Church accounting software that keeps designated funds straight

The bank shows $84,300. A member stands up at the annual meeting and asks how much is left in the building fund. The treasurer says $31,000. The elder who has been collecting roof pledges says $26,500. The bookkeeper says the software does not report it that way, and offers to pull a spreadsheet after the meeting.

All three people are reading the same bank account. That is the whole problem. A church holds one pile of money and several promises about what parts of that pile are for, and most bookkeeping software is built for a business that holds one pile of money with exactly one claim on it.

The number your ledger has to produce

Fund accounting keeps a running balance for each promise, and those balances add up to the cash you have.

Take the $84,300. Suppose $31,000 came in on envelopes and pledge cards marked “building,” $4,800 came from a benevolence offering taken in March, and $2,100 is a memorial gift the family asked be spent on the nursery. That leaves $46,400 the church may spend on anything the budget covers. The report an elder board needs is four lines that sum to $84,300, produced by the software, not assembled by a volunteer on Saturday night.

Two kinds of restriction get confused, and they behave differently.

Donor-restricted money came with an instruction from the giver, or in response to an appeal that named a purpose. ECFA’s Standard 7.2 puts it this way: “Statements made about the use of gifts by an organization in its charitable gift appeals must be honored. A giver’s intent relates both to what was communicated in the appeal and to any instructions accompanying the gift, if accepted by the organization.” Once you accept a gift given for the roof, the roof is what it is for.

Board-designated money is unrestricted money the board decided to set aside. A board that designated $20,000 for a future van can undesignate it at the next meeting and put it toward payroll. Both balances belong on the report, and they carry different weight when the money gets tight, which is exactly when someone will propose spending them.

The test for any accounting product is one screen: a balance sheet, by fund, where the columns tie to the bank. If a demo cannot produce that in front of you, the answer is no, and the price does not matter.

Nobody outside the church checks this

Most nonprofits file a Form 990 every year and someone reads it. Churches do not. The IRS puts the rule this way: “Every organization exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue Code section 501(a) must file an annual information return except: A church, an interchurch organization of local units of a church, a convention or association of churches.” The same list exempts an integrated auxiliary of a church, a church-affiliated organization managing funds or retirement programs, and a school below college level affiliated with a church.

That exception is a real relief and a real hazard. No annual filing means no outside deadline forcing the books into shape, no preparer asking why the restricted balance moved, and no public document a member can look up. The only people who will ever catch a fund balance that quietly went negative are the ones sitting in your own finance meeting.

ECFA’s standards describe what fills the gap. Standard 3 requires that “the board or a committee consisting of a majority of independent members shall approve the engagement of an independent certified public accountant, review the annual financial statements.” Standard 2 sets the floor for the board itself: “Every organization shall be governed by a responsible board of not less than five individuals, a majority of whom shall be independent.” Standard 5 requires that “every organization shall provide a copy of its current financial statements upon written request and shall provide other disclosures as the law may require.”

ECFA is an accreditation body rather than a regulator, so none of that binds a church that has not sought accreditation. Read it as the best available description of what adequate oversight looks like when nobody outside is required to look. Software does not give you any of it. It gives you statements a committee can read. Buy accordingly.

Where general bookkeeping software breaks

A general ledger built for a small business has one equity section. It reports what the business owns, what it owes, and what is left over. Restriction is not a concept it has.

Most of these products offer a tagging feature under some name, and you can attach a tag to every transaction. That produces an income and expense report filtered by tag, which answers “what did we spend on the building this year.” It does not produce a balance carried forward, so it cannot answer “what is left in the building fund,” which is the question that gets asked in front of the congregation.

You can force it. Churches do this every day with sub-accounts, a disciplined chart of accounts, and a monthly journal entry that moves the restricted portion between equity lines. It works when a competent bookkeeper owns it and it degrades the month that person is on vacation.

Xero served its price page on 29 July 2026 and prints three plans: Early at $25 a month, Growing at $55, and Established at $90. Intuit’s QuickBooks pricing page refused our requests on the same date, so this guide prints no QuickBooks figure and will not estimate one.

