How can we help?

Go to https://dashboard.villadeus.com/me.

Enter the email address and password associated with your account, then select SIGN IN.

If you access villaDeus through a link provided by your church or organization, you may be taken directly into that organization’s Personal Portal.

If you use the general villaDeus link and your email is connected with more than one organization, you may also be able to move between your linked organizations.

Your Personal Portal is where you can manage your information and interact with the organizations you are connected with through villaDeus.

Depending on the features your organization uses, you may be able to:

• Update your Profile.
• Manage Family relationships.
• View the Directory.
• Make a donation.
• Manage saved Payment Methods.
• View and cancel Recurring Gifts.
• Review your Giving History.
• View Giving Statements.
• Manage Directory visibility.
• Manage Businesses associated with you.
• Learn about villaDeus Alliance.
• Change your password.

Additional features may be added to the Personal Portal over time.

You generally do not need to separately register for a Personal Portal account.

A Person record may be created when you:

• Make a donation.
• Add yourself to an organization’s Directory.
• Submit a Business for Marketplace.
• Are added by an Administrator.
• Are included in a data import from your organization.

When you make a donation, villaDeus uses your email address to determine whether an account already exists. If the email matches an existing account, your Giving is associated with that account. If it does not, a new Person record is created.

Directory and Marketplace signup processes may also help identify an existing account before creating another one.

When you first need to access an account that does not yet have a password, villaDeus will send you an email with a link to set one.

Go to https://dashboard.villadeus.com/me.

Enter:

• Your email address.
• Your password.

Then select SIGN IN.

If you have not yet set a password, or your email still needs to be confirmed, villaDeus may send you an email with a link to complete the process.

Email verification confirms that the email address belongs to you.

It also helps villaDeus:

• Protect your account.
• Deliver account and Giving communications.
• Confirm your identity before certain Giving activity.

An unverified email can prevent some activity, including ACH/eCheck and Recurring Giving, from processing.

If you try to sign in before completing required email verification, villaDeus may send you another verification email.

If the email address on your account is incorrect or your email provider is blocking the message, you may need help from your organization before you can complete the process.

Go to https://dashboard.villadeus.com/me.

Enter your email address in the password-reset field and select RESET PASSWORD.

villaDeus will send you an email containing a link to set or reset your password.

If you do not see the email within a few minutes, check your Spam or Junk folder.

Password-reset links are valid for a limited time.

If your email is connected with accounts at multiple organizations, the reset email may allow you to:

• SET ONE PASSWORD FOR ALL CHURCHES, or
• Select an individual organization and reset only that account’s password.

Passwords currently must contain at least 10 characters and include at least:

• One uppercase letter.
• One lowercase letter.
• One numeric digit.

From your Personal Portal:

• Select your initials in the upper-right corner.
• Select SECURITY.
• Enter your new password.
• Enter it again in the confirmation field.
• Select Update Password.

If the passwords match and meet the password requirements, the new password takes effect immediately.

First, make sure you are using the correct email address and password.

If you have forgotten your password, use RESET PASSWORD from the sign-in page.

If you still cannot sign in, possible causes include:

• Your email still needs to be verified.
• Your email address was entered incorrectly when your account was created.
• You are using a different email address from the one associated with your account.
• Your account needs attention from your organization.

Your church or organization should normally be your first point of contact for account-access questions because they can confirm whether you should have access and help correct your account information.

Select your initials in the upper-right corner of the Personal Portal.

Select LOG OFF.

From your Personal Portal:

• Select your initials in the upper-right corner.
• Select PROFILE.
• Update the information you want to change.
• Select Update Profile.

Depending on your account, editable information can include:

• Email address.
• Profile image.
• First name.
• Last name.
• Phone number.
• Address.
• Address (second line).
• City.
• State.
• Postal code.
• Organizational associations.
• Directory-sharing choices.

Open PROFILE from the menu in the upper-right corner.

Update your first and/or last name and select Update Profile.

Open PROFILE, update your phone number, and select Update Profile.

Open PROFILE.

Update the applicable address fields, then select Update Profile.

Open PROFILE and enter the new email address.

When you save the change, villaDeus sends a confirmation link to the new address.

Your email address does not change until you select that confirmation link.

After the new address is confirmed, it becomes the email used for your account and future sign-ins.

Changing your email does not create a new Giving history or move your Giving to a different Person record.

If your Personal Portal is connected with more than one Client, you may have a separate Person record within each one.

When apply to all church accounts is selected, villaDeus applies the current Person’s editable Profile information across those linked accounts.

Organizational Unit associations are not copied because those associations are specific to each organization.

You can also switch between the organizations shown near the top of the Profile screen and maintain different information for each one when appropriate.

Yes. Where available, your Profile displays the Organizational Units associated with your Person record.

