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May 17, 2019

Combined Payout Reports

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 ca

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

May 07, 2019

Deposit Checks Remotely through Paperless Transactions

If your church processes a sizable number of paper checks every week, we have some good news for you! A company called Paperless Transactions released an integration with Planning Center Giving that helps you scan checks, remotely deposit them, and automatically import those donations into Giving. In banking this process is called “Remote Deposit Capture” and this is the first RDC solution that integrates directly with Giving. How it Works 1. Scan Checks: Paperless software (Windows only)

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Jan 24, 2019

Joint Donor Statements

Annual statement season is a good time to connect with and thank your donors. This year, you can honor people who give together by addressing and sending statements to both people using the new Joint Donor feature in Giving. Joining Donors On the administrative side of Giving, there are a few ways to connect two people who give jointly. By visiting the People tab within Giving, you can see a list of everyone who is and isn’t currently a joint donor and edit their status from the list. Alterna

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 14, 2018

Share Public Pages with QR Codes

Sharing a direct link is the easiest way to get people to fill out a form, sign up for a group, or give to a specific fund. Sending a link via text or email isn’t always practical, though—sometimes you have to share links on your paper bulletin or announcement slides. Then the challenge becomes getting people to actually type those URLs into their browsers on the spot. We realized link-sharing might not be the best way for some churches to share public pages, so we created an alternative:

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Aug 08, 2018

Totally Better Totals for Giving

When you accept online donations, processing fees are an unavoidable fact of life. Every time someone gives with a card or initiates an ACH bank transfer, there will be a fee. The good news is that we're on your side fighting to minimize those fees! Planning Center makes $0 from processing fees, no matter how many online donations you receive. Today, we are introducing a few new features which we hope will contribute to a clearer picture of how processing fees impact your donations.

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 18, 2018

Expiring Card Replacements

Problems with payment processing can have a real impact on the health of your church’s donation management, and of all the payment issues churches encounter expiring credit cards are the biggest problem. A few years ago, Stripe introduced a groundbreaking new feature: automatic card replacements. In most cases, a saved credit card in Planning Center Giving will continue to work for recurring donations without donor-intervention, even if the physical card gets replaced by the donor's bank.

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 20, 2018

Donor Email Preferences

Today we're excited to release new email settings to give your donors control over their email notifications in Planning Center Giving. Preferred Email Address Donors who have more than one email address listed in their Planning Center profile can now control which address receives their donor notifications. This includes things like donation receipts, statement deliveries, and account alerts. This might be especially useful for church staff who mostly use Planning Center with their work em

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 09, 2018

Tracking Disputed Donations

Although it's not common, it's possible for donors to file disputes about the charges they see on their bank statements. The dispute process is initiated at the donor's bank and moderated by the payment processor, Stripe. While this is fairly commonplace in the retail environment, it's rare that donors file this type of dispute without first contacting their church. How rare is it? In Planning Center Giving, only one in every 65,466 donations is disputed. Even though disputes are uncommon,

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 02, 2018

Improved Donation Tracking

We track a lot of information for each and every donation in Planning Center Giving. We use “stamps” to efficiently communicate details about a donation’s lifecycle: where the donor gave, how they paid, the current status of the donation, and more. Goodbye "Pending" Stamp As an administrator in Giving, one of the biggest frustrations is to see that a donation is pending and not know why. Today, we say goodbye to the “pending” stamp, and welcome three stamps in its place: * Uncommitted

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 01, 2018

Cover The Processing Fee

Payment processing fees. You don’t like them. We don’t like them. But the only way to fully avoid them is to go back to a world where every donor has to bring cash or a checkbook to church, which they probably wouldn’t like. One Big Feature, One Tiny Checkbox Planning Center Giving now gives you a way to subtly communicate two things to your donors: First, there’s a processing fee associated with this payment. Second, the payment method they select impacts how much the church pays in proc

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 02, 2017

Experience the Embeddable Giving Form

You put a lot of time and effort into your church website, so it's a bummer to send visitors somewhere else when they're donating. No more! Now you can put the entire donor experience right on your own website. Here's what it looks like: Give it a Try Give Online* * Don't actually donate to our fake church. We'll probably just spend it on toys and LaCroix. Details and Installation The button is just a regular old html link, so you can style it any way you like. Most comm

