Recording cash and check gifts

Plenty of giving still arrives the old way — cash and checks in the Sunday plate. Psalmly lets you record those gifts per giver, right alongside online giving, so the totals, history, and year-end statements Psalmly already produces reflect all of your church's giving, not just the digital part. Recording is free on every plan, and there's no fee of any kind on cash — the money never touches Psalmly.

You'll find it on your Giving page: a Record offering button sits in the header from the moment your church exists. Recording needs no online-giving setup — you never have to connect Stripe to log the plate. Online giving is the optional add-on; if you set it up later, recorded and online gifts share the same ledger, totals, and statements.

Logging Sunday's plate

Real plates arrive as a batch — one date, one counting sheet, several gifts. Record offering works the same way:

• Offering date — one date for the whole batch. It defaults to today; change it when you're catching up on an earlier Sunday.
• Count sheet — optionally attach a photo or PDF of your paper counting sheet. It's kept private to your admins and stays linked to the batch, so you can always check the entry against the paper.
• The gifts — a short list of rows, one per gift. Add as many as you need; a running total at the bottom should match your count sheet.

When you save, the gifts appear immediately in your giving ledger with Cash or Check chips, right in line with online gifts — one list, no separate log to reconcile in your head.

Loose cash and attributed gifts

There are two kinds of rows:

• Loose plate cash — the counted cash total with no giver attached. It counts toward your fund totals but never appears on anyone's statement.
• Attributed gifts — usually checks. For each one, pick the giver, enter the amount, choose the fund (a designated check like "building fund" goes here), set cash or check (with an optional check number), and add a note if you like.

The giver field is the part worth a moment's care, because it's what makes statements complete. Start typing a name and you'll get four ways to attribute the gift:

• A member — pick them from your directory. The gift lands in their own giving history and on their year-end statement automatically.
• Someone on your roster — pick a person you've added to the directory who doesn't use the app; they show a "No account" tag in the list. Their cash and check gifts are kept under their name, and you can download a year-end statement for them right from their roster profile — so a faithful giver who'll never open the app still gets a proper record. See People without an account.
• A non-member — type a name and choose "Use … as a non-member." The gift is recorded for your church's records and exports under that name, but a one-off typed name has no in-app statement. If they give again and again, add them to your roster instead so their statement stays whole.
• Anonymous — the gift counts in your totals but the giver is hidden from your church reports. If you matched a member or roster person first, the gift still appears on their own statement — anonymity only hides them from the church's reports, never from their own records.

One thing recording never does: send an email receipt. A gift given in person shouldn't trigger a surprise "payment receipt" email — the year-end statement is the acknowledgment.

What your members see

Nothing extra to do here — a matched member's cash and check gifts simply show up in their own giving history, their year-to-date total, and their downloadable statement, on the web and in the mobile app, right next to any online gifts. See Receipts and tax statements for the member's-eye view.

Scanning the count sheet

On paid plans, Psalmly AI can read your count sheet for you. Attach the photo, press Scan sheet, and the batch fills itself in — the loose-cash total and each check with its payer's name and amount. Handwriting is genuinely hard, so a scan is always a head start, never a finished entry: match each name to a member, double-check any amount that looks off, and then save. Nothing is recorded until you confirm.

On the free plan the scan button becomes an upgrade hint — typing the batch by hand works exactly the same and always will.

Fixing mistakes

Open any recorded gift from the ledger to see its details — giver, fund, method, date, and the count sheet it came from. From there you can Edit it (fix a typo'd amount, move it to the right fund, re-match the giver) or Delete it. A delete can be undone for a moment from the toast, and the change flows through totals and statements automatically.

Where the money side stays

Recording is bookkeeping-free by design: no money moves, nothing touches your Stripe account, and there's no platform fee — you're simply completing your church's giving records. The digital side (payouts, processing fees, refunds) is unchanged; see Payouts, fees, and where your money goes.