You can select or clear those associations and then save your Profile.

Removing an association can affect what you see and where you appear:

• You may no longer be able to view that organization’s Directory if it is not publicly available.
• You will no longer appear in that church, campus or organization’s Directory.
• You may no longer appear with your Family when viewing that particular church, campus or organization if your Family members remain associated there.

Removing an church, campus or organization association does not remove or change your:

• Giving History.
• Recurring Gifts.
• Giving Statements.
• Other Giving records.

In the Family area, People you are authorized to manage can be selected and edited.

If a Family relationship has not been accepted or does not give you permission to manage that Person, their profile appears unavailable and you cannot open or edit their information.

Use the giving link on your church’s website or the link your organization shared with you. If you are signed in to your Personal Portal, select the correct organization and open Give Now.

Enter the amount and choose the fund you want to support. Choose One-Time or Recurring. For a recurring gift, also choose its frequency and first gift date. Select Next to review your gift.

Review the church, fund allocations, amount, and any optional contribution to cover fees. Choose or add a payment method, then select Give Now when you are ready to submit. Complete any email-verification step you receive.

You can make a one-time gift without signing in first. Use your usual email address so your gift can be associated with your existing account. A new Person record may be created if there is no matching account.

Signing in lets you access your saved payment methods and manage your giving. Recurring giving requires a verified email address.

villaDeus supports credit cards, debit cards, and ACH/eCheck payments from a bank account. Apple Pay and Google Pay are also available for one-time gifts when supported by your device and browser.

Recurring gifts use a saved card or ACH/eCheck payment method. Wallet choices are not shown for recurring giving.

Yes. You can allocate one electronic payment among multiple available funds. For example, $40 to General and $60 to Missions can be processed as one $100 payment.

Your fund allocations remain separately recorded even though your card or bank account shows one combined payment. If you choose to cover fees, that additional gift is included in the same payment.

Each electronic payment uses one payment method for all of its fund allocations and any amount you choose to give to cover fees. To use different payment methods, make separate payments.

When you select the optional fee-covering choice during checkout, you make an additional gift to your church to help offset the processing cost. This is a gift to the ministry, not a separate fee you pay directly to villaDeus.

The amount is calculated to account for processing the additional gift as well. Review the total before submitting. Covered fees remain identifiable in your giving record and applicable giving statements.

Yes. Review the gift before selecting the final Give Now button. If you need to change the amount or fund, use the back arrow next to Payment to return to the gift details, then review the updated summary before submitting.

Contact your church or organization promptly and explain which gift needs attention. A completed electronic gift cannot simply be edited to change its amount or fund.

Your church can help determine the appropriate correction. Where a refund is needed, it applies to the whole electronic payment, including all fund allocations and any covered fees. Coordinate with your church before submitting a replacement gift so you do not give twice unintentionally.

Some giving activity, including ACH/eCheck and recurring giving, requires your email address to be verified. Follow the verification link sent to you and check your spam or junk folder if you do not see the message.

A gift that remains on hold for more than six days without the required verification is deleted rather than processed later. If that has happened, complete verification and arrange a new gift. Ask your church for help if you are unsure whether the original gift processed.

Not necessarily. Pending means processing or settlement is not yet complete. It is not confirmation that the money has been deposited into your church’s bank account.

If you are concerned about a gift, ask your church to check its status before you try again.

A payment can fail because of a declined or expired card, insufficient funds, a bank restriction, or another processor response. The reason depends on the payment; there is not one explanation for every failure.

Check any message you received and review your payment details. Contact your bank or your church as appropriate. If you are unsure whether a payment completed, ask your church to confirm before submitting another gift.

Your church may have temporarily suspended online giving. Existing gift records are not removed by that suspension.

Contact your church for help. Recurring occurrences skipped during a suspension are not automatically collected later; future scheduled giving can resume when the suspension is lifted.

Sign in to your Personal Portal and select the correct organization. Open Giving Menu, then Payment Methods. Select Add Payment Method, choose Card or eCheck, enter the requested details, and select Submit.

You may save more than one supported payment method. Complete any required email verification before using ACH/eCheck.

Saved payment methods show identifying details in masked form rather than displaying your full card or bank-account information. The payment credentials are handled through secure payment processors.

Add the replacement card as a new payment method. You cannot update the number or expiration date of an existing saved card in place.

Adding a new card does not automatically move a recurring gift to it. Recreate the recurring gift with the new payment method and remove the old recurring instruction, checking the first date carefully to avoid overlapping gifts.

In your Personal Portal, choose the correct organization and open Giving Menu → Payment Methods. Select the saved method and choose Remove.

To stop a recurring gift, manage the recurring instruction itself under Recurring Gifts. Do not rely on removing a payment method as your cancellation step.

