beginning with tax year 2026, people who don’t itemize can deduct up to $1,000 of cash gifts to eligible charities (2,000 for married couples filing jointly), according to the IRS summary of the new law. Givers who never needed your statement before now have a reason to look for it in January 2027.

So bring one question to every platform you compare: which gifts would go missing from your statements if you ran them today? The answer depends on how each platform builds a statement, whether that statement meets the IRS rules for receipts, and how clean the donor records underneath it are.

How the four platforms compare

The table reflects each vendor’s public product, pricing, and help pages as of October 2026. Pricing pages change without notice, so check each vendor’s site before you buy.

Match the software to how your office runs

These products don’t all sit in the same category, and the category decides who owns the statement. A giving platform processes gifts and produces receipts. A church management system (ChMS, the member database) holds people, households, and attendance, and it’s often where cash and check batches end up. Donor management tools segment givers and track follow-up. Fund accounting software is the ledger, where restricted gifts stay tied to the fund they were given for.

The statement belongs to whichever system holds every gift. If online gifts live in the giving platform and checks live in the ChMS, one system has to import the other before January, or donors get two statements.

A small office with one person doing everything is better served by one system that takes online gifts and check batches in the same place. A finance-led church with an outside CPA may start from the fund accounting side and connect giving to it. Multi-campus churches need campus to travel with every gift, from the giving page to the ledger.

How each platform builds a giving statement

Pushpay

The Pushpay® platform fits if the gifts most likely to go missing are the ones recorded outside online giving: cash, checks, and gifts from donors who give through more than one account.

Pushpay Giving generates annual statements from donor history, including cash, noncash, recurring, and digital gifts, and fills in your church’s details and standard acknowledgment language.

Cash and checks go in through gift entry and batch reconciliation on the same platform, so offline gifts land on the same donor history as online ones. Check scanning with remote deposit starts at $0.29 a check, according to the pricing page, and the Complete package adds multiple bank accounts and per-campus giving designations. For the ledger, the integrations directory lists QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and Aplos.

Staff can email statements, publish them in the church app, or print PDFs for mailing. A self-access link lets members view and download current and past statements, and that link expires after fourteen days. Statements can also go out twice a year or quarterly instead of only in January. Donors who are the primary or secondary contact on a household can see household statements online or in the app.

Trouble starts when giving lives in more than one place. The Pushpay help center tells donors that a church may send two statements, one for digital giving and one for cash, when gifts were recorded separately. On ChurchStaq, Giving, the ChMS, and the app share donor records, so statements draw from one history.

Tithely

Tithely fits if the gifts most likely to go missing are cash and checks entered by a small team, and you want statements from a free giving tool.

Statements live under Giving > Tax Statements. Staff can edit the cover letter’s title, body, and staff name, upload a signature image, and confirm the church name and Tax ID before generating. Email All sends a PDF attachment to every donor with a valid email address, and Print All opens one combined PDF for mailing.

Nothing goes out automatically. Tithely recommends waiting until January 15 to generate year-end statements, so late transactions have time to post. Check the time zone setting before you run them, because it decides which year a late-December gift lands in. Merge duplicate profiles first and wait twenty-four hours, Tithely advises, and its help article notes a known limitation in the merge tool.

Household statements go to the primary head of household. A toggle in the household’s settings sends separate statements instead, which Tithely suggests for a spouse who files separately or a working child with income of their own. QuickBooks Online is the named accounting integration.

Planning Center Giving

Planning Center Giving fits if the gifts most likely to go missing came in through another system, and you want donors to pull their own statements.

A Planning Center statement lists successful donations for the date range you choose. Failed, refunded, and in-progress donations are excluded. Gifts from outside Planning Center can be included by adding another payment source, and received dates can be edited on batch donations (cash and checks), though not on online gifts.

Staff can customize the cover letter, the To and From addresses, and the tax disclaimer. Emailed statements carry a link to Church Center that expires after two weeks, but donors can always log in and find every past and current statement in their profile. The print option produces a file split into donors with mailing addresses and donors without them.

