Year-end giving records

At year end your church owes every giver a written record of what they gave, and your bookkeeper needs the year's gifts in one file. Scout holds every gift that was recorded in it and exports them as a spreadsheet.

Scout does not yet produce the statement documents themselves. There is no statements screen, no PDF, and nothing goes out to givers from Scout. You get the gift-level data, and you produce and send the statements.

Export the year's gifts

1. 1

   Open the giving report

   Click Giving in the sidebar. In the Before month-end panel of the top card, click Open giving report. That button is the only link to the report in the app, and it appears once your church has at least one recorded gift. The page itself is /giving/report.

2. 2

   Set the range

   The toggle at the top of the report offers Year to date and Last 12 months. For a tax year, choose Year to date.

3. 3

   Click Export CSV

   The file downloads named for the range and the day you ran it, like giving-ytd-2026-12-30.csv. It has one row per gift and seven columns: Date, Donor, Fund, Method, Type, Amount, Note.

Run the export in December

Year to date runs from January 1 of the current year to the moment you click. Last 12 months starts on the first of the month eleven months back. There is no year picker and no custom date range, so the only export that lines up with a tax year is the one you run inside that year.

Record December's cash and check gifts first, then export in the last days of December and keep the file. See Recording offline gifts for entering those.

What's in the file

• Completed gifts only. A gift refunded through your Stripe Dashboard is marked refunded in Scout and drops out of the export.
• A bank transfer lands late and keeps its original date. Scout records an ACH gift when Stripe confirms it, which takes a few business days, and dates it the day the member gave. One given on December 30 can show up in Scout on January 3 carrying its December 30 date, so it misses a December 31 export and appears in a January Last 12 months export.
• Donor is a name, or "Anonymous." Gifts the giver marked anonymous export as "Anonymous," and so does any offline gift your staff recorded without picking a donor. Neither can be tied back to a person from the file.
• Note is usually blank. It carries the memo line your staff typed when recording an offline gift, which is where a check number ends up. Gifts made in churchHQ have no note field, so those rows come out empty.
• No contact details. There is no email column and no mailing address. Addresses live on the person record, and nothing in Scout exports them, so a mailing list has to come from wherever you already keep one.

What Scout has no field for

Scout has no way to mark a gift non-deductible and no pledge records, so the export cannot separate deductible giving from anything else. If your church takes money that is not a deductible gift, a dinner, a raffle, or merch sales, record it against its own fund. Then you can sort the export by Fund and drop those rows before you total anyone up.

Scout also writes no tax language anywhere. The church's legal name, EIN, and whatever wording your accountant requires all come from you.

Build the statements

Open the CSV in your spreadsheet program and total the Amount column by Donor, which a pivot table does in a few minutes. That per-person total is what goes on the statement, along with your church's details and the required language. Your accounting software or a mail merge takes it from there.

Check the "Anonymous" rows before you send anything. Each one is money your church received that no giver will see credited to them, and an offline gift recorded without a donor can be fixed by re-recording it against the right person.

When a giver asks what they gave

A giver can read their own record in churchHQ. They tap Give in the bottom bar, then switch the toggle at the top to History, which shows their year-to-date total above their 20 most recent gifts. The total resets on January 1, so from New Year's Day it reads the new year. Giving from the app covers what else they see there.

Staff can open the person's profile and expand the Giving section in the ledger, which needs View giving data.

Who can export

Downloading the CSV needs two permissions: View giving data and Export data, which sits in the Admin group. Owners, Admins, and Pastors have both, and so does the seeded Finance role. The Staff role has neither. How roles work covers changing that.

The Export CSV button renders for anyone who can open the report. If you lack Export data, clicking it opens a page reading {"error":"Forbidden"} rather than starting a download. Someone without View giving data who reaches /giving/report sees an empty report reading "No giving in this range," which looks the same as a church with no gifts.

What the Print button gives you

Print on the giving report prints the page you are looking at: the totals, the monthly trend, the fund breakdown, and the top givers. That is a board document rather than anything a giver should receive. Top-giver amounts stay hidden until you click Show amounts, though the ten names print either way, so read the page before you hand it around.