--- title: How to set up online giving and keep every gift in one ledger description: Connect payouts once, share a giving page that works without an account, record Sunday's cash and cheques beside it, and give your treasurer one record to trust. date: 2026-09-08 author: The Cendance Team category: guides tags: [finance, giving, funds] image: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1599659593072-10de2e109486?q=70&w=1600&auto=format&fit=crop image_credit: Andrew Moca on Unsplash canonical: https://cendance.com/blog/online-giving-every-gift-in-one-ledger --- # How to set up online giving and keep every gift in one ledger Giving reaches a church five different ways on a normal Sunday. A card tapped on a phone during the offering, a cheque folded into the plate, an e-transfer with the fund name in the memo, cash in an envelope, and the monthly gift someone set up in the spring and has not thought about since. Each one is real generosity. The treasurer's job is to turn all five into one accurate record, and that job is where most churches lose their Monday. Here is how giving works in Cendance, from the giver's phone to the fund report, with one ledger underneath all of it. Start with payouts, once. Under Settings, connect your organization to Stripe and complete the verification. Gifts settle into your church's own bank account, and once Stripe has verified your legal name, your giving page shows a Verified badge beside it. Decide there whether to invite givers to cover transaction fees. When it is on, the give form offers a pre-checked option to add a little extra so the full gift reaches the ministry, and the ledger records the gift itself, with the coverage tracked separately. Then share the giving page. It is a public link that works without an account: suggested amounts or any amount, a choice of the funds you have made public, each with a one-line description, and a name and email for the receipt. Members who sign in to Eden get the same form plus a recurring option, weekly, monthly, or yearly, and a history of what they have given. For people who prefer a bank transfer or an e-transfer, publish those details under Other ways to give, per campus if your campuses bank separately. ![A church's public giving page in Cendance: suggested amounts, a choice of funds with descriptions, and the option to cover transaction fees.](/blog/screenshots/online-giving-every-gift-in-one-ledger/give-page.png) Sunday's offering comes in on paper, and that is fine. Record cash and cheques by hand with the giver, fund, method, date, and a memo for the cheque number. If your counting team keeps a spreadsheet, import it instead: you preview what will be created, run the import, and undo the whole batch if a column was mapped wrong. Entries can sit as drafts until the count is confirmed, then post in bulk. Every gift, online or on paper, lands on the giver's profile in People. Online gifts are matched to a person by email when the payment settles, or a new person is created, so someone who first gave through the public page is already in your directory when they walk in next Sunday. ![The givings list in Cendance, with online, cheque, cash, and wire gifts posted against their funds.](/blog/screenshots/online-giving-every-gift-in-one-ledger/givings.png) Funds turn a pile of gifts into a story you can tell. Create a fund for anything you want to track on its own: the general fund, benevolence, the building project, this year's missions. Give it a target and a due date and the fund page shows progress toward it, along with who contributed, the average gift, and everything else that flowed in, whether from giving, shop sales, tickets, or course fees. Who approves changes to a fund, or to a gift already posted against it, is decided in Access Control: a Finance role can cover the whole organization, one campus, or a single fund. Set how many approvals each fund needs, and the fund page shows who can give them and warns you when there are too few. ![A fund's page in Cendance, showing contributors, average gift, giving raised beside shop and course proceeds, and who can approve changes to the fund.](/blog/screenshots/online-giving-every-gift-in-one-ledger/fund.png) The record stays trustworthy because it is hard to change quietly. Once entries have been reviewed and locked, changing one means an unlock request that a second person approves, with the reason on file. A refund on an online gift is recorded against the original entry rather than deleted. Reports summarize giving by campus, year, and month, and the statements tab generates the financial statement your regulator expects from the same figures, so year end starts from numbers that already agree with each other. Security runs underneath without any setup from you. The public page is protected against card testing, and 3D Secure steps in whenever a giver's bank asks for it. You will find giving, funds, and reports under [Finance](/products/finance) in your [Cendance dashboard](https://dash.cendance.com/dashboard?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=online-giving-every-gift-in-one-ledger). Connect payouts this week, share the giving link on Sunday, and let the ledger take care of Monday. ## Related posts - [How to care for your church community through hard times](/blog/care-for-your-community-through-hard-times.md) - [The complete planning center for your church](/blog/the-complete-planning-center-for-your-church.md) - [How to make a free and powerful church directory](/blog/how-to-make-a-free-church-directory.md) - [How to sell your church's study guides and recordings online](/blog/the-study-guide-that-delivers-itself.md) - [How to run Sunday check-in, from the welcome desk to the pickup code](/blog/sunday-check-in-from-welcome-desk-to-pickup-code.md) - [How leaderboards and ratings keep a training program healthy](/blog/keep-training-alive-with-leaderboards-and-ratings.md)