ChurchFinance vs Paxton Church & Charity Accounting Software

ChurchFinance is cloud-based financial management software for churches and religious organizations. It records income and expenses using categories, funds, recurring entries, bank rules, CSV imports, and an audit trail. Budgeting covers annual plans, ministry-scoped budgets, fund accounting, and budget-versus-actual tracking. Reports include income statements, fund summaries, cash-flow and reconciliation reports, giving statements, and board packets.

Online giving accepts cards, ACH bank transfers, and Apple Pay through Stripe, for one-time or recurring gifts, with no ChurchFinance platform fees. The free Starter plan covers one team member. Growth is $71 a month, billed annually at $853, and Ministry is $134 a month, billed annually at $1,609. The service says it uses HTTPS/TLS, encrypts sensitive credentials at rest, hashes passwords, and takes daily backups; it has not pursued SOC 2 or HIPAA certification. Users can export donor, transaction, and fund data as JSON or CSV. An auditor portal provides scoped, read-only, time-bound access.

Paxton Church & Charity Accounting Software is paid accounting software designed for churches and charities. It runs through a cloud-hosted online version and a Windows desktop version, with access also listed for iOS, macOS and the web. Standard provides multi-fund accounting, purchase ledger, budgets, donations and Gift Aid, document attachments, Charity Commission reports, transaction imports, VAT processing through Making Tax Digital, user access levels, and telephone and email support. Advanced adds sales ledger, invoicing, sales analysis, foreign-currency processing, project analysis and project budgets. Reporting follows Charity Commission SORP requirements and can produce a SOFA in Charity Commission format. The software manages Gift Aid and creates an HMRC-format schedule. Bank transactions can be imported from statements, but there is no automatic bank feed. Standard costs £50 a month and Advanced £75 a month, excluding VAT, with a 30-day trial and no free plan.