Donor management in ExpensePlus vs in ChurchSuite
However, you will need to choose either ExpensePlus or ChurchSuite for managing donors and claiming Gift Aid on donations.
Donor management in ExpensePlus
There are many tools in ExpensePlus to help you manage your donors and donations:
- Viewing donation reports
- Streamlined Gift Aid management
- Managing donor pledges
- Recording donor communications
- Tracking donor engagement
- Producing donor statements
- Tagging donors (enabling you to filter donor reports and actions by tag)
- Integration with LoveGiving (enabling you to accept online donations and Gift Aid)
By using ExpensePlus to manage Donations and Gift Aid there is no risk of anyone with access to ChurchSuite being able to see your donor-giving data. There will be no need for donations data to reside in ChurchSuite to begin with - indeed you can simply keep all your finances, donations and Gift Aid management all in one place inside ExpensePlus.
Donor management in ChurchSuite
So why might you choose to use ChurchSuite instead of ExpensePlus?
ChurchSuite has many of the brilliant tools you will find in ExpensePlus, including claiming Gift Aid. The main advantage of using ChurchSuite for processing and managing donations and Gift Aid is if you are already using that system to do so (because continuing will avoid you having to migrate this into ExpensePlus).
Here are some of the other advantages of using ChurchSuite:
- You can provide access for church members to view their own giving data (if you wish to do so).
- Church members can update their Gift Aid declarations themselves (this is a really handy feature!)
- You can send out donor communications directly via ChurchSuite (your church members will be already familiar with getting emails from ChurchSuite, so if you send out annual statements to donors and are happy to do this via email, then this can be a timesaving feature).
Watch the ChurchSuite Export module overview video to find out how to export donation details from ExpensePlus to Churchsuite.
Warning: You cannot use both ExpensePlus and ChurchSuite for your donor management and for claiming Gift Aid. You should choose one or the other. This is because:
- Using both would be duplicating information
- Using both would risk you double claiming Gift Aid on the same donations
Note: if you choose to use ExpensePlus, then you might want to consider using LoveGiving for online donations. If you do decide to use ChurchSuite for accepting online donations, then for those donations that will reside in ChurchSuite you should claim Gift Aid inside ChurchSuite (ExpensePlus knows not to claim on these, as long as you set the donation method to 'ChurchSuite' for these donations when reconciling this income). Find out more here about Gift Aid.