10 Best Church Accounting Software of 2024
As a church administrator, it is hard for you to manage all the church's finances with the extensive list of obligations that you already have.
A church accounting software will ensure that the donations and membership management systems are streamlined with all donations recorded and tagged for tax purposes.
With a tool administering your finances this way, you will solidify the donors' decisions to invest in your organization as one prosperous for the community, strengthen the relationships with your staff and manage their compensation, and attain this reputable image for a long time.
Listed below are the church accounting software that strikes the balance between excellent performance and affordability almost perfectly, and there is one that is an ideal match for your church regardless of the size.
Best Church Accounting Software Options
1. Aplos
Best Overall Church Accounting Software.
The most common accounting choice for church and nonprofit organizations, Aplos covers the complete church bookkeeping requirements like bank transaction import, bill tracking and payment, invoice creation, payment receiving, check printing, 1099 tracking, and more.
Aplos allows you to track donors, manage donations, allocate income and expenses, and the robust reporting capability lets you track donations with giving statements, budgets, funds by project, campaign, or department.
You can create mobile-friendly donation forms for mission trips, special events, or capital campaigns.
The integration with the payroll service Gusto, which is often selected the top pick when listing the best payroll companies for small businesses, lets you self-service and create employee profiles so you can administer health benefits and compensation, or it can pay the employee and contractor wages, state and federal taxes on your behalf.
Pricing
The Aplos Suite is $14.75 per month.
Pros
- Receive gifts and donations online and through mobile giving
- Enable recurring gifts and donations and cover the processing fees
- Built-in donor management and fundraising tools
- Create mobile-friendly donation forms for mission trips, special events, or capital campaigns
- Track pastoral payroll, housing allowances, and make tax payments through Gusto
- Fixed-asset tracking
- Budgets by fund
- Manage multiple entities
Aplos offers everything you need for streamlined church accounting management with built-in donor management and fundraising tools, as well as online gifts and donations, project, campaign, and department reporting, pledge tracking, and much more.
2. PowerChurch Software
Best Low-Cost Church Accounting Software.
Through PowerChurch Software, you can track donations and pledges, process unlimited payroll transactions, and manage your church funds while being able to choose between the desktop or cloud-based version in the PowerChurch Plus program.
The accounting, membership management, and recordkeeping system PowerChurch enables growing churches to start accounting fast with a setup assistant.
The program allows its users to track budgets, create invoices and accept payments from accounts receivable customers, print accounts payable, generate accurate reports and insightful graphs, and more.
PowerChurch comes with an integrated payroll software as a standard feature of their package, which allows you to print checks for your employees, automatically calculate tax deductions, calculate all payroll tax, process the necessary quarterly and year-end tax forms.
Pricing
Downloading PowerChurch Plus through the New User module will cost you $395.00 and $159.00 through the Upgrade module.
Pros
- Track bank accounts
- Multiple checking accounts
- Reconcile bank statements
- Generate church balance sheet, liability accounts, restricted funds, equity accounts, income accounts, expense accounts
- Enter invoices as you receive them and then print checks
- Supports a variety of check formats and layouts, including the Canadian cheque format
- Track Canadian HST tax reclaim with minimum setup
- Calculate tax deduction amounts for each employee
- Generate 941 reports and make tax deposits
In PowerChurch's complete church administration software package, you can maintain memberships, contributors, accounting, event scheduling, and record keeping functionalities at the highest level at a price that even the small churches can afford.
3. CahabaWorks
Best Church Accounting Software for Managing Members, Groups, Contributions, Fund Accounting Financials, and Child Check-In.
Covering donation management, financial reporting, payroll, membership & small group management, and child check-in, CahabaWorks delivers a locally installed comprehensive church accounting solution.
Through the members module, you can view information about the people in your church and their households, with the flexibility to set up households, assign relationships, enter notes, view contributions, and manage pledges.
Organize and manage information about small groups in your church through multiple levels of categories like Sunday school, youth, and so on, and track attendance by the individual or total count.