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 27, 2017

Payment Sources and the Giving API

Today's updates are all about opening up Planning Center Giving and making it play nicely with other donation systems – whether you're counting donations in a batch or allowing integration with a third party using the new Giving API. External Payment Sources We've introduced the idea of a payment source. While a payment method tells you the type of transaction (cash, check, card, ACH, etc) a payment source tells you where this donation came from (Planning Center, Paypal,

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

4 min read

Jun 07, 2017

Giving Comes to Canada

O Canada! We are so excited today to bring Planning Center Giving to our northerly neighbors. As of today, Canadian churches are welcome to sign up. Let's take a look at some of the larger aspects of the service that we've reshaped for our Canadian customers. Donor Statements We've been in tight communication with our Canadian beta testers, learning exactly what churches expect to see in an annual donor statement. All the mandatory fields and compulsory information required by the

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

May 01, 2017

Recurring Donation Forecasts

Today we've added some new forecasting tools in Planning Center Giving! Now, it's easy to see how much money you'll receive this month if everyone who has set up a recurring donation actually follows through. Even though it's simple math, getting these numbers by hand can be tricky. Some months have five Sundays. Some donors have recurring donations on hold until a specific date. These new forecast numbers take all of that into account so you don't have to. The View Funds buttons will,

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Feb 12, 2017

Apple Pay for Giving

Planning Center Giving customers can now join the ranks of UNICEF, the American Red Cross, charity: water and many other nonprofits in supporting Apple Pay for donations. Apple Pay on iPhone or iPad All your donors will need to do is tap the familiar Apple Pay button, scan their thumb on their phone, and that's it. A record of the donation will appear in their Wallet app, just as it would if they had used Apple Pay at a retail location. Giving will issue them a receipt via email and t

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Feb 08, 2017

Detailed Stripe Transfers in Giving

Today, we're launching detailed Stripe Transfer reports within Planning Center Giving. Stripe is the payment processor that powers Giving and Registrations. After funds are collected, Stripe transfers these funds to your church bank account. These new Stripe Transfer Reports in Giving will help your bookkeepers understand what's in each transfer so the deposits are easier to balance with your general ledger. Here is the new screen: All your Stripe Transfers are listed on the left with

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Feb 01, 2017

Printable Views in Giving

We've made two changes to Planning Center Giving that will make your life a little easier when bringing Giving data from the screen to the printer. "Print View" There's a new option in the "Export" menu: "Print View." Selecting this option will open a print-friendly view in a new browser tab. You'll find this on the Dashboard, Donations view, and anywhere you see a listing of donations such as the Batch page and Donor page. Generally Printable Pages Now, when you select Fil

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Dec 20, 2016

Faster, Flexible Batches

We love your feedback. We need it. We crave it. It's our compass. After 18 months and 6,373 help-desk tickets (as of this moment) it's easy to see which parts of Planning Center Giving are working well and which areas need improvement. Our project queue is still a mile long but as we round out 2016, we wanted to improve an existing feature: batches. Batches are how cash and check donations are added to the system. It's a core concept in Giving. In practice, working with batches felt a bit ted

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Nov 30, 2016

Viewing, Exporting, and Contacting Donors

We've added new donor list functionality within Planning Center Giving! Now you can quickly get to your list of donors, download it as a CSV, or email the entire list right from Giving. Let's take a look at the new "View Existing Donors" section: 1. Date range & filters - Narrow the list down to only those donors who gave during a certain date range. Additionally, you can add a filter to include only donors who gave to a specific fund or gave a donation with a specific label. 2. "Only n

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Oct 13, 2016

Text-to-Give is Now Free

Here's how it went down: Jeff (our CEO): Hey, I was thinking about Text-to-Give yesterday. Me (Giving product manager): Yeah? What's up? Jeff: What if we made it free? Me: Well, it takes money to run that service. Like, the short code and the SMS messages themselves. And we'll have those costs when we release in Canada too. Jeff: Yeah. Me: You're saying, we'll just eat that? Let me crunch some num– Jeff: I've never liked that it was an add-on. Have you? Me: No. We could roll it into th

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read