7 Top-Rated Church Accounting Software

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By Shephalii Kapoor

Published | Updated on
13 min read

Faith-based organizations, such as churches, often have complex fund accounting requirements that cannot be managed with traditional accounting techniques. Church accounting software can help these organizations manage their finances, budgets, and donations and comply with tax-exempt regulations.

Considering the variety of software options available on the market, it may be challenging to know which one to select. To help you choose the right tool, we’ve highlighted the top seven accounting software for churches, in alphabetical order, based on verified software reviews. Read more.

The products listed in this article have been categorized into two groups—tools that offer church management features, including church accounting capabilities, and dedicated accounting tools. Some of the common features across all these include—expense tracking, invoicing, and reporting.

1. Aplos

Aplos is a fund accounting platform for churches and other faith-based organizations that helps them manage their books and finances. The software offers a custom chart of accounts that enables administrators to organize and categorize the religious organization’s financial transactions. They can add a fund to this chart, assign a name and color, and even add accounts listing assets, liabilities, expenses, and other details to help them track funds and financial transactions accurately.

Product features of interest:

  • Donation tracking: Record and manage donations received by your church. With this feature, you can also identify your tax-deductible income, manage sponsorship invoices, and track recurring donations.

  • Financial and accounting reports: Check your assets, liabilities, profit/loss, equity accounts, and other financials with over 70 customizable financial and accounting reports, including income statements, balance sheets, budgets, and grant reports. 

  • Giving statements: Create giving statements summarizing the contributions made by your donors over a specific period. You can customize these statements to include your organization’s name, logo, and contact information.

Customer support options: Phone calls, emails, and chat.

Who should consider Aplos?

If you are a church administrator looking for a tool to help you track and manage multiple funds, Aplos can be the right fit for you. With its custom chart of accounts, the tool will enable you to represent your organization's specific financial aspects in various account categories, such as assets, equity, and income. Within each category, you'll find individual accounts with unique names and specific types of transactions. You can add, edit, or delete accounts, record expenses, and create budgets for different accounts.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

Available upon request from the vendor

Device compatibility

2. ChurchTrac

ChurchTrac is an online church management software for churches of all sizes. The software allows church administrators to reconcile bank statements and stay in sync with their banks by matching actual transactions with the bank statements. This feature helps them prevent accounting errors, keep track of the church's finances, understand mismanaged funds, and generate accurate reports to ensure financial transparency.

Product features of interest:

  • Budget creation: Categorize your expenses and donations to create yearly budgets and evaluate the amount spent or received against the budget. You can do either a brief setup or a detailed setup for each budget item.

  • Transaction search: Locate accounting transactions using filters, such as date, payee name, amount, tag, and category. The feature can help you track expenses for a particular category or fund and find uploaded documents related to a transaction. 

  • Accounting reports: Generate income statements, balance sheets, fund statements, and other church accounting reports. You can save these reports as a PDF and print them for future reference.    

Customer support options: Phone calls, emails, and knowledge base.

Who should consider ChurchTrac?

If you are a church’s accounting professional looking for a tool that can assist you with budget creation, you can try ChurchTrac. The software allows you to skip the boring spreadsheets to clone a previous budget and create a fresh copy by tweaking the numbers. This will save you time while creating a new budget. It also offers several budget reports, such as yearly budget, monthly budget, and planned budget vs. actual reports, to help you plan the church finances.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

/ Pro tip

Shortlist a tool that offers reporting capabilities so you can generate, access, and share necessary accounting and financial reports, such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow reports.

3. Realm

Realm is another church management software that assists pastors and administrators in church administration, accounting, and community management. The platform offers payroll runs that automatically process employee salaries’ disbursement by calculating necessary withholdings and processing adjustments, such as employee benefits and additional compensation. It also helps you maintain important details about your employees, such as their profiles and family data, and accommodate special tax requirements and allowances for ministerial members.

Product features of interest:

  • Time entry: Create employee timesheets to manage their schedules and calculate payroll for specific working days. You can also split employees into groups to process their payments and calculate their compensation for particular jobs.

  • Tax filing: Generate, review, and electronically file tax forms, such as 1099s and W-2s, by considering federal, state, and local taxes. The software also offers payroll tax liability reports to get an overview of your organization’s tax obligations.

  • Reporting: Generate, customize, and share accounting reports with others. The software also offers a report history feature that lets you download a recent report you may have lost. 

Customer support options: Phone calls, emails, and chat.

Who should consider Realm?

Church managers looking for a platform to refine their data searches with advanced filtering options can opt for the Realm church management tool. The software’s varied criteria, including attendance status, volunteer roles, age group, and data ranges, will help narrow your searches. It also offers custom fields to store unique data and filter combinations using logical operators, such as AND, OR, and NOT. With the interactive filtering options, you can also select through checkboxes, dropdown options, and input values to enter your filters.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

4. Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is an accounting and financial management platform that can help faith-based organizations automate their accounting processes, such as accounts payable, accounts receivables, and financial reporting, for increased efficiency. The software features an open application programming interface (API) that enables users to connect with other software systems, such as membership management, budgeting, and expense management tools. This also enables real-time data synchronization, providing a comprehensive view of the church’s financial health.

