Jeff Berg and Aaron Stewart first worked together in 2005 as staffers at a Southern California church, helping congregants experience an inspiring weekly service. But behind the scenes, they faced endless spreadsheets and logistical headaches to plan out the music, message, and videos for the weekend service. The stressful process of manually copying files and then updating multiple spreadsheets, a Microsoft Access database, and a website wasn’t sustainable. So in 2005, they built an internal tool designed to make managing church initiatives, such as weekly services and events, easier and free up staff time to better support congregations.
In 2006, Berg and Stewart launched Planning Center as a software platform to help other churches replace clunky tools with its modern and intuitive church software for organizing worship services and managing volunteers. As the California-based company added new features, it became clear that digitizing the church donation process would soon become a high priority.
Historically, congregants have made donations by cash or paper check during a church service—directly tying donation frequency to church attendance and requiring manual accounting and reconciliation. Planning Center partnered with Stripe in 2015 to update this model and make it easy for churches to accept one-off and recurring digital donations, as well as payments for church events, camps, and other activities.
Since then, Planning Center has continued to improve its Stripe payment solution, including adding new payment methods and support for ACH bank transfers, to help churches and congregants handle donations efficiently. The company has grown to become a feature-filled church management system with four million active church customers—from small neighborhood churches to megachurches with multiple campuses around the world. It now supports over 25% of a large market with over 350,000 churches.
Stripe makes it easy for congregants to set up recurring donations, which tend to be more consistent and higher value than one-off or in-person donations. This helps both churches and donors reach their annual donation goals with little to no effort. We want congregants’ ability to give to be as simple and easy as buying a Coke from a vending machine.
Building a next-level donation experience
Planning Center’s church customers and congregants have varying levels of comfort and sophistication with technology adoption, so ease of use was a high priority. Planning Center chose Stripe Connect as the financial backbone of Planning Center Giving, the company’s white-labeled payments platform that routes funds from donors to individual churches. Stripe-hosted onboarding now makes it easy for churches to get set up on the platform, submit compliance documents, and start processing donations right away. Planning Center also implemented Connect and the Reports API to build payout reports that now simplify each church’s bookkeeping and financial reporting.
“At the end of the day, the thing that’s most important to our development team is a stable, highly available API for high-volume payment processing from bank to bank, coast to coast,” said Ricketts.
The seamless integration of Connect and Stripe Payments meant Planning Center’s church customers could immediately begin accepting one-off and recurring donations from congregants, helping churches build stickier relationships with donors and increase donation amounts. The ability to make online payments also uncoupled donation frequency from church attendance. Additionally, churches that use Planning Center’s Registration solution to manage event sign-ups can now process online registration fees with Payments.
As part of its ongoing effort to provide donors with a modern payment experience, Planning Center recently updated its giving web forms with Stripe’s Payment Element. Now, Planning Center can accept a variety of payment methods, including credit cards, digital wallets such as Apple Pay, and direct debits in different countries. In the future, the company can use Payment Element to turn on more than 100 payment methods and accept over 135 currencies as the business scales.
This variety is a win-win: donors can choose the payment methods they are most comfortable using, and Planning Center can more easily expand to new regions—activating the newest or most popular payment methods without needing developers to build custom payments infrastructure. In 2025 alone, Planning Center’s payment processing grew by over 17% annually.
To further streamline the donation experience, Planning Center implemented Stripe Financial Connections, which can authorize donors’ bank accounts instantly. Today, over 50% of Planning Center’s payment volume is processed through ACH transfers.
ACH is an old, somewhat complex banking protocol that Stripe has really brought into the modern world in a fast and reliable way with Financial Connections.
Planning Center used Authorization Boost—Stripe’s AI-powered acceptance optimization product—to maintain a 97% authorization rate on transactions. Card account updater has been especially powerful in retaining recurring donations by automatically updating credit cards that expire—the top reason that donors churn.
Planning Center now processes millions of dollars in donations monthly without needing a dedicated payment fraud team, relying entirely on Stripe Radar’s protections. Radar effectively catches fraudulent transactions (such as stolen credit card testing through donation forms), which frees up Planning Center’s Trust and Safety Team to focus on other fraud, spam, and security threats instead of payment fraud management.
Planning Center also now relies on Stripe Tax to collect sales tax on US platform subscriptions, which differs by state and tax-exempt status. “Because of the robustness of Stripe’s Tax API and documentation, we’ve been able to build a custom application layer and apply our own nonprofit logic to manage tax rates and tax exemption certificates across all 50 states. We have the flexibility to build exactly what we need to build for our customers,” said Ricketts.
Accelerating growth with a small team
Planning Center originally built its digital donation platform with two developers. Planning Center Giving now processes over $600 million in donations each month—with $1 billion processed in December 2025 alone and $30 billion in total over the past decade—while only adding 3 developers to the team.
“Our team is able to get so much done with Stripe that we haven’t needed to add much to developer headcount over the last 10 years, which is huge,” said Ricketts. “With Stripe, we don’t have to worry about stability, uptime, or implementation headaches—it’s been the biggest accelerator for our small team from when we started through today.”
In the months ahead, Planning Center plans to migrate to Stripe Billing to streamline and modernize its subscription billing process. From there, in partnership with Stripe professional services, the company intends to use embedded components in Connect to give churches a native onboarding experience and deliver more robust reporting for churches.
Stripe will enable us to embrace changes and technological advancements as the payment industry changes over time, so our small team can continue to build a really great payment experience for churches.
