Like most churches, your bookkeeper likely manages your books on a “cash” basis. This means that when it comes to your general ledger, the accounting process begins when a deposit is made to the church’s bank account.
If you use Planning Center Giving, the batch system makes it easy to count checks and cash and then track the exact date the batch was deposited in the bank.
However, online donations can be a little harder to manage: they happen at any time, the settling time for transactions can vary, and Stripe issues automatic payouts (deposits to your church bank) once or even twice per day. For a busy church, that’s 40+ Stripe Payouts each month.
That is a lot to reconcile with Quickbooks every month and a lot of room for human error.
Combined Reports to the Rescue
To make life easier, we’ve created a combined report of all your Stripe Payouts, filterable across any date range.
All the numbers you need are here in one report whether you balance your books weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It’s printable, exportable, and simple to understand.
A Better Understanding of Fees
With these new reports, you can now understand how much you’re paying in payment processing fees across time. The “effective rate” is the total amount paid to Stripe expressed as a simple percentage of the total amount given by donors.
Now you can get at that number across time and have a straight answer the next time a board member asks “How much did we pay in processing fees last year?”
Enjoy!
Team Giving
Effective Rates Over Time
We think being able to show the effective rate over time is a big addition to this new combined payout report.
Stripe does something curious with ACH transactions—they bundle them into their own payouts. So, one payout is comprised of all card donations and the following payout is all ACH donations.
Because ACH donations are so much cheaper to process than cards, the “effective rate” listed at the top of each payout can be wildly different from payout to payout. All ACH payouts typically have an effective rate of around 0.16%. All card payouts come in at around 2.5% (that $0.30 per transaction fee can add up if there are a lot of small donations).
With this new view, we can smooth out these numbers and give you a better sense of your effective rate over time. For combined payout reports that span 12+ months, the average effective rate we’re seeing is currently around 1.6% for US churches who have a good mix of ACH and card donations.