Best church software for giving statements and tax receipts in 2026

A year-end giving statement draws on every gift a donor made during the calendar year, both the gifts given online and the checks and cash counted at services. When those gifts are recorded in different systems, someone has to combine them before statements go out, and any gift left out of that merge won’t appear on the statement.

So when you compare church software for donor reporting and tax receipts, start with where each type of gift gets recorded and how it reaches the donor’s record. 

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Quick verdict on the main options

Published prices come from each vendor’s pricing page as of September 2026 and exclude promotions.

Best for accounting depth

Aplos, because donations, giving statements and the general ledger live in one product.

Best for automation

Pushpay. Statements can be set to go out on an annual, quarterly or custom schedule, and donors can download their own giving records without asking the church office.

Best for a small budget

ChurchTrac starts at $29 a month and includes fund accounting in every plan. Breeze costs a flat $72 a month however many people you track.

Why Pushpay leads for statements and receipts

Pushpay builds both the giving platform and the church management system. Gifts land on the member’s profile in Pushpay ChMS, next to attendance, groups and family relationships, without an import from another vendor’s software. Statements draw from that same record.

Every gift type on one record

Pushpay’s church giving platform handles card, ACH and digital wallet gifts, and it accepts stock and crypto as well. Cash and other offline gifts are tracked by campus in the same system. They go in through batch entry, which fills in an existing giver’s details and searches before creating a new record, so a check from a known donor doesn’t produce a duplicate profile. Pushpay’s contribution statement tool then combines online, cash and non-cash gifts into one statement per donor.

Statements on your schedule

According to Pushpay’s guide to church giving statements, most churches send statements once a year. Pushpay also supports quarterly, twice-yearly or custom-period statements, which let donors see their progress toward a pledge before the year ends. Each statement includes the acknowledgment language the IRS requires for charitable contribution receipts.

Statements go out by email with your church’s name and logo, publish in the church app, or print as PDFs. Donors can also download their current and past giving records through a secure one-time link, which expires after 14 days.

Donor reporting beyond the statement

“The back-end reporting provides my team with everything we need for weekly reports, monthly reconciliations, and annual giving statements,” says Brett Billman of Watermark Community Church.

The giving records behind those statements also feed Pushpay’s donor development tools. With them, your team can:

• Assign donor stages and pull lists of first-time, lapsed or at-risk givers
• Break down giving history by individual or household
• Send leadership an automated snapshot of weekly giving

A recurring gift that fails and isn’t recovered is missing from the donor’s year-end total. Pushpay’s Everygift features target those failures. Failed Payment Recovery identifies recurring gifts that stopped processing and gives donors a way to catch up, and Expiring Card Notifications alert donors before their card lapses. Pushpay reports that churches switching to its platform grow their recurring donors by 24% on average.

Where Pushpay stops

Pushpay keeps donor records and sends giving totals to your accounting software rather than replacing it. Your bookkeeper keeps working in the ledger they already use, whether that’s QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct or Aplos.

What to verify in the Pushpay demo

• Household statements: request a combined statement for a two-adult household where one adult gives online and the other by check.
• Offline gift entry: watch a week’s checks and cash get entered by campus, then find those gifts on the donor’s profile.
• Accounting sync: confirm the integration for your accounting package and whether it posts deposits, fund totals or individual gifts.
• Permissions: confirm which staff roles can see individual giving and which see totals only, and where edits to a gift are logged.

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Aplos for accounting depth

Aplos is fund accounting software with donor management and online giving built in, which makes it a strong fit when your treasurer or bookkeeper is the primary user.

Fund accounting and donor-ready reports

Every Aplos plan includes a balance sheet and income statement by fund, along with bank reconciliation. On the giving side, each plan includes custom giving forms and a donor portal. Donation tracking covers in-kind and special gifts, and giving statements can run monthly, quarterly or annually.

Where Aplos fits best

Aplos suits a church that needs restricted and designated funds to reconcile on the balance sheet, with donations recorded in the same product. It suits a church less well when member engagement is the priority, because Aplos centers on accounting and donor management rather than the groups, check-in and communication tools of a full ChMS.

What to verify in the Aplos demo

The Lite ($79) and Core ($129) plans include two users, and Advanced ($229) includes three. User roles and permissions start at Core, so price the plan around how many staff need access and what each of them should see. Ask how in-kind gifts appear on the statement, and whether the donor portal shows prior years.

