The Integration That Saves Church Admins the Most Time

Every Monday morning, a church administrator in east Tennessee opens two browser tabs. One is her giving platform. The other is her church management system. She starts with the giving report from Sunday, scrolls through each transaction, and manually types the donor’s name, gift amount, fund designation, and date into the corresponding record in the ChMS. Forty-seven transactions this past week. Each one takes about 90 seconds if the donor’s name matches cleanly. Longer if someone gave under a slightly different name, or if their spouse made the gift instead, or if a new visitor gave for the first time and doesn’t exist in the system yet.

By the time she finishes, she has spent nearly two hours on a task that amounts to copying numbers from one screen to another. She does this every week. She has done it for three years.

She is not doing anything unusual. In most churches with separate giving and management platforms, this is simply what Monday looks like.

Two systems, one problem

Most churches end up with at least two core pieces of software: a giving platform that handles online donations and a church management system that tracks members, attendance, groups, and communications. Sometimes these are from the same provider. Often they are not.

When they are not connected, every gift that comes in through the giving platform has to be entered again in the ChMS. Not because anyone decided that was a good workflow. Because nobody set up the integration that would make it unnecessary.

The giving platform already has the data. The donor’s name, the amount, the date, the fund. The ChMS needs that exact same data to generate year-end giving statements, to track a family’s generosity trends over time, to flag when a consistent giver suddenly stops. Both systems need the same information. The question is whether a person copies it by hand or whether the systems share it automatically.

In a church of 75 regular givers, manual entry adds up to roughly 90 minutes to two hours per week. That’s conservative. In a church of 200, it’s closer to three or four hours. Over a year, that’s somewhere between 75 and 200 hours of staff time spent on a task that a properly configured integration handles in the background with zero human effort.

Those hours belong somewhere else.

Which platforms sync natively

Not every giving platform connects with every ChMS. But the two most common pairings for churches in the 50-to-300 range both offer native integrations that require no custom code and no third-party middleware.

Tithe.ly giving with Tithe.ly ChMS. If you use Tithe.ly (affiliate link) for both giving and church management, the sync is automatic. Giving data flows directly into member records in the ChMS. When a donation comes in through Tithe.ly Giving, the transaction appears in the donor’s profile in Tithe.ly ChMS without anyone touching it. Fund designations carry over. Recurring gifts log automatically each time they process. Year-end giving statements pull from the same unified data set, which means no reconciliation headaches in January.

This is the simplest version of the integration because both products are built by the same company and designed to talk to each other from the start. If you are currently using Tithe.ly for giving but a different system for church management, this is worth considering. Moving your ChMS is not a small decision, but the time savings from a native integration are real and compounding.

Planning Center with Stripe. Planning Center’s giving module (Planning Center Giving) uses Stripe as its payment processor. If you’re already in the Planning Center ecosystem for services, check-ins, groups, and people management, adding Planning Center Giving means your donation data lives in the same platform as everything else. A gift that comes in through Planning Center Giving automatically attaches to the person’s record in Planning Center People. No export, no import, no copying between tabs.

For churches already using Planning Center for other functions, this is often the most natural path. You’re not adding a new system. You’re activating a module within a system your team already knows.

What if you use a different combination? If your giving platform and ChMS are from different providers and neither offers a native connection to the other, you have two options. Some platforms support integration through Zapier or a similar automation tool, which can push data from one system to the other based on triggers you define. The setup is more involved, and there is a monthly cost for the Zapier plan, but it can work. The other option is to evaluate whether consolidating onto a single provider makes sense for your church. That’s a bigger conversation, but the integration question is often the thing that tips the decision.

How to set up the sync

The specifics depend on your platform pairing, but the process follows the same logic in every case. You connect the systems, map the data fields, test with a small transaction, and verify that everything landed where it should.

Tithe.ly giving to tithe.ly chms

If you’re using both Tithe.ly products, most of this is already done for you. Log into your Tithe.ly admin dashboard and navigate to the ChMS section. Confirm that giving sync is enabled. It should be on by default, but it is worth verifying, especially if you added the ChMS after you had already been using Tithe.ly Giving for a while.

Check the donor matching settings. Tithe.ly matches incoming gifts to member profiles based on email address. If a donor gives using an email that matches a profile in the ChMS, the gift attaches automatically. If no match is found, the system creates a new profile. Review these unmatched profiles periodically, because sometimes a member gives using a different email than the one in their ChMS record. When that happens, you can merge the profiles manually, and future gifts from that email will attach correctly going forward.

Verify that your fund designations in the giving platform match the fund names in the ChMS. If you renamed a fund on one side but not the other, gifts may land in a general or uncategorized bucket. This takes two minutes to check and prevents hours of confusion during financial reviews.

Planning center giving

If you’re adding Planning Center Giving to an existing Planning Center account, the integration with Planning Center People is built in. When you set up Planning Center Giving, you’ll connect a Stripe account for payment processing. Follow the setup wizard, which walks you through connecting Stripe, configuring your giving page, and setting fund designations.

