What should a church giving-system review examine?

A review is only as sound as the material it reads. Before anything is examined, leadership should decide what will be shared, who authorizes it, and how it will be handled. Access should be limited to what the review actually needs.

Nothing sensitive needs to be shared to begin a conversation. The first step is a short request. Which materials are useful is discussed personally, with the people responsible for them, once the church has chosen to proceed.

1. 01Giving recordsPlatform exports and reports, read over a meaningful time window rather than a single month.
2. 02Processing documentationProcessing statements and fee or settlement documentation, only when leadership has authorized sharing them and their use has been discussed privately. Never a required public upload.
3. 03Recurring schedulesActive, paused, and failed recurring gifts, and how the church follows up with givers after a failure.
4. 04Giving pathwaysThe actual pages, links, and steps a giver follows from each place giving is invited.
5. 05CommunicationHow and when giving is spoken about in services, emails, and announcements.
6. 06ResponsibilitiesWho handles processing, follow-up, communication, and reporting today.

The most important discipline in a review is to keep what was seen apart from what it may mean. Leadership can act confidently on an observation. An interpretation deserves to be weighed.

A useful finding states what was seen, where it was seen, what it may indicate, and how confident the reading is. It does not inflate a pattern into a conclusion, and it does not attach a dollar figure that the evidence cannot support.

A finding leadership can trust is worth more than ten findings leadership has to argue with.

Every finding should be attached to a person or role. A finding without an owner tends to become a note in a file. The review should then name the next responsible move: the one action that most deserves attention now, in light of everything else that was seen.

This is the shape of a Managed Giving System Review: a focused first engagement that shows leadership what the giving system is revealing and identifies the next responsible move.