Neither price tells you what you need to know, so run the test yourself in the trial, in your own file: enter three gifts to three different purposes, spend one of them, then try to print a balance sheet with a column per purpose. Whatever appears on that screen is the honest review. Our full method for pricing and disqualifying tools is written out at how we review.

What the ledger side costs, checked 29 July 2026

Every figure below was read off the vendor’s own public page on that date, and every page is linked in the row and again in Sources. Where a vendor does not publish a price, that is what the row says, because a vendor’s refusal to print a number is itself information.

Tool	What it is	Published price	Where it costs you
Aplos Lite	Nonprofit and church fund accounting, hosted	$79 a month, 2 users	Two users on a $948-a-year plan, and no budgeting until you move up a tier
Aplos Core	The same, with budgeting and AP/AR	$129 a month, 2 users	Still two users. A third seat means the $229 tier
Aplos Advanced	Fund, grant, and department budgeting	$229 a month, 3 users	Aimed at organizations over $250,000 in annual revenue
PowerChurch Plus	Desktop membership, contributions, and accounting, sold as a license	$445.00 new user download, $175.00 upgrade	Windows only, and you install and keep it current yourself
PowerChurch Online	The hosted version, licensed by concurrent user	$47.00 a month or $499.00 a year for two concurrent users, each additional pair $29.00 a month or $299.00 a year	Concurrent-user pricing bites the Sunday afternoon three people need to be in at once
ChurchTrac	Church records with accounting as a paid add-on	$9 to $90 a month by number of names, accounting $15 a month more, messaging $7 a month	Accounting is an add-on, so the cheapest real configuration is $24 a month rather than $9
Realm, by ACS Technologies	Church management with accounting and payroll modules	No price published	The site routes to a demo registration. You cannot compare what you cannot price
Wave	General small business accounting	Starter free, Pro $19 a month or $190 a year	No fund dimension at all, so restricted balances live outside the ledger
Xero	General small business accounting	Early $25, Growing $55, Established $90 a month	Same problem. A business ledger with one equity section
GnuCash	Free desktop double entry accounting	Free	The feature list does not mention fund accounting anywhere, so you would build and maintain parallel account trees by hand
Covenant OS	Our own church system, in development	Nothing to buy	Not available. Choose from the rows above and choose now

Aplos is built for nonprofit and church books rather than adapted to them, and it is the product most often named when a treasurer wants fund accounting without an enterprise ledger. The price page served on 29 July 2026 and it names the reports that matter on every tier including the cheapest: balance sheet by fund, income statement by fund, bank reconciliation, custom reports, a board portal, and 1099 management. That is the exact four-line report described at the top of this guide, printed by the software, on a $79 plan.

The user count is the real ceiling. Lite and Core both include two users, so a church where the treasurer, the bookkeeper, and the finance chair all need to log in is looking at the $229 tier, which is $2,748 a year. The trial is short as well, 15 days rather than 30, with no credit card required. That is a tight window for the eight-step trial at the end of this guide, so block out the fortnight before you start it.

PowerChurch is the cheapest real accounting package on the list and the least eager to explain itself. The catalog prints $445.00 for a new download of Plus version 15 and $175.00 to upgrade, with the check-in system at $189.00 desktop, $139.00 if bought alongside a license, or $18.00 a month online. Technical support is priced separately at $149.00 for six months or $280.00 for a year, which is a real line item other vendors bundle. The products page names membership, contributions, accounting, and event scheduling as the four areas the product covers, and the support menu carries a payroll tax table page, which tells you the desktop product expects you to keep tax tables current yourself. That is the shape of the whole product: cheap, capable, and dependent on someone at your church who reads manuals.

Read the Online license carefully. It is two concurrent users, not two named users, and additional capacity is sold in pairs at $29.00 a month. A church of 150 with a bookkeeper who works Tuesdays and a treasurer who works Sundays never notices. A church where the office administrator, the bookkeeper, and the pastor all keep it open will.

