Why we built API access into Givr (and why your church needs it)

The treasurer's problem is the industry's problem

Churches don't exist in isolation. They use accounting software. They manage membership databases. They run rotas, prayer lists, pastoral records. And suddenly, when you introduce digital giving, you're creating a new island of data that doesn't speak to anything else.

The old workaround was inevitable. Enter data manually. Copy and paste. Pray nothing gets lost in translation. One treasurer we spoke to was spending 90 minutes every month reconciling giving records with their accounts software, because the two systems couldn't see each other.

API access solves that. It lets your giving platform talk directly to the tools you already depend on. No more double-entry. No more spreadsheet chaos. Your financial data flows where it needs to go, automatically.

This isn't about tech for tech's sake

When we designed Givr, we started with a specific problem: £560 million in Gift Aid claims are left unclaimed by UK churches every year. That's a real number. That's why Givr automates the entire HMRC submission process for you. But once you're collecting giving data, and you're automatically claiming Gift Aid, the next logical step is obvious: let that data integrate smoothly into the financial systems churches are already using.

API access lets a church do something they couldn't before. They can build custom workflows. They can feed giving data into their accounting software without manual work. They can generate reports that combine giving, fund allocations, and donor records. They can sync recurring gift information with their membership system so pastoral staff knows who's been supporting the church long-term.

These things matter because they free up time. A church treasurer is almost always a volunteer. Every hour they spend on data entry is an hour they're not spending on strategy, on pastoral care, on the actual stewardship of the church's finances.

It's in the Grow tier because it's built for churches that are scaling

We didn't put API access in the Free tier. That's deliberate. The Free tier is for a church testing digital giving, learning the basics. They have a small congregation, they're collecting under £5,000 a month, and they need simplicity above all else. The dashboard and automated Gift Aid are enough.

The Gather tier adds recurring giving and HMRC submission. That's the tier for a church that's committed to digital giving, that wants to claim every pound of Gift Aid they're entitled to.

The Grow tier is for churches that have moved beyond 'getting set up'. They want white-label branding so their giving page reflects their identity. And they need API access because they're integrating with their finance software, their membership platform, their accounting workflow. They're solving real operational problems.

It's also where the unit economics make sense. The platform fees drop to 0.35% in Grow because we're serving churches that are transacting significant volume. API access isn't a checkbox feature added to justify a price increase. It's a genuine operational tool for churches that need it.

What you can actually build with it

One of our early conversations was with a church running their accounts in Xero. They wanted Givr to automatically categorise donations by fund (General, Building, Missions, Youth) and send them straight into the correct ledger accounts. API access makes that possible. They could build a simple integration that reads the data Givr captures and writes it to Xero without touching a spreadsheet.

Another church wanted to report on giving patterns by postcode, not just by individual donor. They could query the API, pull giving records with location data, and generate insights that helped them understand where their community was coming from. That's the kind of thing that's invisible until you have API access, then it becomes obvious.

A third use case we've seen is pastoral: a church wanted to know which members have been giving consistently over the past year, so they could send a specific thank-you and prayer update to long-term supporters. They built a simple script that pulls recurring gift records from the API and flags them in their member database.

These aren't exotic use cases. They're things a church treasurer might ask for if they realised it was possible.

The thing we're still thinking about

We've launched Grow with API access as a roadmap feature, which means it's coming soon but we're refining it based on what churches actually need. Because there's a difference between 'here's the API, build whatever' and 'here are the specific endpoints that will actually solve your workflow problems'.

Some churches will want to query their own data. Some will want third-party platforms to build integrations with us. Some will want both. We're learning which patterns matter most, so we build the API in a way that's useful and sustainable.

The deeper question we're sitting with is this: as more churches go digital with giving, what does financial stewardship look like when data is fragmented across five different platforms? What happens when one system has the most accurate view of giving, but another has the donor records, and a third has the accounting? API access is part of the answer. It's how we move toward a world where a church's data works as one coherent system, not as isolated islands.