A church giving app is mostly a receipt engine with a payment button attached.
Most of the work in a church giving app happens after the money has moved. The donation itself is a few seconds on a card. The rest is a year of fund splits, recurring gifts that quietly fail, and one January statement per household that has to hold up if the donor is ever asked for it. That gap is why congregations end up disappointed by general church app builders that treat giving as a button.
This page covers where Apple lets you collect a donation, why a church donation app needs an outside payment processor, what the IRS requires the receipt to say, and the fields one gift record has to hold before any of it works.
See what a receipt has to sayThe short version
Apple decides where you can collect, the IRS decides what the receipt says.
Two outside rules shape this build before any design work starts. Apple's App Store Review Guidelines say an ordinary app may not collect funds for charities and fundraisers inside itself, and that apps raising money for such causes must be free and collect outside the app. Approved nonprofits get a written exception, with Apple Pay support required.
The second rule is the receipt. A gift of 250 dollars or more needs a written acknowledgment with specific contents, and churches have their own line inside that rule about intangible religious benefits. Get those two right and the rest is ordinary record keeping.
A donation is not an in-app purchase
The first thing to settle is whether money can change hands inside the app at all, because the answer is not the one most people assume. Apple's App Store Review Guidelines treat charitable giving separately from paid digital content. Guideline 3.2.2(iv) lists collecting funds within the app for charities and fundraisers as unacceptable unless you are an approved nonprofit, and says apps that seek to raise money for such causes must be free on the App Store and may only collect funds outside of the app, such as via Safari or SMS.
Guideline 3.2.1(vi) is the exception, and it is the one churches want. Approved nonprofits may fundraise directly within their own apps, provided the campaigns follow the rest of the guidelines and offer Apple Pay support. Apple also requires the app to disclose how the funds will be used, to abide by required local and federal laws, and to ensure appropriate tax receipts are available to donors. Approval is a process you go through with Apple, not a setting in App Store Connect, so put it on the timeline early.
The practical consequence is that the in-app purchase machinery for unlocking digital content is not what you are building. You are wiring up either Apple Pay under the approved nonprofit route, or a web checkout the app opens in the browser. Either way the money runs through a payment processor your church holds an account with, and the app is the thing that asks.
It is worth being plain about the tooling too. Newly v2 has no built-in payments, so a giving app built with it links out to a hosted checkout or an approved Apple Pay flow rather than settling anything itself. Which processor you pick, and what each route costs you in fees and control, is a subject of its own in taking money inside an app.
What the receipt has to say
The annual giving statement is the thing a tithing app exists to produce, and it has a specification. A donor claiming a deduction of 250 dollars or more has to obtain and keep a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the organization. Contemporaneous means the donor holds it no later than the date they file the return for that year, so a statement that goes out in April is already late for anyone who filed in February.
The required contents are short and specific: the name of the organization, the amount of a cash contribution, a description but not a value for a non-cash contribution, and a statement about what the donor got back. That last part is where churches have their own wording. If the donor received nothing, the acknowledgment says so. If what they received consisted entirely of intangible religious benefits, it says that instead. If they received goods or services, it carries a description and a good faith estimate of the value.
This is also why a raffle or a fundraising dinner cannot be receipted like a gift. The ticket has value, so the deductible part is reduced and the acknowledgment has to describe what was provided. If your church runs those alongside regular giving, a raffle fundraising app and a giving app are answering different tax questions, and pooling the two sets of records by accident is a mess somebody untangles in January.
Below 250 dollars the donor still needs a record: a bank record, or a written communication from the church showing its name, the date and the amount. Most churches send a statement to every giver regardless of size, which means the app has to hold every gift, not only the large ones.
IRS, charitable contributions and written acknowledgments
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What this gift needs on its receipt
What the donor received in returnWritten acknowledgment required
At 250 dollars or more the donor has to hold a contemporaneous written acknowledgment carrying the name of the church, the amount, and a statement that no goods or services were provided in return.