Open Give Now for the organization you want to support. Enter the gift amount and fund allocations, select Recurring, and choose the frequency and first gift date. Select Next, review the details, choose a saved card or ACH/eCheck method, and submit with Give Now.

Your email must be verified before recurring gifts can process. Apple Pay and Google Pay are for one-time gifts, not recurring schedules.

You can choose weekly, every two weeks, twice per month, or monthly. Every two weeks and twice per month are different schedules; select the one that matches your intention.

Recurring gifts do not currently have an automatic end date. Remove the recurring instruction when you want future gifts to stop.

Sign in to your Personal Portal, select the correct organization, and open Giving Menu → Recurring Gifts. Review the schedule you want to manage.

A recurring instruction describes future giving. Completed occurrences are separate gifts in your giving history.

An existing recurring instruction is not edited in place. Create the replacement instruction with the details you want and remove the old instruction.

Review the new first gift date and confirm the old instruction has been removed so the two do not run in parallel. Adding a new payment method alone does not change an existing recurring gift.

Open Giving Menu → Recurring Gifts in your Personal Portal. Select the instruction you want to stop, then select Remove.

This stops future occurrences of that instruction. It does not refund completed gifts or erase your giving history. Contact your church if you need help with a gift that already processed.

There is not a separate pause control. Remove the recurring instruction to stop future gifts, then create a new instruction when you are ready to resume.

No. Skipped occurrences are not automatically retried or collected as catch-up gifts. This can happen while required email verification is incomplete, the organization has suspended giving, or the account is locked.

Once the issue is resolved, an active instruction can continue at its next scheduled occurrence. Ask your church to check the status before making a separate catch-up gift.

Not always. A temporary failure can leave the instruction active for its next scheduled occurrence. A processor response indicating an expired or invalid card can cancel the instruction and trigger a notification.

Review the message and your Recurring Gifts list. If the instruction was canceled, save a valid payment method and create a new instruction.

An existing recurring instruction can continue to a fund that has been unlisted from public giving. Unlisting a fund is different from disabling it.

If you need to recreate the instruction and cannot select the fund, contact your church for guidance.

No. Refunding a completed occurrence and removing the recurring instruction are separate actions. If you also want future gifts to stop, remove the instruction under Recurring Gifts.

Sign in to your Personal Portal, select the organization you want to review, and open Giving History.

Organizations have separate giving records. If the same email is connected to more than one organization, select each organization to review its history; a shared sign-in does not combine those records.

Open Giving Statements in your Personal Portal for the correct organization. A statement becomes available when your church has generated it and its issue date has been reached.

It can be available in the portal even if your church did not send statement emails. If you cannot find the statement you need, ask your church whether it has been issued.

Check that you are viewing the correct organization and statement period. Contact your church with the date, amount, and method of the gift so it can review the record.

Cash and check gifts, and giving from a previous provider, can appear when your church has entered the applicable records and associated them with you. They do not appear merely because you made those gifts outside villaDeus.

Yes. Covered fees are an additional gift to your ministry. They are included in applicable statement giving and remain separately identifiable.

Statements remain connected to the underlying gift records. A refund or chargeback can change the statement so it reflects the resulting giving history.

If a statement that was previously emailed changes, villaDeus sends an email notification. Contact your church if you have a question about the change.

Directory visibility depends on three separate requirements: your church has associated you as a congregant, your church has approved you to appear, and you have allowed your information to be shared in the Directory.

Making a gift or having a Personal Portal account does not automatically add you to the Directory. Review your Directory choices in PROFILE and ask your church to check the organization-side requirements.

Yes. Your Directory sharing choices allow you to control whether your phone, email, and address are shared. You do not have to share every field.

Open PROFILE from your initials menu, review the Directory choices available to you, and select Update Profile to save your changes. Your church’s approval and congregant requirements still apply.

Children are not shown as separate top-level Directory entries. Eligible children may appear when a Family is expanded.

Being in a Family does not bypass Directory eligibility or sharing choices. Ask your church if your Family listing needs correction.

Yes. Directory sharing controls what is shown in the Directory; it does not remove your Person record from the church’s administrative system. Authorized administrators can still work with records according to their permissions.

A Family relationship involving an existing Person may require that person to accept an invitation. Until the relationship is accepted and gives you the appropriate permission, their profile may be unavailable for you to manage.

Family members remain individual people with their own records; a Family relationship is not a shared account.

No. Removing a Family relationship does not delete the person’s record. It changes the relationship between those people.

No. Address information belongs to each Person, not to a single shared Family address. Update each applicable profile that you are authorized to manage, or ask the other Family members to update their own information.

No. Family relationships do not combine individual donor identities or merge giving history. Gifts remain associated with the individual donor, and statements are based on those gift records.