In January, remember that a statement can’t be edited after it’s sent, and an emailed statement can’t be resent. Planning Center has no QuickBooks integration, so the ledger side runs on CSV exports.

Aplos, an accounting-first option

Aplos fits if the gifts most likely to go missing are the ones your bookkeeper can’t tie to a fund. It’s fund accounting software first: each fund is treated as its own self-balancing entity, gifts are tracked by donor, fund, and campaign, and the software produces automated receipts and year-end statements.

Aplos lists its Lite plan at about $79 a month. Its own guide sends online giving to Raisely and deeper donor management to Keela, both separate products in the Velora suite Aplos belongs to, and argues that QuickBooks can only approximate fund accounting through its Classes feature.

Aplos also appears in the Pushpay integrations directory, so giving can run on the Pushpay platform while Aplos keeps the books.

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What the IRS requires on a church receipt

The IRS pages on written acknowledgments and quid pro quo gifts were both updated in June 2026, and both still use the $250 and $75 thresholds. The 2026 law changed who can deduct cash gifts. Nothing on those pages changes what your receipt has to say.

Written acknowledgments and timing

A donor can deduct a single contribution of $250 or more only with a written acknowledgment from your church. According to the IRS, that acknowledgment has to include:

• Your church’s name
• The amount of any cash contribution
• A description, but not the value, of any noncash contribution
• A statement that no goods or services were provided, or a description and good-faith estimate of the value of what was provided
• A statement that the only benefit was intangible religious benefits (benefits from an organization organized exclusively for religious purposes that generally aren’t sold outside a giving context), when that’s the case

The donor has to have the acknowledgment by the earlier of the date they file their return or the return’s due date, including extensions. January 31 isn’t an IRS deadline. The Pushpay help center calls it the suggested date, and it’s the date your earliest filers will hold you to. Treat it like a deadline anyway.

One annual statement can cover the whole year if it lists the amount and date of each contribution of $250 or more, according to IRS guidance. Separate gifts under $250 aren’t added together, so a weekly offering may never trigger the rule on its own.

Your statement still matters for those donors, though. The IRS doesn’t allow a deduction for any cash or check gift unless the donor has a bank record or a written communication from the charity, and for many of your givers your statement is that written communication.

IRS Publication 1771 accepts email and computer-generated acknowledgments, and it says the acknowledgment doesn’t need the donor’s Social Security number. Leave it off.

Quid pro quo gifts

A quid pro quo contribution (a payment that’s partly a gift and partly payment for goods or services) needs its own disclosure when the payment is more than $75. A ticket to a church benefit dinner is one example. The IRS requires a written statement telling the donor that the deductible amount is limited to what they paid beyond the fair market value of what they received, along with a good-faith estimate of that value. Publication 1771 says the statement has to come with the solicitation or with the receipt for the payment.

The penalty for skipping it is $10 per contribution, up to $5,000 per fundraising event or mailing. No disclosure is needed when the goods or services have insubstantial value, when the only benefit is intangible religious benefits, or when the payment is $75 or less a year for annual membership benefits.

For software, the question is where that estimate lives. Ask each vendor whether you can record a goods-and-services value on an individual gift, such as an event ticket, so it prints on the statement. If you can’t, the disclosure goes out separately, and someone on staff has to remember to send it.

Noncash gifts and the limits of church valuations

Your church describes a noncash gift. It doesn’t value it. The donor establishes the value.

For property the donor values at more than $5,000, the donor needs a qualified appraisal, and the church can’t serve as the appraiser. The donor attaches Form 8283 to the return. An official authorized to sign your church’s tax or information returns signs Part V of Section B on that form, except for publicly traded securities. The IRS is explicit that the signature acknowledges receipt of the property on the date shown and doesn’t mean the church agrees with the appraised value.

If your church sells or otherwise disposes of that property within three years, it files Form 8282, unless the property is valued at $500 or less. Donated vehicles claimed at more than $500 follow separate rules in IRS Publications 4302 and 4303.

