Planning Center Giving Reports: Every Report You Can Run, and the Three You Can't

Planning Center Giving reports are spread across three places: the Dashboard, the Donations page, and statements on the Manage page. The Donations page holds itemized donations, donor totals, in-kind gifts, payouts and pledge campaigns. All of them export to CSV. All of them stop at the edge of Giving.

Key points

• Giving ships six reports: the dashboard, By donation, By donor, in-kind donations, donor statements and payout reports, and all of them print or export to CSV.
• The two worth learning are By donation (itemized gifts, filtered by campus, fund, label, stamp or payment source) and By donor (per-donor totals for a date range, sortable by amount).
• First-time givers, recurring givers and pledgers come from Lists in Planning Center People, not from Giving’s report tabs.
• No built-in report shows a household’s giving across years or giving next to attendance. Those need two exports joined outside Giving. A two-condition list can name last year’s first-time givers who gave again; the retention rate over time is still yours to build.
• The Reviewer permission level sees the dashboard but not reports or donation history, so the person asking for a number often can’t pull it.

Giving is the product churches lean on hardest and read most narrowly. It gets asked one question a year, are we on budget, while quietly holding the best record you have of who is still committed. Here is the full inventory, and the three questions no tab will answer.

What reports does Planning Center Giving have?

Planning Center’s own Giving reports article is the authoritative list, and it’s shorter than most people expect. Six things.

Dashboard

Giving trends and recent donations for the date range and campus set at the top, broken out by donations, new donors, labels and funds. The whole-church view: totals and direction, no names attached.

By donation

An itemized list of every gift in a time frame, filtered by campus, fund, label, stamp or payment source. One row per donation. What your bookkeeper wants.

By donor

The same period rolled up per donor, with sortable columns for totals and number of donations, and an Email Donors button that mails the filtered list straight from Giving. The report most churches under-use.

In-kind donations

Physical items and stock, with fair market values recorded separately, and not counted in your ordinary donation totals, so an in-kind gift never appears in the numbers you take to the board unless you go looking.

Donor statements

The annual tax statement generator, emailed or printed. Mechanics below.

Payout reports

Deposit reconciliation. Payout reports show how net Giving income was calculated for each deposit, including the fee charged and the effective rate. Planning Center recommends the version in Account settings.

Donor lists are the one that lives outside Giving, built in Planning Center People. Pledge campaign reporting has its own tab on the Donations page, where the campaign Overview tab shows progress toward goal, the Pledges tab shows each donor’s amount and percentage complete on screen, and an export gives you a CSV of all pledge information. Which of the three you reach for, report, list or dashboard, matters more than it sounds like it should.

One boundary: Planning Center says plainly that “Giving was designed to track donations only” and “is not a general ledger,” with no QuickBooks integration. Every report above assumes that.

How do you export a giving report?

Itemized donations for a date range

For reconciliation, fund breakdowns, and anything headed for a pivot table.

1. Open Donations in Giving and select the By donation tab.
2. Set the date range at the top, and the campus if you run more than one.
3. Add filters last, not first: fund, label, stamp, payment source. It’s easier to remove a filter than to notice a missing one.
4. Export to CSV. One row per donation, which is what anything downstream will want to group or pivot.
5. Check the total against the dashboard for the same range before sending it anywhere. A mismatch is almost always a forgotten filter or a batch nobody committed.

Donor totals for a date range

For top households, thank-you lists, and any year-over-year comparison.

1. Open Donations and select the By donor tab.
2. Set the date range. A full calendar year if you’re comparing, and be precise about the boundaries.
3. Apply campus, fund, label, stamp or payment source filters if needed.
4. Sort by donation total, descending. That click turns an alphabetical list into a call list.
5. Export to CSV, then repeat for the prior year as a second file. Two files, two years, one lookup. That’s every giving comparison your board will ask for.

Step five is the one people skip, and it’s the difference between a report and an answer. If you’d rather it landed in a spreadsheet on its own, set up the export-to-Sheets route once.

How do donor statements work?

Statements are the one report your donors see, so the details matter more.

Planning Center builds them in bulk: you create a statement with a label and a date range, and every donor with at least one successful donation in that range is included, inactive donors along with the rest. Failed, refunded and in-progress gifts never appear.

Three things catch churches out every January.

It filters on the received date, not the donation date. For online gifts that date is locked; for cash and check batches it’s editable, which is how a December gift lands on the wrong year’s statement.

Non-deductible gifts and pledge progress are opt-in, both checkboxes on the Configure tab. If you run campaigns, including pledge progress saves a round of emails in February.