ChurchTrac is the most defensible number in this guide for a church under 200 people. Nine dollars a month for records plus fifteen for accounting is $288 a year, and the accounting page calls it “a true fund accounting software for churches for tracking fund balances,” naming budgets and deposit and expense tracking alongside. The name bands are 75, 125, 250, 500, 1,000, and unlimited at $9, $18, $36, $54, $72, and $90, annual billing charges 10.8 months for 12, and the trial is 30 days. Archived names do not count toward the limit.

Two cautions. The per-band figures are computed by the calculator on the page rather than printed as a list, so a reader who does not click cannot compare tiers, and the numbers above came out of the script that drives it. And their giving runs on “Stripe’s discounted nonprofit processing rate (contact us for details),” which means the fee schedule is a phone call rather than a page.

Realm publishes no price and asks you to register for a demo. Its own navigation names three plans, Inform, Connect, and Multiply, and attaches a figure to none of them. That is a legitimate way to sell software and a bad way to buy it. If you go down that road, get the first-year total in writing including implementation, data conversion, and per-user charges, and get the renewal price for year two in the same document.

Wave, Xero, and GnuCash belong here as the honest floor. Wave Starter is free and Pro is $19 a month or $190 a year, with unlimited receipt capture now inside Pro rather than sold separately. Card processing on Starter is 2.9 percent plus $0.60, dropping to 2.9 percent plus zero on Pro. Wave Payroll is separate at a $40 base fee plus $6 per active employee and $6 per contractor paid. Xero runs $25, $55, and $90. GnuCash costs nothing, does real double entry, and prints a balance sheet, and the phrase “fund accounting” does not appear anywhere on its feature page.

None of the three knows what a restricted gift is. For a church with one bank account and one purpose, that is fine. For a church running a capital campaign, it is a spreadsheet with better arithmetic.

The donor side is a different purchase

Giving platforms and accounting packages get shopped together and sold separately, and the fee schedule is where the money hides. Here is who publishes a rate and who does not.

Tool	Published subscription	Card rate	Bank transfer rate
Breeze ChMS	$72 a month, giving included, unlimited admin users	Not published on the pricing page	Not published on the pricing page
Planning Center Giving	Free up to 10 monthly donations, then $15 to $239 a month	2.15% + $0.30 in the US	0% + $0.30 ACH
Tithe.ly Free Giving	$0 a month	2.9% + $0.30, Amex 3.5% + $0.30	1% + $0.30
Subsplash Giving	$0 a month	2.3% + $0.30	1%
Servant Keeper Core	$79.99 a month, or $73.32 a month paid yearly at $879.89	”Standard processing rate,” no figure published	Not published
Servant Keeper Complete	$159.99 a month, or $146.66 a month paid yearly at $1,759.89	”Preferred processing rate” included, no figure published	Not published
ChurchTrac giving	Included with the plan	Stripe nonprofit rate, quoted on request	Not published

Four of those seven print both numbers, and the spread is large enough to change a budget. On $200,000 of annual online giving split evenly between card and bank transfer, Planning Center’s 2.15 percent card and 0 percent ACH costs roughly $2,150 in percentage fees. Tithe.ly’s 2.9 percent card and 1 percent ACH costs roughly $3,900 on the same volume. That gap is bigger than any subscription on this page, which is why the processing rate deserves more of your attention than the monthly fee. The full arithmetic, including the per-transaction 30 cents that punishes small recurring gifts, is worked out in what giving platforms actually cost.

The bank transfer line is the single largest lever a church has over its own fee bill, and Planning Center’s 0 percent plus 30 cents is the cheapest published rate in the category. A church that moves half its recurring givers off cards saves more than most of these subscriptions cost.

Breeze at $72 a month includes giving with no monthly charge, unlimited admin users, unlimited contacts, 250 texts a month before $10 per 500, worship tools at $29 a month, and a $119 bundle with the Tithely site and app products. Their pricing page does not state a card or ACH rate anywhere on it. Ask for the schedule in writing before you migrate donor records, and note the banner on that page saying Breeze is now sold as Tithely Church Management, because it means the giving rates you should be asking about are probably Tithe.ly’s.