Tithe.ly for fast bulk statements

Giving statements are part of Tithe.ly’s giving platform, which has no monthly fee. Processing costs 2.9% + $0.30 per card gift and 1% + $0.30 per ACH gift.

Year-end giving statements

To generate statements, you select a year or a custom date range, choose one campus or all of them, and run the batch. Tithe.ly says statements are ready in under a minute, however large the church. Before the run, the system flags likely duplicate donor accounts so you can merge them and send each donor one statement.

Customization and delivery

Cover letters carry your logo and church details, and statements can be printed or emailed. If a refund or a missing gift surfaces after the run, you correct the giving data and reissue that donor’s statement. For accounting, Tithe.ly exports a CSV for your general ledger and produces bank deposit reports broken out by fund.

What to verify in the Tithe.ly demo

Tithe.ly’s statement announcement doesn’t describe how cash and check gifts are entered, so ask to see offline gift entry. Confirm which tax acknowledgment language appears on the statement and whether you can edit it. Then price the full stack: the free giving platform doesn’t include church management, which costs $72 a month alone or $119 bundled with Tithe.ly’s app and website products.

Breeze, ChurchTrac, and Planning Center

Breeze for simple statement workflows

Breeze is now sold as Tithely Church Management, the $72-a-month product that pairs with Tithe.ly’s giving platform. The plan includes giving, unlimited admin users and no contract. Breeze groups donors by household and produces statements you can print or email. Its pricing page lists giving and attendance reports but no accounting features.

ChurchTrac for budget-minded teams

ChurchTrac prices by the number of names in your database, from $29 a month for 75 names to $119 for unlimited. Archived records don’t count toward that number. Every plan includes fund accounting and contribution tracking, along with check-in, groups and a church app, so a church with up to 250 names pays $59 a month for giving and accounting in one product. If you want help configuring the accounting side, ChurchTrac’s setup service starts at $399.

Planning Center for giving and donor profiles

Planning Center Giving is free for up to 10 donations a month and priced by donation volume after that. Card gifts cost 2.15% + $0.30 and ACH gifts cost a flat $0.30. Checks, cash and payments from apps like Venmo or Zelle are entered in batches, and year-end donor statements draw on those same records.

Accounting is the gap. Planning Center has no direct QuickBooks integration and recommends exporting CSVs and posting journal entries in your accounting software. For a church whose ministry teams already run on Planning Center, that export step is the tradeoff for keeping giving in the same system as everything else.

Financial and accounting features in church management software

Church software handles accounting in one of two ways. Some platforms include a general ledger, so donations post to the books inside the same product. Others record giving and send the totals to a separate accounting package. Aplos and ChurchTrac take the first approach. Pushpay, Tithe.ly and Planning Center take the second, with different levels of automation. Breeze’s pricing page lists no accounting features.

Built-in fund accounting

Aplos separates restricted and unrestricted funds at the transaction level, so every donation posts to the fund it belongs to. Budgeting depends on the plan. Lite has none, Core includes basic budgeting, and Advanced adds budgets by fund, department or location.

Aplos can also prepare and file Form 990-N and 990-EZ online. Churches are exempt from filing Form 990, so that feature matters mainly to affiliated organizations, such as a school or a parachurch ministry, that may be required to file.

ChurchTrac includes fund accounting in every plan without relying on class tracking (the tagging workaround general-purpose accounting software uses to separate funds). Budgets can cover the whole church or individual ministries, with no cap on how many you create. Bank Sync imports transactions from your online bank for reconciliation. Because giving and accounting share one database, donations reach the ledger without an export.

Accounting through integrations

When giving and accounting live in separate products, the difference comes down to how totals move between them. A direct integration posts them automatically. A CSV export means someone downloads the file, imports it and posts the entries every period.

Pushpay’s QuickBooks Online integration sends fund batch totals to your books automatically, while individual donor records stay in Pushpay. Batch entry subtotals offline gifts before they sync, which gives the counting team a figure to check against the deposit. Pushpay also integrates with Sage Intacct, which its integrations page positions for multi-campus churches, and with Aplos. That last pairing lets a church run giving and statements in Pushpay and fund accounting in Aplos.

Tithe.ly and Planning Center both rely on CSV exports, so someone on your team posts each period’s giving totals to the books by hand.