Product features of interest:

  • Automatic data entry: Minimize data entry and save time on repetitive tasks, such as uploading historical bank statements into your accounting software. The feature automatically captures data and publishes it to accounting tools, including Sage Accounting, Sage 50, Xero, or Quickbooks. 

  • Automated invoices: Generate and share invoices with church members and donors without manual intervention. The software allows you to create customized invoices from eight different invoicing templates by including your church’s logo, contact information, and other details. 

  • Financial dashboard: Access financial reports, such as balance sheets and income statements, via an intuitive dashboard. The dashboard offers ten predefined dimensions, including department, item, and employee, to help you filter out information, modify charts, and switch between multiple dashboards. 

Customer support options: Phone calls, chat, and knowledge base.

Who should consider Sage Intacct?

Church accounting professionals looking for a tool to reduce errors in their financial accounts can consider Sage Intacct. The software uses optical character recognition (OCR) to capture data, such as dates and amounts, from various documents, including invoices, receipts, and financial documents. Each extraction is verified for accuracy to ensure error-free entries. This helps users ensure data accuracy as all information is reviewed before publishing.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

/ Pro tip

Opt for a tool that helps you manage and segregate multiple funds, such as general, building, and mission funds. The system should also allow you to track revenues and expenses related to other funds and ensure that the resources allocated to each fund don’t clash with the others.

5. Quickbooks Online

Quickbooks Online is an accounting solution with tools that can assist church leaders with budgeting, payroll management, and expense tracking. The software offers a class-tracking feature that uses fund accounting to help churches track accounting transactions by departments, funds, or programs. You can set up classes for different projects within the church to get an overview of the income and expenses for each project separately.

Product features of interest:

  • Cash flow management: Automatically track the amount you owe stakeholders, such as congregation members and vendors, to ensure that the bills are paid on time. The software also helps you spot trends in your cash flows and assess past data to manage your budget. 

  • Expense categorization: Sort your expenses into categories, such as rent and supplies, to keep your financial data organized. With this feature, church members can track their expenditures at any time of the year and ensure they never miss an important tax deduction. 

  • Donation management: Accept donations online via credit, debit, and automated clearing house (ACH) transactions. Users can also tag donations to specific funds and programs to refer them whenever required.  

Customer support options: Phone calls, chat, and online FAQs.

Who should consider Quickbooks Online?

If you are a church accountant looking for a tool with features that can assist you with fund accounting, Quickbooks Online can be an option. Besides the class tracking feature, the software enables you to track multiple funds with bank sub-accounts. While the total of all your funds can be recorded to a single bank account, you can set up different sub-accounts for each fund for the purpose of tracking. Moreover, the class tracking feature in Quickbooks helps you generate profit and loss reports by class to review fund income and expenses.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

6. Wave Accounting

Wave Accounting is another accounting tool that allows users to scan billing and invoicing receipts on the go. The software automatically provides an easily accessible backup of the receipts on smartphones or tablets. With this feature on their mobile, church staff, and volunteers can scan unlimited receipts and bulk import up to 10 receipts at a time. This will save time and ensure faster processing of reimbursement requests.

Product features of interest:

  • Secure bank data connections: Connect unlimited bank accounts to your system while ensuring the security of your transactions. Bank data connections in Wave Accounting are read-only and are secured by a 256-bit encryption. The software offers payment card industry (PCI) compliance for added security.

  • Online payments: Quickly accept payments online via all major cards—Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. You can accept credit card payments over the phone, online, or even in person via a POS system, card readers, and merchant accounts. 

  • Recurring invoices: Generate and customize professional-looking invoices any day of the week, month, or timezone. You can use this feature to set up credit card payments for your repeat customers automatically. 

Customer support options: Emails, chat, and knowledge base.

Who should consider Wave Accounting?

Churches working on a budget can use Wave Accounting for their accounting needs. It is a free tool that offers unlimited income and expense tracking and allows you to add unlimited collaborators and partners. Moreover, it helps you make unlimited bank connections and access helpful accounting reports, such as overdue invoices and profit and loss statements. It even has monthly and yearly mobile receipts to help accountants save time and conveniently access important expense information digitally.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

/ Pro tip

Select a church accounting system that supports budget creation, tracking, and comparison against actual financials. This will help you optimize your expenditure and forecast financial requirements.

7. Xero

Xero is an accounting solution that can help charity organizations make and receive payments in multiple currencies, including the Euro, Indian Rupee, and New Zealand dollars. This multi-currency support is important for instant conversions. With this feature, users can check how fluctuations in exchange rates affect their cash flows and profits. Church administrators can use Xero to add various foreign currencies that are necessary for their operations.