Once giving is active, donations automatically link to the corresponding person record in Planning Center People. The matching works through Planning Center’s internal profile system, so if someone gives using the same email or login they use for check-in or group registration, the gift attaches to the right person without any extra steps.

After setup, make a small test donation yourself. Give $1 to your general fund using the same email address attached to your Planning Center profile. Then check your People record and confirm the donation appears. Check the fund designation. Check the date. This five-minute test catches configuration issues before they affect real giving data.

After the initial setup

Regardless of which platform pairing you use, run a parallel check for the first two weeks. Process giving normally through the integration, but also pull a manual giving report and compare it against what shows up in the ChMS. You’re looking for three things: missing transactions (gifts that processed but didn’t sync), mismatched donors (gifts that attached to the wrong person or created a duplicate profile), and incorrect fund designations.

Two weeks of parallel checking is usually enough to catch any configuration issues. Once you’re confident the data is flowing correctly, you can retire the manual process entirely.

What to check monthly

A working integration is not a set-it-and-forget-it situation. It’s closer to set-it-and-check-it-monthly. The sync itself runs automatically, but small issues can accumulate if nobody looks.

Unmatched donations. Every month, pull up the list of gifts that didn’t match to an existing member profile. These are usually new visitors, members who gave from a different email address, or spelling variations that the system couldn’t resolve automatically. Match them manually. This takes five to ten minutes and keeps your giving records accurate.

Duplicate profiles. When the system can’t match a donor, it creates a new profile. Over time, you can end up with two or three profiles for the same person, each with a portion of their giving history. Check for duplicates monthly and merge them. Most platforms have a built-in duplicate detection tool that flags likely matches. In Tithe.ly ChMS, look under People for merge suggestions. In Planning Center, the People module has a “possible duplicates” section.

Fund designation accuracy. Confirm that gifts are landing in the correct funds. If you recently added a new fund to your giving platform, make sure the corresponding fund exists in your ChMS and that the names match. A mismatched fund name is the most common cause of gifts ending up in the wrong category.

Giving statement preview. Once a quarter, preview a giving statement for a known donor and compare it against the giving platform’s transaction history for that person. The numbers should match exactly. If they don’t, you have a sync issue that needs attention before year-end statements go out. Catching this in March is a minor inconvenience. Catching it in January, after statements have already been mailed, is a significant problem.

The time you get back

Two hours per week is a reasonable estimate for manual giving entry in a church of 75 to 150 regular givers. Some churches spend more, especially during high-giving seasons like December or Easter. Over a year, that’s at least 100 hours. For a church where the person entering that data is also the person planning services, managing volunteers, answering pastoral emails, and preparing the bulletin, 100 hours is not a rounding error. It’s a meaningful portion of their capacity.

But the time savings, as significant as they are, may not be the most important thing this integration protects.

What it protects is accuracy.

A human being typing 50 transactions into a system every Monday will make mistakes. Transposed digits. A gift attributed to the wrong family member. A $500 donation entered as $50. These errors are inevitable over time, and they surface at the worst possible moment: when a member receives a year-end giving statement that doesn’t match their records. That conversation is uncomfortable for everyone involved. It erodes trust in the church’s administrative competence. And it’s entirely preventable.

An automated sync transfers data exactly as it was recorded. No transposition errors. No misattributed gifts. No accidental decimal shifts. The data that enters the giving platform is the data that appears in the ChMS, every time, without variation.

That consistency matters. When a member pulls up their giving history and sees accurate records, they feel confident that their generosity is being stewarded well. When the finance team runs a report and the numbers reconcile on the first pass, they can focus their energy on financial planning instead of error correction. When year-end statements go out in January and nobody calls with a discrepancy, that silence is the sound of a system working the way it should.

What if you’re starting from scratch

If your church doesn’t currently use a giving platform or a ChMS, you’re actually in a strong position. You can choose tools that integrate from day one and avoid the manual-entry problem entirely.

Tithe.ly (affiliate link) offers both giving and church management in a single ecosystem, which is worth evaluating if simplicity and native integration are priorities. Planning Center offers a modular approach where you can start with just the pieces you need and add giving when you’re ready. Both are used by thousands of churches in the size range where these tools make the most difference.

The worst time to think about integration is after you’ve been doing manual entry for two years and your data is split across platforms with no clean way to merge it. The best time is before you pick your tools, when you can choose systems that already talk to each other.

One thing to do this week

Log into your giving platform and your ChMS. Open them side by side. Look at last Sunday’s giving data in the giving platform, then check whether that same data exists in the ChMS. If it does and you didn’t enter it manually, your integration is working. Verify the amounts match and the fund designations are correct.

If the data isn’t there, or if someone on your team typed it in by hand, you have an integration to set up. The process described above takes less than an hour for most platform pairings. The return on that hour will show up every single Monday for as long as your church uses those tools.

Your church administrator’s time is too valuable to spend copying numbers between screens. The tools already know how to share. Somebody just needs to tell them to.