Why fund and designation tracking matters

A gift’s fund designation has to be captured when the gift is entered, carried through to the statement, and reported by fund, so the finance team can show each gift went where the donor directed it. Ask every vendor to show how a single gift split across two funds appears on both the donor statement and the deposit report.

Can one system cover giving and accounting?

It can, if your accounting needs are modest. ChurchTrac and Aplos both combine fund accounting and giving in one product. A church running payroll, several restricted funds and an annual audit is usually better served by a dedicated accounting package connected to a giving and donor platform like Pushpay, so fund totals post without a manual export.

Audit trails and access controls in church software

Access controls on giving data determine who can see individual gifts, who can change them, and whether the system records each change. Software roles are also how you keep counting the offering separate from recording and reconciling it.

Roles and permissions by platform

Breeze’s pricing page lists unlimited admin users but doesn’t describe permission levels, so ask about them in the demo.

Planning Center’s roles map most closely to a counting team. Counters enter donations and manage batches, Bookkeepers also see donor history and reports, and Reviewers get read-only access to campaign dashboards. In Pushpay ChMS, you apply system or custom roles to each person’s profile. Tithe.ly lets you limit an admin’s access to Giving.

ChurchTrac’s security checklist adds two practices that apply on any platform: give every user an individual login instead of a shared one, and limit administrator accounts to two or three.

Change logs

A change log shows whether a gift was edited, moved to another fund or deleted, and who made the change. It’s what you check when a donor’s records and their statement total disagree. Of the platforms compared here, ChurchTrac’s support documentation describes its log in the most detail. Each user’s audit trail records their logins and the IP address behind each one, along with the records they added, updated or deleted.

For any platform, test this in the demo. Have the vendor change a gift’s amount or fund, then show you where that change is recorded and who can see it.

Payment security

Pushpay is PCI DSS compliant as a Level 1 Service Provider, the highest validation level under the payment card industry’s data security standard. Its fraud monitoring uses machine learning to flag suspicious payments for a fraud response team, and its security program includes independent annual audits and third-party penetration testing. Ask every vendor on your list for its PCI compliance status in writing.

FAQ and buying checks

What a contribution statement needs

A donor can’t deduct any single gift of $250 or more without a written acknowledgment from the church, received by the time they file. IRS Publication 1771 lists what the acknowledgment must include:

• The church’s name
• The amount of each cash gift, which for IRS purposes includes checks and card gifts
• A description of any non-cash gift, without a value (valuing it is the donor’s job)
• Whether the church provided goods or services in return, with a good-faith estimate of their value, or a statement that only intangible religious benefits were provided

When a donor pays more than $75 and receives something in return, such as a banquet ticket, the church also owes a quid pro quo disclosure. Pushpay adds the required acknowledgment language to statements automatically.

The IRS sets no mailing date for churches. Many send statements by January 31 so donors have them before most start filing.

Which option fits small, growing, and multi-site churches?

For a small church, price structure usually decides it. ChurchTrac scales by names tracked, and Breeze charges one flat rate.

A growing church needs a platform it won’t outgrow. Pushpay scales from a 150-person congregation to a multi-campus organization, according to its ChMS page.

Multi-site churches need giving tracked by campus and one donor record across locations. Pushpay tracks gifts by campus, and Tithe.ly can generate statements for one campus or all of them.

How should software track online, check, and cash contributions?

Every gift, whatever the method, should land on the same donor record, tagged to a fund and a campus, inside a batch or deposit you can reconcile to the bank. When checks and cash are recorded in a separate spreadsheet, they have to be merged into the giving system before statements run. Pushpay’s Everygift also helps cash and check donors move to digital giving, so each donor who switches leaves fewer gifts to enter by hand.

How should churches use donor exports and recurring gift tracking?

Exports move giving data into your accounting system and board reports. Recurring gift tracking should show each gift’s status (active, failed or expiring card) on the donor record, so your team can reach donors whose recurring gifts have stopped before the year closes.

What to confirm before you switch

A mid-year switch leaves the current year’s giving split across two systems. Before signing, get the vendor’s plan for importing this year’s gifts, so each donor receives one statement in January instead of one from each system.

Before you book demos

If you plan to send this year’s statements from a new system, start demos in October so there’s time to move this year’s gifts into it before January. Give every vendor the same test: a donor who gave online and by check, split across two funds. Ask each vendor to produce that donor’s year-end statement during the demo, with no export and no spreadsheet.