What one gift record has to hold
A gift is not an amount and a date. The minimum record is who gave, how much, when it cleared, which fund it was designated to, the method it arrived by, whether it belongs to a recurring schedule, and whether it was given anonymously. Drop any one of those fields and something downstream breaks, usually the statement.
Funds are the field people underestimate. A congregation rarely has one bucket. General giving, building, missions, benevolence and a named campaign all behave differently in the books, and designated gifts are restricted: money given for the roof cannot quietly pay the electricity bill. An online giving app for churches that stores a single amount per gift has pushed that whole problem into a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand.
Recurring giving is where most of the money sits and where most of the failures are. Cards expire, banks decline, and a monthly gift that stops usually stops silently. The app needs a visible list of schedules, a failed state that a named person actually sees, and a way for the giver to change their own amount or pause it without phoning the church office.
The donor is also a person in the directory, so the giving record and the member record want to be the same person rather than two spellings of a name. That overlap is why giving usually arrives bolted onto a membership app instead of living on its own.
Who is allowed to see who gave what
Giving data in a church is pastorally sensitive in a way a normal payments dashboard is not. Knowing what each family gives changes how people get treated, and many pastors deliberately do not want to see it. That is a permissions requirement, not a preference, and it is easier to build in at the start than to retrofit after the first awkward conversation.
The split that works is by role. Counters and the treasurer see amounts with names. A ministry lead sees a fund total and no names. The pastor sees whatever the church has decided in writing, which for many is totals only. The account that can see everything should belong to one or two named people, and the app should keep a record of who looked and when.
Anonymous giving needs to be a real state rather than a blank name field. The church still needs the amount for the books, and the giver still needs a receipt if they intend to deduct it. The usual answer is a gift that is anonymous in the ministry view and identified in the treasurer view, which only works if those roles existed before the first gift was recorded.
What each way of collecting giving actually gives you
| Option | Collects inside the iOS app | Handles recurring gifts | Produces the annual statement | Splits gifts by fund |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plate, cash and checks | No | No | typed up by hand | on the envelope |
| A giving page you link out to | No | Yes | whatever the provider sends | the list the provider ships |
| Text giving through a provider | No | Yes | whatever the provider sends | one keyword per fund |
| Church management suite with giving | needs Apple nonprofit approval | Yes | Yes | generic |
| An app you build on your own processor | needs Apple nonprofit approval | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Building one around your own church
Giving platforms are built for the average congregation, priced as a share of what passes through them plus a monthly fee, and shaped around the fund list they ship with. A church with a benevolence fund that pays out the same week it is given, or a building campaign where pledges are tracked separately from gifts, ends up running the platform and a spreadsheet side by side. The spreadsheet is the signal that the tool stopped fitting.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe the app you want, including your real fund list and who is allowed to see amounts, and it writes a React Native and Expo project you own, runs it on a cloud simulator while it builds, and uploads iOS builds to TestFlight using your own Apple Developer account. It costs $25 a month, there is no free plan, and Android goes to Google Play internal testing from the Deploy tab, or out as a standalone APK. It does not move money and it does not file anything with the IRS.
So the honest shape of this build is that the app holds the people, the funds, the schedules and the statement, while a processor you already have an account with does the settling. If your giving already works and only the January statement hurts, build the statement first and leave the money where it is.
Questions people ask about church giving apps
Only if you are an approved nonprofit with Apple. Guideline 3.2.2(iv) says collecting funds within the app for charities and fundraisers is unacceptable otherwise, and that apps raising money for such causes must be free on the App Store and may only collect funds outside of the app, for example via Safari or SMS. Guideline 3.2.1(vi) grants approved nonprofits the exception, and requires Apple Pay support, disclosure of how funds will be used, and tax receipts available to donors.
Describe the way your church actually gives
Write down your fund list, who is allowed to see amounts, and what the January statement has to say, then build the app around those three answers.
Start building