Servant Keeper is a contribution system rather than a general ledger. Their pages name contribution records and end-of-year statements and do not name a general ledger, fund accounting, or payroll. Core at $79.99 a month is quoted at four users and treats check-in as a $199 option. Complete at $159.99 is quoted at eight users, includes check-in, and adds 1,000 SMS a month plus a website with 50 GB of storage. If you buy it, buy it as the donor system and put the ledger somewhere else.

If the membership roll is also in play, the free tiers and their exact ceilings are collected in free church management software, and the two purchases overlap enough that pricing them together saves a round of demos.

The two payroll questions every treasurer gets wrong

Who gets a 1099 and who gets a W-2 is a classification question, and the IRS answers it with three categories of evidence rather than a rule: behavioral control, meaning whether the church controls what the worker does and how; financial control, covering how the person is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, and who supplies the tools; and the type of relationship, including written contracts, benefits, permanence, and how central the work is. The IRS is blunt on the same page that “there is no ‘magic’ or set number of factors that ‘makes’ the worker an employee or an independent contractor and no one factor stands alone in making this determination,” and that “the keys are to look at the entire relationship.” When it is genuinely unclear, Form SS-8 asks the IRS to establish the status. Ask your CPA how long the current backlog runs before you count on an answer by January.

Run the test on your real cases. The guest preacher who came once and left is almost never an employee. The nursery worker you schedule, supervise, and pay every Sunday almost always is, whatever the church has been calling her. The worship leader who sets the rehearsal schedule, uses church equipment, and has done it for four years is the case that gets churches in trouble, and calling that person a contractor to avoid payroll is the single most common expensive mistake in church bookkeeping.

The 1099 threshold changed for this tax year. The Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC, revised 12/2026, state that “for tax years beginning after 2025, the minimum threshold amount for reporting certain payments required to be reported on certain information returns and/or perform backup withholding on those payments increased to $2,000 and may be adjusted for inflation beginning in calendar year 2027.” That replaces the $600 figure your last treasurer memorized, and it takes a lot of guest speakers and one-off musicians out of the filing entirely.

The dates did not change. The same instructions say “Section 6071(c) requires you to file Form 1099-NEC on or before January 31,” with 1099-MISC due 28 February on paper or 31 March electronically. The general instructions for information returns set the electronic filing rule plainly: “If you are required to file 10 or more information returns during the year, you must e-file.” Ten is counted across all types, so a church filing eight W-2s and four 1099s is over the line and files electronically.

If the church has employees at all, the IRS is direct: “If a tax-exempt organization (EO) has employees, the EO is responsible for Federal Income Tax Withholding and Social Security and Medicare taxes.” The same page adds that some exempt organizations owe federal unemployment tax as well. Publication 15 and Publication 15-A are the documents, and your CPA is the person who reads them for your state.

Ministers are the case your software has to handle. The IRS position in Topic no. 417 is that “if a congregation employs you for a salary, you’re generally a common-law employee of the congregation and your salary is considered wages for income tax withholding purposes,” while the services performed in the exercise of ministry are “generally covered by Social Security and Medicare under the self-employment tax system, regardless of your status under the common law.” So the minister gets a W-2, and the church does not withhold FICA on ministerial wages the way it does for the office administrator.

The housing allowance sits on top of that. The same page requires that “the minister’s employing organization must officially designate the housing allowance as such before paying it to the minister,” which makes it a board action with a date, recorded in the minutes, ahead of the first affected paycheck. It is excludable from gross income for income tax and included for Social Security coverage purposes. The exclusion is limited to the lowest of the amount designated, the actual expenses of providing a home, or the fair rental value, and the IRS adds that “the amount excluded can’t be more than reasonable compensation for the minister’s services.” A minister opposed to public insurance on religious or conscientious grounds may apply for an exemption from self-employment tax on Form 4361, and the IRS states plainly that economic reasons do not qualify.

Which turns into three concrete demands on any payroll module you consider: it must produce a W-2 for a worker with no FICA withheld, it must carry a designated housing amount that does not land in Box 1, and it must let you record a mid-year change when the board redesignates. Ask the salesperson to show all three on screen. Nothing in this section is tax advice for your church; take the specifics to a CPA who has done clergy returns before.