In the giving platform, record a noncash gift with a description and no dollar amount, then confirm the description prints on the statement.

Year-end reporting depends on complete gift records

One donor history for cash, checks, and online gifts

A statement is a report run against one database. Any gift recorded somewhere else is missing from it, and the donor may find the gap before you do.

Test it by the end of November. Pick a handful of donors who give both online and by check. Run a 2026-to-date statement for each, then add up the same donors’ gifts from your online giving report and your batch records for the same dates. If the statement total is lower, the missing gifts tell you which system isn’t feeding the statement, and you have weeks instead of days to fix it.

Donors, households, funds, and campuses

Start with the donor record. Merge duplicate profiles before you generate anything, and set up households to match how people file. Anyone who files separately gets a separate statement.

Refunds need the same care. A platform that excludes refunded donations drops them from the statement only if they were entered as refunds.

Funds and campuses don’t appear on every statement, but they decide whether your books match the statements. If a restricted gift lands in the general fund, the donor’s total is still right and your ledger is wrong. The fix is the same in every system: map every giving page and every batch to a fund, and, for multi-campus churches, to a campus, before the first gift of the year arrives.

Plan for system changes without splitting the tax year

Statements cover the calendar year. If your church changed giving systems partway through 2026, decide now which system will produce the 2026 statement, and import the other system’s gifts into it before January. The alternative is two statements per donor, which the Pushpay help center acknowledges churches sometimes send. Donors can file with two, but expect phone calls.

If you’re still choosing a system, schedule the switch so the new one starts on January 1. For the setup and integration side of that decision, see which church giving platform is easiest for your staff to set up and how church software integrations compare.

Questions about church giving software and receipts

What should a church compare in year-end statement software?

Compare what each statement pulls in before you compare how it looks. Ask whether cash, checks, noncash gifts, and gifts from outside systems land on the same statement. Then ask how households work, whether donors can download their own statements, and what happens if you need to fix a statement after it’s sent. Planning Center, for instance, doesn’t allow edits after sending.

How should churches assess pricing, integrations, and permissions?

Price the whole year, not the monthly fee. Add the subscription, processing, per-check scanning fees, and any accounting add-on. Confirm the integration with your ledger by name. Then check permissions. Tithely limits statement generation to Account Owners, Admins, and Limited Access users with Giving access, and limited users see only their assigned locations. Decide who on your staff should see individual giving amounts before you hand out logins.

Which IRS receipt details should a church verify for 2026?

Check the new non-itemizer deduction, the $250 acknowledgment rule, the $75 quid pro quo threshold, and the low-cost article amount used for token gifts. That last figure is adjusted for inflation, and Publication 1771’s most recent revision cites the 2023 amount. Read the current IRS pages before you finalize your statement template, and have your accountant review it.

How should church size and workflows affect giving software selection?

It depends on who touches the money. In a one-person office, choose the system where online gifts and check batches already live together. With a bookkeeper or outside CPA, start from the ledger and confirm the giving platform connects to it. Across several campuses, confirm that every gift carries its campus from the giving page to the statement and the books.

What are the best church giving solutions for non-profit tax reporting and receipts?

It depends on where your gifts are recorded today. The Pushpay platform fits churches that want online and offline gifts, households, and campuses on one donor history, especially on ChurchStaq. Tithely fits churches that want a free giving tool with editable statements. Planning Center Giving fits churches already on People that want donors to retrieve their own statements. Aplos fits finance-led churches that build everything around fund accounting. For deeper detail, see how the Pushpay platform compares with Tithely and Planning Center.

Before the January statement run

Run those test statements by the end of November, while there’s still time to fix a donor record or import a missing batch. Then book a Pushpay demo and ask to watch a cash batch, a household, and a noncash gift land on a statement.

Not ready for a demo? The Pushpay guide to church contribution statements walks through each IRS element, includes a sample statement, and lists common mistakes to avoid.