Managing a Family profile does not itself give unrestricted access to another person’s giving history.

If your organization provided you with a direct villaDeus dashboard link, you can use that link to sign in.

If you do not have the organization-specific link, you can always start from the villaDeus website:

• Go to villaDeus.com.
• Select Log In in the footer.
• Enter your email address.
• Follow the login email sent to you.
• If your email is associated with more than one villaDeus Client, select the organization you want to access.

This provides a reliable way to get back into your account even if you no longer have your original organization-specific link.

If you need Administrator access, you can contact:

• An existing Administrator at your organization, or
• villaDeus for assistance.

An authorized Administrator can create another Administrator if they have the appropriate permissions. villaDeus can also handle this for you.

If you would rather not manage Administrator setup yourself, just contact us and we are happy to do it.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions for Administrator-management instructions.

There is currently no special first-login tour or setup wizard.

After signing in, you are taken directly into the villaDeus Management UI.

If the Administrator who created your account required a password change, you will be prompted to change your password.

Otherwise, you can begin using the platform immediately according to your permissions.

The primary Management UI navigation currently includes:

• Overview
• People
• Businesses
• Giving

Depending on your organization, you may also see an Organizational Unit selector.

The areas you can see depend on your Administrator permissions. If you do not have permission to use a feature, villaDeus generally hides that feature rather than displaying something you cannot access.

Overview is intended to give you a quick picture of what may need your attention without requiring you to open every area of the system.

Depending on your organization and permissions, Overview may include:

• People or Directory items awaiting review.
• Businesses awaiting Marketplace approval.
• Giving summaries.
• Recent Giving trends.
• Notes maintained by your organization.
• Commonly used participant-facing links.

For many Administrators, this is a good place to start when signing in.

Notes are internal information boards your organization can create for its Administrators.

They can be used for anything useful to your organization, such as:

• Contact information.
• Policies and procedures.
• Internal instructions.
• Operational reminders.
• Other reference information.

Your organization may create as many separate Note Boards as it needs.

People is the primary area for working with the individuals connected to your organization.

Depending on your permissions and the Person involved, this can include work related to:

• People.
• Congregants.
• Donors.
• Directory participation.
• Families.
• Giving information.

The People interface is also where an Administrator will often go when helping a congregant or donor with their villaDeus account.

Detailed instructions are available in Section 29 — People, Donors & Directory.

The Businesses area currently focuses primarily on Businesses that have been submitted and are awaiting Marketplace approval.

More advanced Business administration is currently performed in the Engineering UI by Administrators with the appropriate permissions.

Giving is the primary Management UI area for day-to-day Giving operations.

It currently provides access to:

• Summary
• Recent Gifts
• Gifts On Hold
• Recent Deposits
• Recurring Gifts
• Funds
• Open Plate Batches

More detailed instructions for each of these areas are provided throughout the Giving-related sections of this Knowledge Base.

If your villaDeus Client contains more than one Organizational Unit, use the Organizational Unit selector in the left navigation.

You can choose to:

• View a selected Organizational Unit, or
• View All Organizational Units together.

The selection applies across the Management UI, including People, Businesses, Giving, Overview, and Links.

When viewing an individual Organizational Unit, the selector also provides basic information to help identify it, including its:

• Name.
• Short Name.
• Address.
• URL.

Selecting an Organizational Unit changes the data you are viewing. It does not change the Organizational Unit's configuration.

View All lets you work across all Organizational Units within the same Client.

For example, if your organization operates several churches, campuses, schools, or other units, you can use View All to see applicable information across all of them together.

You do not currently need to leave View All and select an individual Organizational Unit simply to perform a Management UI action.

A Person may be associated with another Organizational Unit within the same Client.

If you cannot find someone while viewing a single Organizational Unit, try switching to View All and searching again.

Search in villaDeus is specific to the area you are working in; there is not currently one global search across the entire Management UI.

Some people, such as bookkeepers, consultants, or ministry staff, may administer more than one separate villaDeus Client.

Those are different from multiple Organizational Units within a single Client.

If your email is associated with more than one Client, use the general villaDeus login process and select the organization you want to access.

Each Client remains a separate administrative and data context.

If you simply need another person to have administrative access, villaDeus can do this for you.

Contact us with the appropriate information and we can help establish the Administrator account and permissions.

If you prefer to manage Administrators yourself and have the necessary permissions, Administrator management is available through the Engineering UI.

You will need the appropriate permissions, including Manage admins and access to the Engineering UI.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions for the complete procedure and permission rules.

There is not currently a self-service Forgot Password process for Administrator accounts.

If you cannot remember your password, contact:

• Another authorized Administrator at your organization, or
• villaDeus.

An authorized Administrator or villaDeus can assist with resetting your access.