Giving statements, and the January they create

The IRS sets out exactly what a written acknowledgment has to carry to substantiate a charitable contribution of $250 or more: the name of the organization, the amount of the cash contribution, a description but not a value for any non-cash contribution, a statement that no goods or services were provided if that is the case, a description and good faith estimate of the value of any goods or services that were, and a statement that any goods or services “consisted entirely of intangible religious benefits, if that was the case.” Publication 1771 is the longer version.

Three things break this every year, and all three are software problems you can catch in a trial.

A statement that omits the goods-and-services language is useless to a giver whose return gets examined. Print a sample in the trial and read the fine print at the bottom. If that sentence is not there, find the setting or find another product.

Designated gifts have to survive the trip from the giving platform to the statement with their designation attached. A gift to missions that arrives in the ledger as undifferentiated income has cost you the fund balance and the giver’s record in one step. Give $10 to three different funds in a sandbox and see what comes out the other end.

Fee-covered gifts need a decided answer before January. When a giver checks the box that adds the processing fee to the gift, the receipt has to show what the church treats as the contribution. Get your accountant’s ruling on gross versus net before the first statement run, because fixing it after 300 PDFs have gone out is a miserable week.

Who reconciles what

Software does not create controls. It records whatever the person with the password enters. The controls are people, and a church of any size can run these.

Two unrelated people count the offering together, in the same room, and both sign the count sheet. Related does not mean unfriendly; it means not married to each other and not parent and child.

The person who enters gifts into the system is not the person who reconciles the bank statement. The person who reconciles the bank statement is not the person who signs checks. In a small church these are three volunteers, and finding the third one is worth more than any feature on any comparison chart.

The bank statement goes, unopened, to someone outside the finance team once a quarter. An elder, a deacon, anyone with no access to the accounts. They open it, look at the checks, and initial it. Most embezzlement in small churches survives for years because one trusted person owned every step of the cycle, and that person was trusted for good reasons right up until the second mortgage.

The monthly close is short and it is the same every month. Reconcile every bank and credit card account. Print the balance sheet by fund and confirm the fund columns tie to cash. Print income and expense against budget. Review any fund with a negative balance, because a negative restricted fund means the church spent restricted money on something else. Hand all of it to the finance committee before the meeting, not during it.

When a spreadsheet is the correct answer

A church with one bank account, two or three designated funds, one minister on payroll, and no grants does not need to buy anything. A spreadsheet is a correct answer and it can stay correct for years.

Build it in three sheets. The first is a register, one row per transaction, with columns for date, source or payee, amount in, amount out, fund, and budget category. The second is a summary that sums the register by fund and produces the four-line report described at the top of this guide. The third is the reconciliation, one row per month, with the statement balance, the outstanding items, and the register balance, and the whole thing is only worth anything if those two numbers match every month. Someone other than the person who keeps it opens the file quarterly.

Print it monthly and keep the paper. A spreadsheet nobody prints is a spreadsheet nobody checks.

Then know the tripwires that end it. A second bank account. A capital campaign with donor-restricted pledges. A paid employee who is not a minister. A grant or a denominational gift with a reporting requirement. A lender or an insurance carrier asking for financial statements. A year where you write more than a handful of 1099s. Any one of those, and the $288 a year that ChurchTrac’s records-plus-accounting combination starts at, or the $948 Aplos Lite costs, stops being an expense and starts being cheaper than the volunteer hours you are burning.

The room-and-calendar side of the office follows the same rule and has its own free floor, priced out in church event planning software. Whatever you buy on either side, the roll it holds is member data, and the obligations that come with holding it are in protecting member data.

The failure mode to watch for is not the spreadsheet. It is the church that bought software, kept the spreadsheet running alongside it because the software never quite matched how they work, and now maintains two sets of books that disagree. If that describes your office, the project is picking one, not buying a third thing.

