What your church actually sees inside Givr's dashboard

Why we built three views instead of one

When churches use Givr, money flows in fast. A Sunday morning service might see thirty, fifty, even a hundred people scan the QR code and give in seconds. Without a clear way to see what's happening, it all becomes a blur. You know the total. You don't know the story.

We decided early on that a single 'donations list' wasn't enough. A treasurer needs to understand three things at once: which funds are growing (missions, building repair, general offering), which donors are regular supporters versus one-off givers, and where the money is actually going. Most systems force you to pick one view and live with it. That felt wrong.

The Fund view shows you exactly what it sounds like: how much each fund has raised, how many donations it's received, and the trend over time. A building fund might show £4,200 raised across 23 donations this month. The Donor view lets you see individuals, their giving history, whether they've opted into Gift Aid, and their preferred fund. The Donation view is the granular layer - every single gift, the moment it came in, the fund it went to, the donor details.

The moment we realised the dashboard needed to do Gift Aid work

We were in week two of private testing when a church in Bristol asked a question that changed how we built the whole thing. 'If someone gives on Sunday and ticks the Gift Aid box, can we see right then that they've declared?' It sounds simple. It isn't.

Gift Aid declarations are binding agreements between the donor and HMRC. A donor can declare once, and it covers all their gifts for the next four years. But most church treasurers have no way to see at a glance whether someone has already declared, or whether they need to ask them again. We ended up building Gift Aid status directly into the donor view. You see a green tick if they've declared, or a prompt if they haven't. It saved that Bristol church from asking the same donor to declare twice in a month.

That's when we realised the dashboard wasn't just about reporting. It was about making the actual work of church finance faster and less error-prone.

How the three layers work in practice

Imagine you're a treasurer opening Givr on Tuesday morning. You glance at the Funds view first. You can see that this month, Sunday morning offerings are up 12 percent on last month, but the youth group fund is stalling. You make a note to mention it in the next meeting.

Then you click into the Donor view because you noticed a name you recognise giving twice last week. You pull up their profile and see they've been giving regularly for eighteen months, they've opted into Gift Aid, and their average gift is £25. That's useful context for when you send out the year-end thank you letter.

Finally, you export the Donations view for your records. Every gift, every timestamp, every fund code. You've got everything you need for your treasurer's report, and you've got a clean audit trail that even the strictest PCC would accept.

What would have taken two hours of spreadsheet work five years ago now takes fifteen minutes. And it's accurate, because there's no manual data entry. The moment someone scans the QR code and gives, the dashboard updates.

Why we made it free, and why that matters

The Fund + Donor + Donation dashboard comes as standard on the Free tier. No upgrade needed. We made that call deliberately.

Most church treasurers are volunteers. They're doing this alongside a day job, or retirement, or raising grandchildren. Putting a paywall between them and basic visibility into what's happening with their church's money felt wrong. The dashboard isn't a premium feature. It's a fundamental one.

What the paid tiers add (Gather at £25 a month, Grow at £55) is the Gift Aid automation and recurring giving. Those are the pieces that save real time and real money. On Gather, when HMRC releases Gift Aid payments, they come back into your account automatically, and you don't have to manually claim anything. On Grow, you get API access so you can pipe your data straight into your existing systems if you run a complex finance setup.

But the window into your church's giving? That's included from day one.

The question we still get asked

Someone always asks: 'Can I see which specific donations are Gift Aidable, right there in the dashboard?' The answer is yes, but it's subtle. In the Donation view, if a donor has declared Gift Aid, you'll see that flag. You know instantly which gifts have Gift Aid backing them. It's not that hard, but it's also not a thing most systems even think about. We did because we built Givr for UK churches, not as a generic giving platform adapted for the UK.

The real question underneath that one is always the same: 'How do I stop leaving money on the table?' The Church of England estimates that £560 million in Gift Aid goes unclaimed every year by UK churches. That's not because churches are bad at finance. It's because the system used to be broken. A volunteer treasurer with a spreadsheet can't process HMRC forms efficiently. A platform designed specifically for this task can. That's where the dashboard leads you.