Yes.

Two-factor authentication may work in either of two ways:

• villaDeus may require it for all Administrators within a Client, or
• if it is not required for the Client, an individual Administrator may choose to enable it for their own account.

The Client-wide requirement is controlled by villaDeus.

An Administrator can configure their own authentication through Google Auth in the upper-right user menu when it is available.

To set it up:

• Open Google Auth.
• Scan the displayed code with your authenticator app.
• Enter the numeric code currently displayed by the authenticator app.
• Complete the setup.

Once configured, the authenticator provides the additional verification required during applicable logins.

Open the upper-right user menu and select Profile.

Your Administrator account is separate from any Person profile you may also have within the organization.

Changing information in one should not be assumed to change the other.

Open the upper-right user menu and select:

Sign Off

This ends your current Administrator session.

The Engineering UI is villaDeus's advanced administrative interface.

Most routine work should be performed in the Management UI, but several functions currently require Engineering UI access.

Examples include:

• Creating and managing Administrators.
• Advanced Organizational Unit configuration.
• Configuring ChMS integrations.
• Creating Tax Statement Batches.
• Advanced Business administration.
• Restoring deleted People or Businesses.
• Advanced Groupings administration.
• Certain Giving and banking configuration functions.

The Engineering UI option appears in your user menu only if you have Access Engineering Dashboard.

If you do not have permission to access it, the option is completely hidden.

Wherever possible, this Knowledge Base provides task-specific instructions for the Engineering UI function rather than requiring you to learn the Engineering UI as a whole.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions for Administrator management, Section 34 — Reports & Tax Statements for Statements, and the applicable feature sections for other advanced workflows.

Use the Management UI for normal day-to-day administration.

Use Engineering UI when the task you need is not yet available in Management UI.

Some villaDeus features are introduced in Engineering UI first and later moved into Management UI as the interface continues to develop.

After completing an advanced task, returning to Management UI is generally the easiest way to continue routine work.

If your organization is not yet using villaDeus Giving, you can begin directly from the Giving area.

Select Activate Giving and provide the requested information about:

• The authorized Giving agent.
• Your organization.
• Your depository bank account.
• Your expected Giving activity.

You may save the application and return to it before submitting.

There is no cost or commitment to set up your Giving account, and activating Giving does not require a monthly platform fee or long-term contract.

After you submit the information, villaDeus begins configuring the account.

Most accounts are configured quickly, although some may require additional underwriting review.

While configuration is underway, you can begin preparing items such as your Funds.

When the screen indicates that villaDeus is configuring your account, continue with Section 35 — Launching Giving for the complete launch process, including configuring Funds, testing your Giving link, publishing it, and transitioning from a previous provider if applicable.

villaDeus Giving funds the continued development and expansion of the villaDeus platform while providing churches and ministries with a low-cost way to accept electronic Gifts.

There is:

• No monthly Giving platform fee.
• No long-term contract.
• No cost to switch.
• No requirement to stop accepting cash or checks.
• No requirement to immediately discontinue a previous Giving provider.

The goal is simply to reduce the cost of electronic Giving so more of each Gift remains available for ministry.

The Overview page includes a Links area with commonly used URLs.

Depending on your configuration, these may include:

• Congregant Join Page
• Merchant Join Page
• Giving Page
• Congregant Portal

Applicable links may also provide QR codes or embed code.

If your Client contains multiple Organizational Units and you are using View All, you may see separate link boxes for each Organizational Unit.

The Organizational Unit name appears with the applicable link so you can tell which one you are using.

You do not need to figure everything out yourself.

villaDeus is happy to help with setup, Administrator access, Giving activation, configuration, troubleshooting, or questions about how to accomplish something in the platform.

You can contact villaDeus at:

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

As the Knowledge Base expands, individual areas of villaDeus will also include links to the instructions most relevant to the work being performed there.

No.

villaDeus does not currently use fixed roles such as:

• Admin
• Editor
• Viewer

Instead, each Administrator is assigned the specific permissions they need.

This provides more flexibility because two Administrators with similar responsibilities do not have to be given exactly the same access.

For example, one financial Administrator may need access to Giving and deposit reports but not People, while another may need People and Directory access without access to donor identities.

No.

An Administrator account and a Person profile are separate records with separate login and security behavior.

A person may have both:

• An Administrator account for managing villaDeus.
• A Person profile for participating in the organization.

They may use the same email address, but they should still be treated as separate accounts.

Changes made to one should not be assumed to update the other.

No.

Administrator accounts belong to a specific Client.

If you administer more than one separate villaDeus Client, your access and permissions are maintained separately for each Client.

Permissions granted in one Client do not automatically carry over to another.

If you have the required permissions, you may create and configure Administrators yourself through the Engineering UI.