Product features of interest:

  • Mobile app: Manage invoices, reconcile transactions, and add new contacts with the Xero mobile app, available for Android and iOS users. You can use the app to track overdue payments, bills, and bank balances.

  • Purchase order management: Create and send digital purchase orders and keep track of deliveries. The software offers templates to help users create and customize orders using order numbers and items. You can also convert them to bills. 

  • Third-party integrations: Integrate with over 1000 third-party applications and connect with apps, such as church management, donation management, payroll, and event management tools for your charity-based organization. 

Customer support options: Phone calls, emails, and knowledge base.

Who should consider Xero?

International churches that receive donations or grants from different currencies can use Xero to simplify multi-currency transactions. With support for over 160 currencies, Xero can be a helpful tool for churches engaging in cross-border financial activities. The multi-currency feature helps these organizations assign a default foreign currency to a specific contact, change the currency on individual transactions, and generate foreign and local currency reports to view their financial transactions.

Analysis accurate as of October 2023

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$15 per month

Billing cycle

Billed monthly

Device compatibility

How much does church accounting software cost?

Church accounting software can cost as low as $9 per month, or more than $350 per month, depending on various factors—features, user licensing, customizations, users, integrations, and nonprofit discounts. The best accounting software for churches typically offers the following pricing plans:

  • Free trials: No-cost plans range from 15 days to a month, offering access to all or limited software features. These are ideal for organizations that want to try a tool before investing.

  • Free versions: Free plans offer limited access to basic software features. These are ideal for small churches on a budget.

  • Entry-level plans: Start at $9 per month and offer limited features. These are suitable for accounting professionals who need basic features, such as income and expense tracking, invoicing, and payment management. 

  • Mid-tier plans: Range from $20 to $229 per month and offer advanced features, such as payroll and federal withholding, tax forms, calendar integration, and bank reconciliation. These are suitable for churches that have outgrown entry-level tools but don’t require the full range of functionality offered by enterprise-level tools.

  • High-end plans: Advanced plans can cost more than $350 per month and offer a range of advanced features, including an increased number of users, priority support, and a dedicated account representative. These plans are suitable for organizations with complex accounting requirements.

Hidden costs associated with church accounting software

Besides the software license price, additional costs associated with church software include: 

  • Add-ons and modules: Some software may require you to purchase additional modules or features, such as payroll processing and online giving, which may be required for your accounting tool to work smoothly. These might add to your original cost. 

  • Integration charges: Often, church accounting tools need to integrate with other church management systems, such as expense management, budgeting, and donation management tools, to improve their overall functioning. Small businesses need to take such integration costs into consideration, as these might be substantial. 

  • Upgrades and maintenance charges: If you’re using on-premise solutions, you may have to bear some additional charges, such as software updates, security patches, data backups, and infrastructure maintenance costs.

Frequently asked questions when selecting church accounting software

Here are some questions to ask software vendors before purchasing the best church accounting software:

Does the software offer expense tracking?

Before investing in the best church accounting software, make sure that the software is able to manage your church expenses, including payroll, utilities, and supplies. Ask your vendor whether the tool has the capabilities to record and categorize expenses, associate these expenses with their corresponding vendors, and have tools that enable expense approval processes.

Does the tool comply with nonprofit regulations?

It is important for a church accounting system to consider all the necessary nonprofit accounting standards, tax regulations, and reporting requirements. Some of these could be charitable contribution deductions, Form 990, and the requirements under the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

Does the system integrate with online giving platforms?

Integration with online giving platforms, such as Tithe.ly and Donorbox, is necessary to simplify donation processing and automatic entry into your accounting system. This will give you real-time visibility into donations received, allowing church administrators to monitor their church’s financial health and track donations.


Methodology

To be considered for this list, products had to:

  • Feature in Capterra Shortlist 2023 for church accounting software. We selected the top seven products with the highest ratings to include in this article.

  • Meet our church accounting software market definition: “Church accounting software includes specialized tools for churches to manage funds and donations, church expenses, and financial reporting.”

  • Cater to religious organizations and offer the following core features: accounts payable, accounts receivable, fund accounting, and general ledger.

Read more about our editorial independence.

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Capterra's church accounting software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Capterra directory that offer them. Only products with publicly available pricing information (as of October 27, 2023) were considered for pricing calculation.


Looking for Church Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Church Management software solutions.

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About the Author

Shephalii Kapoor profile picture

Shephalii Kapoor is a writer at Capterra. She helps small businesses identify the right software for their needs by analyzing user reviews for top-rated software products. Prior to Capterra, she worked as an assistant content manager at InfoEdge India Ltd. She has also worked in company law, aviation, and real estate. She is a published author and has contributed to various magazines and websites. During her free time, she enjoys reading.

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