You've been added as a Giving bookkeeper! Now what? A bookkeeper needs to balance the books but doesn't need full access to change account settings. You can access donations, donor profiles, and Stripe (the payment processor partnered with Giving) information to help manage books. This guide provides an overview of your access to Giving, which works alongside your general ledger and helps you learn how to use it!
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If you cannot log in, follow the steps in this article.
This diagram shows how Giving fits into your workflow alongside your general ledger.
Giving allows you to track online and physical monetary donations (including certain types of non-deductible donations), as well as in-kind donations.
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Online donations are given via Church Center or text and processed by Stripe.
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Physical donations are cash and check donations.
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In-kind donations are gifts such as physical items, services, or stock.
Certain non-deductible donations, such as those given through qualified charitable distributions or donor-advised funds, can be tracked through an added payment source and batches. To separate these donations from deductible donations, they will be labeled as non-deductible on donor statements.
You can also track donations given through external payment sources, such as PushPay, F1, Paypal, or any other systems you have in place with batches in Giving.
Keeping online and physical donations in one place allows you to keep track of all donor activity and provide one donor statement.
There are several places to access reports in Giving, depending on the information you need.
Notice
All reports generated from the Reports tab are based on the date the donation was received.
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Dashboard: For a breakdown of your donation information, head to the Dashboard. From here, see a picture of giving over time, giving by fund, and more.
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By Donation: Reports by donation can be filtered to provide an overview of donations by fund, campus, status, and payment type, among many other parameters. This is where you will likely generate a majority of needed reports.
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By Donor: Donors are added to your Giving database when they create a donation or when you create a donation for them. If you need to track down a cumulative total of a donor's giving over time, you can find it on the By Donor tab in Reports.
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Statements: You can generate statements in Giving and email them to your donors or print them out and send them by mail. Donors can access statements from their Church Center profile.
Stripe deposits donations into your bank account. You can enter the deposit into your general ledger and balance that entry with one of the matching payout reports.
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The report in Giving provides a detailed view of Giving income for each Stripe Payout, including an itemized list of donations in the selected payout.
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The report in Accounts provides an overview of Registrations, Giving, and Other Stripe Income for each Stripe Payout. This will include Registrations totals for each event and Giving totals broken down by fund.
Warning
Stripe only supports a single bank account for transferring money to your church, and you can only connect one Stripe account to your Planning Center account. If your bookkeeping process necessitates separate bank accounts for each fund, Giving will likely not be a good fit for your church.
You can find information about your Planning Center account and connected Stripe account from the Stripe Info page in Giving.
Donations are deposited into your bank in two ways:
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Physical deposits
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Stripe transfers
Because Planning Center Giving won't replace your general ledger, you still need a basic bookkeeping software (like QuickBooks) to handle your payable and receivable accounts. Use journaled entries in your general ledger and leave the individual donations in Giving.
Note
You shouldn't keep every donation in your general ledger; instead, you should use journaled entries. However, if you keep individual donations in your general ledger, you can use the CSV export.
In your general ledger, you'll only need to record something like this:
Notifications
Administrators can see any notifications related to them in the Admin Notifications Inbox. You can find this inbox at the top right corner of any page by selecting the bell icon.
If you have login permissions to Planning Center, you will be able to see both read and unread notifications and customize your notification settings.
From your profile, you can choose which notifications you'll receive.
Enable notifications from your profile in Giving to ensure you don't miss anything that happens in Giving. You'll receive an email and a bell notification when any of the selected information changes.
Our Support Team is always here to help! Use the ? at the top right of every page to find articles or open a ticket with Support.
When you select that, you'll see this helpful dialog box.
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Type in what you're looking for. This will search our online manual and return articles on that topic.
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Suggested articles are based on the page you're on when you select the question mark.
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View introduction articles, watch video tutorials, or browse documentation to be taken directly to our online manual.
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Send an email to our Support Team. For the most efficient support, be sure to include specifics about what you're working with. When you submit your questions from here, we receive lots of information about your account, including the page you're viewing, which allows for fast and accurate support for your request.
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Planning Center Support is dedicated to getting you an email response within an hour by investigating the issue in detail, asking for help from other seasoned team members, or even consulting a developer, if necessary. This type of direct assistance and shared knowledge is unavailable on the phone.
These requests to Support can only be made by organization administrators:
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Data removal or corrections you can't make yourself (undo old CSV imports, iCal imports, etc)
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Request promotional pricing (legacy plans, church plants, Giving contract promotion)
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Gain access to anything that was created and managed by someone else in the account
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Restore or fully delete a canceled account
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Disconnect a Stripe account
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Request access to Giving (if there are no current Giving administrators in the account)