You need:

• Manage admins
• Access Engineering Dashboard

If you would rather not manage Administrator setup yourself, villaDeus is happy to do it for you.

If you ask villaDeus to create Administrators, please provide:

• Each Administrator's name.
• Email address.
• At minimum, a description of their responsibilities.
• Ideally, the specific permissions they should receive.

A description such as "bookkeeper who should receive deposit reports and review Giving, but should not see donor names" is much more useful than simply saying "financial admin."

Administrator creation currently takes place in the Engineering UI.

• Open Engineering UI.
• Select ADMINS.
• Enter the new Administrator's:
  • Email address.
  • Temporary password.
  • First name.
  • Last name.
• Select the appropriate Client or Organizational Unit context if the interface presents that option.
• Select Add Admin.
• Open the newly created Administrator.
• Configure the Administrator's account settings.
• Open Permissions and select the access they should receive.
• Save the changes.

The Organizational Unit selection shown during creation does not currently restrict the Administrator to that Organizational Unit.

Administrator permissions are Client-wide.

The Administrator creating the account sets a temporary password.

After creating the Administrator, open the account settings and set:

REQUIRE PASSWORD CHANGE to Yes

This setting currently defaults to No, but requiring the new Administrator to change the temporary password is strongly recommended for security.

The Administrator Account screen includes:

NAV MENU

This controls which villaDeus interface loads by default when that Administrator signs in.

For most Client Administrators, this should be set to:

Management UI

The Management UI is the primary interface intended for routine day-to-day administration.

If you have permission to manage Administrators:

• Open Engineering UI.
• Select ADMINS.
• Open the Administrator.
• Enter a new password in:
  CHANGE PASSWORD
• Save the account.

You can also set REQUIRE PASSWORD CHANGE to Yes if you want the Administrator to replace that password after signing in.

villaDeus does not currently provide self-service password recovery for Administrator accounts.

The Administrator will need assistance from either:

• Another authorized Administrator, or
• villaDeus.

An authorized Administrator can set a new password through the Administrator's account settings.

Do not reuse or reassign the Administrator account.

Instead:

• Open the Administrator in Engineering UI.
• Set:
  ACTIVE to No
• Save the account.

This prevents the Administrator from signing in while preserving the account record and its historical association with prior activity.

Administrator accounts are retained rather than permanently deleted.

Yes.

If an inactive Administrator needs access again, set:

ACTIVE to Yes

No additional reactivation step is currently required.

No.

An Administrator cannot modify their own permission set.

Another authorized Administrator must make the change.

This helps prevent accidental or intentional privilege escalation.

No.

An Administrator cannot grant another Administrator a permission they do not themselves possess.

If you need someone to receive access beyond your own permissions, contact an Administrator with the required access or villaDeus.

The current Client-visible Administrator permissions include:

• Manage admins
• Manage churches / causes
• Manage people
• Manage businesses
• Manage groupings
• Access Engineering Dashboard
• Manage giving account
• Manage giving donors
• Manage Open Plate Offerings
  • Edit deposited batch gifts
• Receive deposit reports
  • include Gifts CSV link
  • include Funds CSV link
  • include Donor/Funds CSV link
• Manage ChMS integration

Each permission should be granted based on the Administrator's actual responsibilities.

Manage admins allows an authorized Administrator to manage other Administrator accounts.

Depending on their other access, this may include:

• Creating Administrators.
• Editing Administrator information.
• Changing another Administrator's password.
• Activating or deactivating Administrators.
• Assigning permissions.
• Impersonating another Administrator.

Administrator management currently takes place in Engineering UI, so Access Engineering Dashboard is also required to use these functions.

Manage churches / causes provides access to advanced Organizational Unit administration.

This includes applicable configuration in the Engineering UI for churches, campuses, schools, ministries, or other Organizational Units within the Client.

Because Organizational Units are peer records within a Client, this permission is not currently restricted to only selected Organizational Units.

Manage people allows the Administrator to manage applicable Person information.

This is important for tasks involving:

• Profile information.
• Congregant information.
• Directory administration.
• Family relationships.
• Other Person-related maintenance.

Because Person information can affect Giving and other features, this permission should be granted to staff who are responsible for maintaining participant records.

Manage businesses allows access to Business administration.

This includes applicable Business management in Engineering UI.

If an Administrator does not have this permission, the BUSINESSES section is hidden from them in Engineering UI.

Manage groupings allows advanced access to Groupings.

Groupings currently underpin Family relationships and may support other organizational structures in the future.

Direct Grouping management is generally intended for advanced Administrators rather than routine day-to-day use.

Access Engineering Dashboard makes the Engineering UI available to the Administrator.

It does not grant unrestricted access to everything in Engineering UI.