Create funds that the contributors are allocated to, create and manage bank accounts, and view all financial accounts associated with your funds.
Pricing
When you confirm your Church ID and enter other basic information, you can access the software's pricing.
Pros
- Set up custom layouts and filters for members lists
- Organize small groups into several categories
- Track attendance of small groups by the individual or total count
- Group contributions into batch deposits
- Create checking and savings accounts
- View balance/equity, income, expense, and dedicated accounts
- Manage church employee compensation and liabilities and expenses related to payroll
- Generate IRS 941and W-2 form reports
Covering everything from e-Giving and child check-in capabilities to groups, contributions, financials, and payroll, CahabaWorks is an affordable and user-friendly solution for growing churches that will help you maximize the impact of your institution within the faith community.
4. FlockBase
Best Church Accounting Software for Small to Mid-Sized Churches.
Letting you manage your church's finances with ease, FlockBase allows you to track your fund balances, pay your staff and comply with IRS regulations, track balances, income, and expenses by the fund.
You can create and print checks to pay your vendors and staff, track your spending and align it with your budget, and pay your staff and vendors through direct deposits.
All the software's features integrate with one another, and, you can even access the functionality of online giving and text-to-give via credit and debit cards, eChecks, and recurring payments.
Keep records of your church members, track which members and households participate in which groups, log contributions for year-end statements, track fulfilled pledges, record and report attendance figures, and deploy email and texting for easy congregation and contributions management.
Pricing
The Cloud Basic plan is $16 per month.
Pros
- Keep records of members and track members and households participating in groups
- Log contributions for year-end contribution statements
- Online giving and text-to-give
- Follow fulfilled pledges
- Record and report attendance
- Check-in members via kiosk or volunteer portal
- Easy congregation and contributions management
- Teach your staff and volunteers how to use the software with minimal training
Built to help churches of all sizes, FlockBase will ensure your church staff and volunteers learn the software with minimal training quickly and enable you to optimize your church's finances.
5. ChurchTrac
Powerful, Cost-Effective Church Accounting Software for Member Administration and Church Management.
Through membership management, you can view profiles based on their roles in your organization, like member, donor, or prospect, or use the smart lists to display names based on any criteria.
Send text or voice messages to groups within your church, to the entire congregation, or send bulk emails or newsletters.
You can keep notes on people and families, secure private notes for specific user types, set up step-by-step processes for discipleship, generate reports for birthdays, anniversaries, and display upcoming dates on the dashboard.
Record contributions from donors, accept credit, debit, or ACH donations on your church website or Church Connect page, generate contribution statements and send tax receipts for those who donated.
Import bank transactions, reconcile your bank statements, and categorize your donations and expenses so you can prepare and plan for the future.
Pricing
ChurchTrac offers a Free plan with unlimited names.
Pros
- Secure private notes for specific users only
- Set up custom, step-by-step processes for discipleship
- Generate reports for important dates like birthdays and anniversaries
- Record spiritual gifts, abilities, personality traits with S.H.A.P.E. ministry profiles
- Create pledge campaigns, connect giving batches with accounting deposits, set up recurring donations
- Print checks in several layouts, set up recurring transactions, locate transactions that meet your criteria
- Credit card processing fees as low as 2.3%
ChurchTrac is simple yet scalable, and it allows you to make deposits simple and easy to track, generate income statements, balance sheets, fund statements while streamlining the ideal budget for any occasion.
6. Breeze
#1 User-Friendly Church Accounting Software.
Along with financial management, Breeze lets you store and organize the members' data with custom fields that will display any details you wish, add dates for background check renewals, child food allergies, spiritual gifts, or anything else beneficial to your church.
Foster the good financial health of your organization by tracking giving, generating giving reports, texting giving, sending giving statements, and entering hundreds of gifts showing who paid what and to which funds.
Increase donations with one-time or recurring online gifts through text messages with no additional cost, and send customizable year-end giving statements recognizing the generosity of your community.
