O Canada! We are so excited today to bring Planning Center Giving to our northerly neighbors. As of today, Canadian churches are welcome to sign up.
Let's take a look at some of the larger aspects of the service that we've reshaped for our Canadian customers.
Donor Statements
We've been in tight communication with our Canadian beta testers, learning exactly what churches expect to see in an annual donor statement.
All the mandatory fields and compulsory information required by the Canadian Revenue Agency are there including the signature of your treasurer. Each statement you issue will use the current signature defined in Settings. That means, when a new treasurer comes onboard, you can upload the new signature without modifying historical statements previously issued. Canadian statements also forgo the individual listing of donations on donor statements and provide just the total tax deductible amount as reported by your church.
Addresses Formatting
Address fields in Giving have been internationalized. That means you and your donors won't have to translate "state" into "province" or "zip" into "postal code." In fact, we've made this change across all address forms across all of Planning Center for you and your donors, attendees, registrants, group members, and volunteers.
Currency and Payment Methods
Stripe, the payment processor used by Giving, supports over 130 currencies and nearly any type of credit or debit card there is. $CAD is fully supported from the donor's bank, through Stripe, and into your church's bank account without converting it to $USD along the way (unless the donation is made with an international credit card of course).
Since ACH bank transfers don't work in Canada, the payment method has been dropped from the donation form and on the administrative side of Giving. The payment methods supported are:
- Canadian credit cards (all types)
- International credit cards (all types)
- Visa Debit
- Debit Mastercard
- Prepaid cards backed by a large credit institution (like Visa or Mastercard).
Note: Interac ATM/debit cards, used for point-of-sale payments in Canada, won't work online.
Canadian Check Cheque Counting
In Giving, you can use a cheque reader to quickly and accurately count paper cheques into batches. Routing and account numbers work differently in Canada than the US, so we've updated the system to accept the Canadian formats.
Payment Processor (Stripe) Fees
Stripe's payment processing fees are a little different for our Canadian customers. Canadian charities can receive discounted rates of 2.2% + $0.30/donation for domestic Visa/MC cards by providing evidence of their non-profit status
Otherwise, Stripe's standard rates in Canada apply.
- 2.9% + $0.30/donation for Visa and Mastercard donations.
- 3.5% + $0/donation for Amex donations.
Our promise to you is this: we do not, and we will not mark up these rates. Our interest is always aligned with your church's interest in keeping these fees low.
Thank You!
When we originally announced that we were working on a donation management system, we received a lot of inquiries about support for Canadian churches. It's been a long time coming and this feature has touched nearly every part of the application. Thank you for your patience and thanks again to our beta testing customers for helping us get this done. We're excited to get your feedback Canada!
Your friends down south,
~ Team Giving