You can’t edit a statement once it’s been emailed. The label, the date range and the statement itself are locked after sending. Review the deliverability report at the top of the Statements tab first. It flags donors missing an email address, a mailing address, or both. Fix those before you press send.

How do you find first-time, recurring and lapsed givers?

None of these sit on the Donations page. They’re donor lists built in Planning Center People, which is where Giving’s data becomes something you can segment.

First-time givers. Build a list with a rule for people who gave a donation, set to their first, inside a date range. That’s the quarter’s new-giver list.

Recurring givers. Available as a list rule. Giving has also had a recurring-gift forecast since 2017, the only forward-looking number in the product, though it isn’t covered in the current help documentation, so check your own account before relying on it.

Amount thresholds. Planning Center’s own caveat is that a “donated more than $100” rule catches “people who gave a single donation greater than $100,” and “will not show people who gave multiple donations totaling more than $100.” The household giving $40 a week is invisible to it. That’s the most common mistake I see in a giving list.

Failed recurring gifts. When a recurring donation fails, Giving does not retry it for that date. It attempts the same donation on the next scheduled date, and the donor is notified. So an expired card looks exactly like a decision to stop giving, on every report you run, for a month.

Lapsed givers. There is no lapsed-giver report, but there is a two-list pattern: a list of everyone who gave this year, then a list of last year’s donors who are not on it. That’s the same not-on-list mechanism Planning Center documents for adults who haven’t given, with the caveat that dependent lists can’t auto-refresh. That gives you names. For amounts, and for the specific set of false positives to clean up, it’s a two-export job. The full method for finding lapsed givers in Planning Center is written up separately. Treat it as the worked example for this page.

One caveat covers all of these: “failed, in process, or uncommitted donations will not appear in donor lists.” An uncommitted batch is the usual reason a list and a report disagree by a few thousand dollars.

What can’t Planning Center Giving reports show you?

Three questions, each normal to ask, none answerable from a tab.

Giving trend per household. A donor profile shows a full donation history, and joining two donors merges a couple’s giving into one view. But neither charts it year over year. By donor gives each donor a total for one date range, so putting a household’s last four years side by side, or doing it for every household at once, means four exports and a join you do yourself. The dashboard trends the church; nothing trends a family.

Retention, first-time and lapsed. You can list who gave for the first time in Q1. A list with two conditions gives you the retained ones by name: first gift last year, any gift this year. What you can’t get is the rate over time: how that number compares with the year before, and the year before that, which is the figure that tells you whether your generosity teaching is working. Lists answer as of now; the trend is yours to build and keep.

Giving against attendance. This is the wall, and it isn’t a Giving problem. Planning Center is a suite of separate products sharing a person record, so a report inside Giving has no access to Check-Ins data. Two households both stopped giving in March; one has been at church every Sunday since, one hasn’t been seen since February. Identical rows, opposite conversations, and only attendance data tells them apart. It’s the same shape as every report that crosses two products.

A fourth limit is organisational. Giving’s permission levels are strict by design: Counter can enter donations but cannot view the dashboard or any report, and Reviewer, meant for pastoral staff and board members, sees the dashboard but not reports, donation history or statements. That’s the right default for donor privacy. It also means the people who ask giving questions can’t answer them, so everything routes through one bookkeeper and arrives a week later.

What does the export route cost you?

Not much for a single question. An hour or two and you have a real answer. A fair trade, and I’d take it.

The cost shows up in the second question. You present the year-over-year comparison, someone asks whether the households that dropped off are still attending, and you aren’t answering from the file you built. You’re starting a new one. Reporting that can’t take a follow-up is a snapshot, and the interesting thing in giving data is almost never in the first answer. It also expires: do the lapsed-giver work in October for the year-end appeal and it’s meaningless by February, so most churches do it once a year and call that a rhythm.

That’s the gap Parable fills. It reads every Planning Center product nightly, with Giving beside Check-Ins, Groups and Services, so “which of our top fifty households have reduced their giving since January, and are they still attending” is a question you type and get back as a list of names. Every number stays clickable down to the people in it, which is what a dashboard of totals never gives you, with SQL and warehouse access underneath for whoever wants it.

If your giving questions fit inside Giving, use Giving. It’s a good product, and adding a tool to answer questions you already have answers to is just another login.

But if every giving question you actually care about ends with and are they still coming, that’s not a discipline problem or a missing tab. Giving is doing exactly what it was built to do. The question is bigger than the product it’s being asked inside.