Pricing
Breeze will cost you $50 per month with unlimited people and users.
Pros
- Group volunteers, event attendees, small group members with tags
- Compose emails and texts for individuals and groups
- Import data from your previous systems
- Online and text giving
- Giving reports and giving statements
- Group volunteers, event attendees, and small group members
- Bulk import your data
Covering everything from mandatory church accounting tools to live donations, Breeze will let you manage your donors, electronic payments, pledges, small groups, and the whole members' directory while steering you towards intelligent budgeting decisions.
7. IconCMO
Best Church Accounting Software with Unlimited Payroll.
While it requires more than basic bookkeeping knowledge and experience, IconCMO is a comprehensive, low-cost church accounting software with automatic upgrades, nightly backups, compliance with IRS and FASB regulations, alongside fund accounting, online donation management, and event registration capabilities.
Create a church budget for each fund to manage revenues and expenses, write checks, make deposits, reconcile checkbook activity.
After creating a list of vendors and entering invoices, you can track credit card expenses by the fund, organize financial reports through balance sheets and revenue and expense reports.
Update the latest payroll tax tables for your employees and pastors to get paid appropriately.
Pricing
The Base package is $35 per month, and it increases in price as you add different options.
Pros
- Complete fund budgeting with actual revenue and expenses comparison
- Reclassify expenses, adjust budgets and fund assignments
- Write checks, make deposits, reconcile checkbook activity
- View and pay bills for your church
- Manage multiple funds within a single bank account
- Track credit card expenses by the fund
- IRS and FASB compliance
- Electronically file W-2s for your employees
IconCMO will give you access to complete financial reports at all times so you can manage an unlimited number of customers by creating invoices, recording payments, and printing deposit slips, along with unlimited payroll.
8. Church Windows
Ideal Church Accounting Software for Novices, Bookkeepers, and CPAs.
Covering fund accounting, recurring transactions, custom check printing, and automated budgeting, Church Windows can organize and streamline your finances so you can make intelligent financial decisions.
Design the chart of accounts according to your church's needs, keep the money separated by funds, post income and expense transactions and set up recurring transactions, deploy complete bank reconciliation, and accommodate all check formats with custom layout check-printing.
Utilize deposit slips and check registers, generate 1099's for independent contractors and preformatted balance sheets, treasurer's reports, fund activity, accounts payable, and summary of cash activity.
Compare budgets for preceding years, and create the next year's budget automatically while tracking running balances for all accounts and exporting accounts and transactions.
Pricing
To get your quote, you will need to contact Church Windows's sales team.
Pros
- Design individual chart of accounts
- Keep the money separated by funds
- Post income and expense transactions
- Edit transactions in the correction mode
- Connect donations, accounting, and payroll modules for quick transfers
- Identify errors throughout bank reconciliation through the on-screen wizard
- Usable deposit slips and check registers
- Print reports directly or export into different formats
Church Windows's easy setup will allow novices to adjust to the accounting module quickly, and, no matter if you are one, you will gain access to preformatted yet flexible reports to help you manage all cash flow activity.
9. ACS Church Accounting
Best Church Accounting Software for Large Ministries.
Apart from covering the basic church financial tasks like budget tracking, spending by the fund, department, committee, project, and more, it allows you to process outgoing funds, print checks, store vendor information, track invoices, and more.
Coordinate bill payments and issue 1099s, while checking writing, applying e-filing for federal and state tax laws, deploying batch invoicing, and more.
Handle the special needs of churches and pastors and apply housing allowances and insurance, so you can accommodate multiple cost centers, customize with the additions and deductions to pay.
Pricing
ACS doesn't display their pricing information publicly, so you will need to contact their sales team.
Pros
- Schedule recurring invoices
- Print checks automatically by the due date and print 1099s
- File state and federal tax forms online quickly
- Address housing allowances and insurance through payroll
- Customize employee additions and deductions
- Print W-2s and 941s
- Set up employee direct deposits
- Manage purchase orders, assets, inventory, and accounts receivable
ACS's Church Accounting will help you streamline your cash flow and spending, monitor asset values, document insurance claims, and much more while effectively managing your outgoing billings and incoming payments.