Run this trial before you buy

1. Load one month of real transactions, including three gifts to three different purposes and one expense paid out of a restricted fund.
2. Print a balance sheet by fund. Confirm the columns sum to the bank balance.
3. Print income and expense against budget for the same month.
4. Generate a giving statement for a giver who gave $250 to the general fund and $500 to the building fund. Read the fine print at the bottom.
5. Enter a minister with a designated housing allowance and produce a sample W-2.
6. Export everything. Every person, every gift, every journal entry, as CSV, yourself, without a support ticket. A vendor who routes your export through their support desk has built a fence and you are inside it.
7. Reconcile one month against a real bank statement, timing how long it takes. Multiply by twelve. That is the actual annual cost of the software.
8. Hand the printed balance sheet to an elder who does not do bookkeeping and ask what the building fund balance is. If they cannot find it in ten seconds, the report is wrong regardless of what the numbers say.

Do this in the next two weeks

Pull your last bank statement and write down the balance. Then list every purpose that money is promised to, with an amount beside each one, from pledge cards, board minutes, and the notes on the envelopes. Subtract. Whatever is left is what the church can spend, and whether that number surprised you is the entire buying decision.

Bring one page to the next finance meeting: the bank balance, the fund list, the difference, and the annual cost of the two products you would consider. Compare the ledger and donor tools side by side in the money directory, and if the membership records are also in play, start with choosing church management software.

Sources

Every page below was fetched on 29 July 2026, and every price, rate, and quotation in this guide came off the page linked here on that date. Nothing in this guide is tax advice for your church.

Fund accounting and church ledgers

• Aplos tiers, user counts, and the per-tier report list: aplos.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
• PowerChurch catalog prices, concurrent-user license terms, and support pricing: powerchurch.com/order. Product coverage: powerchurch.com/products. Both checked 29 July 2026.
• ChurchTrac name bands, add-on prices, annual multiplier, and the Stripe nonprofit rate language: churchtrac.com/pricing. Fund accounting claim: churchtrac.com/features_accounting. Both checked 29 July 2026.
• Realm plan names and demo routing: acstechnologies.com/realm. Checked 29 July 2026.

General bookkeeping software

• Wave plans and card rates: waveapps.com/pricing. Payroll base and per-person fees: waveapps.com/payroll. Both checked 29 July 2026.
• Xero plans: xero.com/us/pricing-plans. Checked 29 July 2026.
• GnuCash feature list: gnucash.org/features.phtml. Checked 29 July 2026.
• QuickBooks: quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing refused our requests on 29 July 2026, so no QuickBooks figure appears in this guide.

Giving platforms

• Planning Center Giving tiers and US processing rates: planningcenter.com/giving. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Tithe.ly plans and processing rates: get.tithe.ly/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Subsplash giving rates: subsplash.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Breeze price, inclusions, and the Tithely rebrand banner: breezechms.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Servant Keeper tiers, user counts, and processing-rate language: servantkeeper.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.

IRS and oversight

• Churches excepted from the annual information return: Annual exempt organization return: who must file. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Employee or contractor, the three categories of evidence: Independent contractor (self-employed) or employee?. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Requesting a determination: About Form SS-8. Checked 29 July 2026.
• The $2,000 threshold and the 1099-NEC due date: Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC (12/2026). Checked 29 July 2026.
• The 10-return electronic filing rule: General Instructions for Certain Information Returns. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Employment tax responsibility for exempt organizations: Employment taxes for exempt organizations. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Minister status, Social Security coverage, the housing allowance, and Form 4361: Topic no. 417, Earnings for clergy. Checked 29 July 2026.
• What a written acknowledgment must contain at $250 or more: Charitable contributions: written acknowledgments. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Board size, audit committee, and financial statement disclosure: ECFA Standards of Responsible Stewardship. Checked 29 July 2026.

Corrections made on 29 July 2026

An earlier version of this guide printed no Aplos price, because aplos.com refused our requests when it was written. The page served on 29 July 2026 and the Lite, Core, and Advanced figures above come from it. The earlier version also said Xero would not serve its price page, which is no longer true, described PowerChurch Online as licensed per user when the license is two concurrent users, quoted Wave payroll at $25 a month when that is the Canadian dollar base fee and the US base fee is $40, and listed Wave receipt capture as an $11 add-on when it is now included in the Pro plan. The claim that an SS-8 determination takes at least six months has been removed, because we could not verify it on any IRS page we fetched in this pass.