Keeping track of tithes and offerings is a critical part of every church’s administration, finance operations, and stewardship. Whether you're using Excel, Google Sheets, or another tracking system, it helps you report on the financial health of your church and plan your budget of expenses.

But it’s not always simple to stay organized–especially when your church members and visitors are giving to your church in a variety of ways (check, cash, credit card, and more). 

A tithe and offering template is convenient and one way to stay organized, and keep track of who is giving and how much. 

But there are also digital alternatives to the tithe and offering record keeping sheet, or methods that don’t require you to manually input information and keep track of paper records that is effective at doing a lot of the work for you.

In the following article, we’ll take a look at helpful solutions for recording your tithes and offerings using a tithe tracker–and how you can develop a strategy for efficiently recording your church tithing. 

What is a Tithe and Offering Record Sheet?

A tithe and offering record sheet is typically a paper chart with fields for date of donation, donation amount, type of donation, and any other relevant information (such as donor name) that is fillable and is adaptable to what your church needs. 

Download our free tithe and offering worksheet, below.

If you do use a tithe and offering record sheet for your ministry, then you’ll want to make sure you have a system for keeping the sheets organized, confidential, and compliant with state and federal laws. A good old fashioned filing cabinet can help, or you may choose to scan the sheets into digital images for safekeeping on your computer hard drive. 

The Benefits of a Tithe and Offering Record Sheet

A tithe and offering record sheet is simple and intuitive to use, and it allows you to quickly record information during or after a church service and typically it is editable so you can customize it to your church's needs. 

The Drawbacks of a Tithe and Offering Record Sheet

While a tithe and offering record sheet is certainly easy to use, it comes with a range of drawbacks. 

Here are just a few of the issues with using a tithe and offering record sheet:

• Requires manual input. A tithe and offering record sheet requires a staff member to spend time and energy recording donation amounts. 
• Susceptible to error. Manual input (e.g. writing or typing in numbers) will often result in small mistakes and errors. An extra zero, misread number, or incorrect donor info can produce problems down the line (such as incorrect end of year statements, or inaccuracies in the budget). 
• Need for high security. The tithe and offering record sheet needs to be kept safe and secure from unauthorized volunteers or staff members. You’re also liable to expose financial information from church members and may not be the most compliant tracking solution. 
• Results in disorganization. A stack of tithe and offering record sheets is hardly the best way to stay organized and insight-driven. Ultimately, this kind of system makes it difficult to monitor your church’s long-term financial health.

Finally, by relying on your same old paper system for recording, you miss out on in-depth insights and reporting you can get from an online giving solution. 

Digital Alternatives to the Tithe and Offering Record Sheet

If you’d like to be more efficient and create a more accurate system for recording tithes and offerings, then you’re ready for a digital giving solution. 

An user-friendly online giving solution completely removes the need for a tithe and offering record sheet. The right tool will continue to give you the ability to manually record cash gifts as needed, but will also help you grow an entirely new, more effective system for giving at church. 

A digital giving solution like Tithe.ly can:

• Allow your church members to make a gift with credit card, debit card, ACH transaction, and more through an online form – no manual input necessary
• Provide your church with the ability to give on their smartphones, tablets, and laptops
• Create the option for recurring giving–the best way to increase generosity at your church
• Make it easy to create individual funds for people to donate to
• Engage your church members more effectively with a church app, two-way text messaging, push notifications, and more
• Cut down on time and energy spent on manual input 
• Automate an entire system for accounting and reporting generosity at your church providing more accurate tracking

Again, you can still receive cash and check gifts with an online giving solution. The right tool will allow you to scan checks and enter in cash gifts from donors that prefer older-school payment methods.

But in an age of online shopping and in-app purchases (more than 8/10 people in America shop online) most of your church members are accustomed to making payments online. An online giving solution such as Tithe.ly can help you make it just as convenient and intuitive to give to your church as it is to order something off of Amazon. And far more meaningful!

Using Tithe and Offering Record Sheets with Online Giving

Some churches may choose to utilize their tithe and offering record sheets with online giving. 

If that’s the case for you, we have good news: we've created free editable tithe and offering record sheets that you can easily fill, print, and share. We've tried to create templates that are

There are two versions so you can use the format that works best for you: printable spreadsheet options, and options that can help you automatically tally and calculate giving (Adobe Acrobat required). We've already done the design work for you, but you can definitely customize, edit, and modify them to save and use as you need as each template is customizable.

Click here to download a printable tithe and offering record sheet for your church. 

Click here to download a tithe and offering record sheet that will automatically tally and calculate donations from your church members. 

Here are different color-coded options for your church that you can then personalize, adjust, and implement to fit your needs. 

Grow Generosity with Tithely

If you’re interested in growing generosity at your church, Tithely can help you offer online giving options to your church with minimal effort–and cost and is user-friendly and convenient. 

Tithely is an online giving tool that allows you to:

• Provide a range of online giving options to your church members–including via text message, check scanning, recurring giving, ACH deposit, credit/debit, and more
• Offer mobile giving with a free mobile giving app that allows church members to quickly give to your church on their mobile phones
• Grow giving through recurring gifts
• Provide donors with an automated gift receipt, which they can use for nonprofit tax deductible purposes
• Track giving trends such as average gift, number of givers, giving growth/decline, and more
• Create special pledge campaigns for engaging your church members in special projects or initiatives
• Save time, ensure more accuracy, and stay more organized with a system that tracks tithes and offerings for you 
• And much more–including creating customizable contribution forms and emails; sending regular giving reminders; and designating a special fund

Best of all, a Tithely giving account is absolutely free to use. There’s no monthly subscription cost or contract required. The only costs are transaction fees, which can be totally covered by your donors.

In addition, we have resources with sermon messages you can use to encourage your church to give throughout the year, along with email templates you can use with your end-of-the-year giving campaign to increase generosity to your church's mission.

To look into how Tithely can help you grow generosity at your church–and make tracking contributions easier for you–click here. 

For easy printing, you can click here to download our free Tithes and Offering Record PDF.