10. Quickbooks Desktop Premier Nonprofit Edition
Best Church Accounting Software for Experienced Bookkeepers.
With a robust set of church accounting features such as donation tracking, event management, and reporting, Desktop Premier Nonprofit Edition makes for the perfect fit for a church in need of financial organization.
Automatically categorize bank transactions with improved matching for payees, accounts, and classes, limit data entry with batch editing, and quickly review and resolve discrepancies.
Capture receipt data with a mobile device and automatically categorize receipt expenses and record multiple transactions, schedule automatic statement emails, and establish a recognizable look with payment receipt formatting.
Create rule-based customer groups based on type, status, location, balance, and communicate effectively.
One of the advantages of Quickbooks is that you can easily access all the units within their accounting software package, as their products deliver all the business payment, bill management, and payroll functions for small and medium-sized businesses, and everything else that falls under financial accounting.
Pricing
The Premier Plus 2021 is $299.99 per year.
Pros
- Improved bank feeds
- Automatically send statements
- Customize payment receipts
- End-of-year donation statements, form 990 reports, donor contribution summary reports
- Track financial data by location, department, or profit center separately
- Track and bill clients by time & material, job phase, percentage completion
- Jobs by vendor reports
- Analyze job profitability on a task level
From allowing you to automatically send statements and customize payment receipts to equipping you with end-of-year donation statements, form 990 reports, and donor contribution reports, Desktop Premier 2021 will let you handle all the assets, liabilities, expenses, and other accounting basics, as well as advanced bookkeeping needs for an unlimited number of churches.
How to Choose the Right Church Accounting Software
To choose the right church accounting software, you need to first recognize and look for priority features that transcend the size of your organization or the specific requirements of your community, and we have enlisted them here.
1. Captivating and Insightful Reports
A robust reporting capability that consolidates and analyzes the data through easy-to-read graphs is what a church needs from accounting software for each staff member to understand how the organization receives and spends money.
PowerChurch Software, for example, covers all the budgeting, invoicing, payment processing, account payable & receivable functions while allowing you to generate accurate reports and insightful graphs.
If you do worry that tools like Quickbooks or accountants will leave a senior pastor confused, you can generate more visually pleasing and less accounting terminology-heavy graphs with assistance from the best budgeting apps like Intuit’s Mint.
Timely and accurate reports can demonstrate whether the church is spending its funding appropriately and following donation guidelines, and staying compliant with regulations.
These reports will improve the church's credibility and relationships with highly contributing donors, this generating more prosperity for the organization.
Reports need to be accessible from anywhere, which is something exemplified in the Church Windows software’s preformatted but susceptible to adjustments, balance sheets, treasurer's reports, fund activity, accounts payable, and summary of cash activity reports.
To avoid running out of funds mid-accounting season, Charge Windows equips you with budget creation plans that help you outline the preceding expenses for any scheduled repairs, or something else.
With outlined and accurate reporting capabilities, church managers can make informed internal decisions by compiling, analyzing, interpreting, and deploying durable managerial accounting strategies that will benefit the organization.
2. Account Management and Funding Organization
Imported bank transactions
Keeping the church's investments, funds, and expenses organized are top priorities, and several most important financial organization features will keep the staff and donors reassured in the value of investments.
Imported bank transactions, as Quickbooks's Desktop Premier Nonprofit Edition will show, will lead to improved matching for payees, accounts, and classes when the functionality is robust enough.
As long as your bookkeeper takes responsibility for organizing and recording the financial transactions in such software through the foundation of strong bookkeeping basics, your bank transactions will always be timely and on point.
In Desktop Premier 2021, you can categorize bank transactions with the improved matching capability with more detail by using enhanced rules and batch editing.
This way, you can gain flexibility and efficiency with enhanced rules that permit you to search for and define categorization criteria quickly.
