Sunday morning giving goes into the plate. A few members pay online through your website. One family mails a check. Another drops cash at the office on a Tuesday. By the time the treasurer sits down to reconcile the month, the numbers are in at least three places — a Stripe dashboard, a notebook, a spreadsheet — and none of them agree with each other. Chasing down the right figure before you can record anything takes longer than the recording itself.

The problem compounds over time. Corrections get made on the fly, with no record of who changed what or why. By December, when you need to show the congregation what was received and from whom, the data has too many gaps and too many unexplained adjustments to trust. This guide walks through what Daviah does to close those gaps — and is honest about one part of the problem it does not yet solve.

Online gifts recorded the moment they happen

Your church website can carry a give button with suggested amounts. When a member or visitor uses it, the gift goes straight to your own Stripe account — Daviah takes no cut of the money, and Stripe's fees come out of the transaction just as they would on any other card payment your church accepts. The payment is recorded in the office only once Stripe confirms the money has actually moved.

That single step removes the most common source of reconciliation errors: someone recording a payment before it has cleared, or forgetting to record it at all. The online giving record in Daviah and the record in your Stripe account will always match, because they are the same event.

Cash, check and envelope giving entered once, in order

Not every member gives by card. Cash envelopes, checks and other offline giving are entered by hand, and each one gets a receipt number that runs in sequence for the year. There is no separate spreadsheet to maintain alongside the office — everything lives in the same record.

Because the sequence is automatic, gaps are immediately visible. If receipt 47 is missing when you reach 48, you know something was skipped. That kind of built-in order check is hard to replicate in a general-purpose spreadsheet.

Corrections that leave a trail

Every treasurer eventually needs to waive a charge, void a duplicate or correct an amount that was entered wrong. In Daviah, those decisions belong to the treasurer, and every one of them is recorded with a reason in the audit trail. The original entry stays; the correction is written on top of it, not instead of it.

That append-only trail means you can always show what the record looked like before a change was made, who made it, and why. If a question comes up later — from a member, a ministry leader or anyone reviewing the books — you have an answer.

Raising giving for the whole congregation in one step

At the start of a giving period the treasurer raises the charge for everyone at once, rather than entering each member individually. Members then see what they owe when they sign in to the congregation portal, and can pay by card from there if they choose.

The portal is on your own church website, not a separate platform. Members sign in to update their details, see their giving record, and pay what they owe — all under your church's own address.

Reports and exports for the treasurer and whoever reviews the books

Dues, payments and members can be exported to CSV at any time. The reports in the office are counted live from the records — not from a cached snapshot that might be a day old. That means what you see when you run a dues report is what is actually in the system at that moment.

Those exports work even if the organisation's subscription lapses. The records stay readable and the CSV exports keep working, so the treasurer is never locked out of the data at the worst possible moment.

What Daviah does not yet do: formal year-end giving statements

The pain described at the top of this page includes year-end giving statements — the formal documents your congregation members need for their own records, and that carry legal weight in many places. Scattered data and reconciliation errors feed directly into problems with those statements.

Daviah closes the data and reconciliation side of that problem: online gifts are captured automatically, offline payments are recorded with sequenced receipts, corrections leave a trail, and the full record can be exported. But the platform does not currently generate a formatted year-end giving statement and send it to each member. That step — producing and distributing the document itself — still belongs to the treasurer, using the exported data and whatever document process your church already has.

That is an honest gap. If formal statement generation and delivery is the most pressing part of your giving-records problem, this guide cannot promise Daviah solves it.

Questions

Does Daviah take a percentage of our online giving?

No. Card payments go straight to your church's own Stripe account. Your church is the merchant, pays Stripe's fees directly, and Daviah takes no cut of the money.

What happens if a member gives by cash or check — is that recorded separately?

Cash, check and other offline payments are entered by hand in the office, each with a receipt number that runs in sequence for the year. Everything sits in the same record alongside card payments, so there is no separate spreadsheet to reconcile at the end of the month.

Can the treasurer correct a mistake without losing the original entry?

Yes. Waiving, voiding and correcting charges is the treasurer's decision and every correction is written into the audit trail with a reason. The trail is append-only, so the original entry stays visible alongside the correction.

Can members see their own giving record?

Members can sign in to a private portal on your own church website to see their record and pay what they owe by card. The portal is part of your church's own site, not a separate platform.

Will Daviah produce and send year-end giving statements to our congregation?

Not at this time. Daviah records and reconciles giving, and the full record can be exported to CSV. But generating a formatted year-end giving statement and sending it to each member is not something the platform currently does. That step still belongs to the treasurer.

What can be exported from the giving records?

Members, dues, payments and officers can all be exported to CSV at any time. Those exports continue to work even if the organisation's subscription lapses, so the treasurer is never locked out of the data.

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