A fund is where a gift is designated: General, Building, Missions. The giver picks one, and every report afterwards can tell you which.
Start with fewer than you think
The temptation is to create a fund for every ministry. Resist it. A give page with eleven options makes a first-time giver stop and wonder which one is the right one, and some of them close the tab rather than guess wrong.
Three or four is plenty for most churches. General should be your default (the one already selected when the page loads) because it is where most gifts belong and most givers do not want a decision.
Default, naming and removing
Funds live in Settings, then Giving, then Funds (Giving funds). Click the pencil to rename a fund and the star to make it the default. Funds show on the give page in the order they were created.
Be careful with the bin icon. Deleting a fund removes it for good, and gifts already given to it lose their fund label, so last year's reports can no longer say what those gifts were for. The default fund can't be deleted until you make another fund the default. If a fund has served its purpose (a completed building campaign), think before deleting it, and talk to whoever handles your books first. Somebody will ask about it in January.
Designated giving
Any fund can carry one of two extra pickers:
Missionary support. Turn this on for a fund (usually Missions) and givers choose which missionary from your roster their gift supports. The designation is saved with the gift.
Love offerings. The same idea against a lighter list: a guest speaker, a staff appreciation gift, a family going through something. Set it up for the occasion and the gifts stay identifiable afterwards.
A fund can do both, one, or neither.
Sending a fund to a different bank account
By default every gift lands in the one bank account connected to your Stripe account. Many churches want the Building fund somewhere separate.
This lives on Bank & Payouts, in the Fund payouts card. It needs two things. Your Stripe account has to have more than one bank account on it. And your payout schedule has to be set to manual, so Stripe doesn't sweep everything into one account on its own. You then run the fund payouts yourself, and the page previews what each run will do before any money moves.
Adding a second bank account for fund payouts is not available yet for churches on their own Stripe account (everyone connected since September 2026). The page says it is coming soon, and to contact support if you need it now.
Do this deliberately, with whoever handles your books. A fund quietly paying out to an account nobody reconciles is worse than everything landing in one place.
What to check before you go live
- The default fund is the one you actually want most gifts in
- Every fund name would mean something to a visitor, not just to your staff: "Benevolence" is internal vocabulary; "Helping Families in Need" is not
- Each name says what the fund is for, because a giver who does not know what a fund is for will choose General instead