The Engineering UI continues to respect the Administrator's other permissions.

For example:

• An Administrator with Engineering UI access but without Manage businesses will not see the BUSINESSES section.
• An Administrator without Manage admins will not gain Administrator-management rights simply because they can enter Engineering UI.

Think of Access Engineering Dashboard as access to the alternate advanced interface, while the remaining permissions determine what the Administrator may actually do there.

Manage giving account provides access to applicable Giving-account administration.

This may include advanced Giving setup, account configuration, banking-related settings, and other Giving-account functions available to the Client.

This permission should generally be limited to Administrators responsible for financial or Giving-account administration.

Manage giving donors controls access to donor identity information in applicable Giving screens and Person views.

An Administrator without this permission may still be able to work with Giving in ways that do not require unrestricted donor identification.

For example, they may still be able to work with applicable Fund totals or Open Plate functions depending on their other permissions.

This permission is intended to protect donor privacy by limiting who can associate Giving activity with specific People.

It is important to understand that Manage giving donors does not redact donor names from report files that inherently contain donor information.

If an Administrator receives a report containing donor names, those names remain present in that report.

Manage Open Plate Offerings allows the Administrator to create and manage Open Plate Batches.

This includes entering manually recorded Gifts such as:

• Cash.
• Checks.
• Historical Giving from another provider where appropriate.

Detailed Open Plate behavior is documented in Section 31 — Open Plate Offering.

Edit deposited batch gifts is a child permission under:

Manage Open Plate Offerings

It allows an Administrator to edit Gift information in an Open Plate Batch after the Batch has been marked Deposited.

Because changing a deposited Batch affects records that may already have been reconciled or reported, this permission should be granted carefully.

The interface will not allow this child permission to be enabled unless the parent Manage Open Plate Offerings permission is also enabled.

Receive deposit reports controls whether an Administrator receives deposit-report emails.

This can be useful for:

• Bookkeepers.
• Treasurers.
• Financial Administrators.
• Other staff responsible for reconciliation or accounting.

The permission also includes optional child settings that determine which downloadable CSV links are included in the email.

When enabled under Receive deposit reports, this includes a link to the Gifts CSV in the deposit-report email.

This report is useful when the recipient needs detailed Gift-level information associated with the deposit.

Because Gift-level reports may include donor information, this option should only be granted where appropriate.

When enabled under Receive deposit reports, this includes a link to the Funds CSV.

The Funds CSV provides Fund-level information and does not include donor names.

This can be useful for someone who needs accounting or Fund-allocation information without needing donor identity information.

When enabled under Receive deposit reports, this includes the Donor/Funds CSV download link.

This report associates donor information with Fund activity.

Because it includes donor-level information, it should only be provided to Administrators who have a legitimate need for that data.

Some permissions have dependent child permissions.

For example:

Manage Open Plate Offerings
→ Edit deposited batch gifts

and:

Receive deposit reports
→ individual CSV-link options

The Engineering UI prevents a child permission from being selected unless the parent permission is also enabled.

If villaDeus configures permissions for you and you request a child permission, we will also enable the required parent permission.

Manage ChMS integration allows access to supported Church Management System integration configuration.

Planning Center is currently the supported ChMS integration.

This permission is used for connection and integration administration rather than ordinary viewing of synchronized People or Giving data.

See the applicable ChMS Integration instructions for details.

Use the principle of least access necessary.

Give each Administrator the permissions they need to perform their actual responsibilities, but avoid granting unrelated access simply for convenience.

For example:

A bookkeeper may need:

• Receive deposit reports
• One or more applicable CSV links
• Possibly Giving-account access

but may not need:

• Manage people
• Manage businesses
• Manage admins

A staff member responsible for Directory administration may need:

• Manage people

but may not need donor identity access.

Because villaDeus uses individual permissions instead of fixed roles, you can tailor access much more closely to each person's responsibilities.

Yes.

If you are unsure what permissions someone should have, contact villaDeus and tell us what that person is responsible for.

For example:

"She handles bookkeeping and deposit reconciliation but should not see donor names."

or:

"He manages People, Families, and Directory information but does not handle Giving."

That is usually enough for us to recommend an appropriate permission set.

If you already know exactly what access is required, you may instead send us the specific permissions to enable.

Impersonation allows an authorized Administrator to temporarily view villaDeus as another Administrator.

It is primarily useful for confirming that permissions have been configured correctly or for troubleshooting what another Administrator can see.

Impersonation requires:

• Manage admins
• Access Engineering Dashboard

If you are comfortable using Engineering UI:

• Open Engineering UI.
• Select ADMINS.
• Open the Administrator you want to test.
• Select Impersonate.

villaDeus then opens that Administrator's normal Management UI experience using their permissions.