Bill management
Another feature that can simplify the church's bookkeeping, that the best accounting software tools have, and save time and money can be seen in ACS's Church Accounting tool that ensures you always keep track of what you owe and pay the bills on time.
ACS Church Accounting saves you time by coordinating the way your employees pay bills and issue 1099s.
By activating ACS's comprehensive accounts payable module, you give your accounting staff the flexibility to select the cash or accrual method in the setup, which determines invoices in the general ledger, reduce payment processing time with automated entries, ensure prompt bill payments, and raise the level of accounting accuracy.
In the same manner, other church accounting tools like IconCMO and FlockBase will provide time and cost-effective solutions by ensuring your staff can print multiple reports at any time, show the status of payables and payable cash requirements, print checks and 1099 forms at any time, force the invoice payments regardless of the due date, and more.
Automating invoices will simplify the payment collection process, which is why software like Quickbooks is often enlisted among the top billing & invoicing software that provide your followers a convenient way to make payment for the organization.
Online payments
Along with imported bank transactions, automatic expense categorization and matching, and bill management, online payments fall under the crucial church accounting features that will keep the finances of these organizations organized regardless of the circumstances.
Online donation forms are customizable, mobile-friendly forms that can be seen in tools like Aplos that equip donors with the possibility to give directly from their computer or mobile device.
Combining the power of storytelling with email, website, and social media engagement, online donation forms help you collect valuable contributions fast.
Donation widgets allow donors to quickly give to your organization without leaving your website in the form of donation popups.
Text to give is the fastest way for donors to give by texting from a mobile device through a unique toll-free number.
3. Cloud or Desktop Software
Depending on the church's unique needs, you will want to evaluate both the cloud and on-premise versions of church accounting software.
Some churches will prefer paying a one-time fee for desktop accounting software instead of a monthly subscription plan.
Along with incremental payments that won't be a sudden blow to the budget, cloud-based accounting software can bring more advantages to a church organization.
When the new features get developed, your cloud-based software gets updated so the church can access new features with no extra work or additional cost.
While the cloud-based software always has a team at hand that is ready to help, desktop accounting software can become outdated and the support insignificant.
Other advantages like multi-user access, no necessary installation, automatic backups, layered encryption and security mechanisms, and minimal data entry put the cloud-based accounting software as the clear favorite for church organizations looking for a reliable, powerful financial management solution.
FAQ
Church accounting is a specialist accounting and bookkeeping area that requires expertise and an understanding of the charity sector for keeping churches and religious organizations aligned with their financial management requirements.
Church accounting software helps churches and ministries keep their books balanced, track donor contributions, manage campaign fundings, pay vendors and staff, and execute efficient communication regarding all financial decisions and results.
Based on the current market conditions, subscription-based church accounting software ranges from $16 to $79 per month.
Payroll processing, advanced reporting, and other more advanced features can be typically found in the higher-tiered subscription plans, which increases the cost of the subscription.
Keep in mind that for every Aplos that offers a free trial there is a software like PowerChurch that doesn't offer one in their signature plan.
If your church is on the smaller side, we would recommend the QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit Edition that allows you to track your finances, manage your donor lists, pay your staff, and much more.
Which Church Accounting Software Should I Pick?
If you are looking for an accounting solution that is universal and fits all sizes to a great degree, Flock Base will let you keep in-depth records of all members, track funds, deploy payroll, reporting, budgeting, direct deposits, and more while having the easiest interface for your staff and volunteers to master.
For a low-cost solution that will serve you with bank account tracking and reconciliation, accurate report generating, invoicing, printing, taxing features, and an all-inclusive check format support, you can opt for PowerChurch Software because others hardly come close.
What if you want to track pastoral payroll, housing allowances, make tax payments through Gusto while being able to track fixed assets, budget by funds, and create mobile-friendly donation forms all under one platform for under $15?
If that was possible, this would make for the best overall church accounting software on the market.
It is possible, and the software in the case is Aplos that comes as the ideal accounting solution for small to mid-sized churches on the market.