This is often the easiest way to verify that you granted the correct access.

If you are not yet familiar with villaDeus permissions or Engineering UI, you may prefer to have villaDeus help validate the setup instead.

During the impersonated session, the interface behaves according to the target Administrator's permissions.

It does not grant the target Administrator any additional access.

The impersonating Administrator cannot use impersonation as a way to give the target account greater access than it actually has.

villaDeus also preserves the identity of the actual Administrator performing the action for audit purposes.

While impersonating, open the upper-right user menu and select:

End Impersonate

This returns you to your own Administrator context.

Yes.

Two-factor authentication may be:

• Required for all Administrators within a Client, or
• Optional for individual Administrators if the Client-wide requirement is not enabled.

The Client-wide requirement is controlled by villaDeus.

If 2FA is optional, an Administrator may choose to enable it through:

Google Auth

in the upper-right user menu.

Follow the onscreen prompts to complete setup using your authenticator app.

No.

Client-wide 2FA enforcement is controlled by villaDeus.

If your organization needs that setting changed, contact villaDeus.

villaDeus hides areas that your Administrator account does not have permission to access.

This applies in both Management UI and Engineering UI.

For example, if another Administrator can see BUSINESSES in Engineering UI and you cannot, that may simply mean they have Manage businesses and you do not.

If you believe you should have access, contact another authorized Administrator or villaDeus.

villaDeus intentionally prevents Administrators from changing their own permissions.

This protects the integrity of the permission model and reduces the risk of accidental or unauthorized privilege escalation.

Another authorized Administrator must make the change for you.

Grant access based on the work they actually need to perform.

If the purpose of a permission is unclear, contact villaDeus before enabling it.

It is easier to add access later than to undo unnecessary exposure of financial, donor, or administrative information.

villaDeus is happy to help create Administrators, reset access, recommend permissions, or review your current setup.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

These terms describe different aspects of the same underlying Person record.

A Person is an individual record in villaDeus.

A Congregant is a Person whom the organization has identified as part of its congregation or ministry community.

A Donor is a Person who has made at least one Gift.

These are not mutually exclusive.

For example, one Person may be:

• A Congregant and a Donor.
• A Congregant who has never given.
• A Donor who is not marked as a Congregant.

It is important not to treat Congregant or Donor as separate account types.

No.

The Congregant setting is a ministry-status designation.

It does not determine whether a Person can:

• Log in.
• Manage their profile.
• Give.
• Join a Family.
• Use other supported participant features.

A Person does not need to be marked Congregant simply to use villaDeus.

A Person becomes a Donor automatically when they have at least one Gift associated with their Person record.

There is no separate Donor checkbox that an Administrator turns on.

Donor status reflects actual Giving history.

The primary People list is Congregant-oriented.

The three-person icon opens the Congregants view.

This view generally shows People who are marked as Congregants.

A Person may exist in villaDeus without appearing in that list.

For example, someone who gave as a Donor but is not marked Congregant may instead be found through the Donor view or search.

Within People, select the Donor view using the icon showing two hands with a dollar sign between them.

This displays People with Giving activity, including Donors who may not be marked as Congregants.

The Person may not match the current People filter.

For example:

• A Donor may not be marked Congregant.
• A Congregant may not have Giving activity.
• The Person may be associated with another Organizational Unit while you are viewing only one selected unit.

Use search when looking for a specific Person rather than relying only on the currently visible filtered list.

For multi-OU Clients, also try View All if the Person may belong to another Organizational Unit.

Yes.

Search can locate a Person even if they are not included in the currently displayed filtered list.

This is important when looking for someone who may not currently qualify for the Congregant or Donor view you are using.

Management UI is the preferred place for routine Person creation.

• Open People.
• Make sure you are in the Congregants view.
• Select Add Person.
• Enter the available basic information.
• Review any possible existing matches shown on the right side of the screen.
• Complete the new Person creation.
• After the Person is created, their profile opens.
• Use Edit in the appropriate profile sections to add or update additional information.

The current Add Person process uses the Person's last name to help surface possible existing matches before a duplicate is created.

villaDeus attempts to help prevent duplicate Person records.

As you enter the new Person's information, possible matches may appear on the right side of the Add Person screen.

Review those matches before creating a new record.

If the Person already exists, use the existing record rather than creating another one.

When a Person is created from Management UI, the Organizational Unit context the Administrator is currently viewing is used for the Person's initial OU association.

For example, if you are viewing a particular campus when you select Add Person, that campus is automatically associated with the new Person.

A Person may later be associated with multiple Organizational Units within the same Client.

Yes.

Engineering UI also provides Person creation.

The Administrator selects the appropriate Organizational Unit, enters basic information, selects Add Person, and then opens the new record from the list to enter additional information.

For routine work, Management UI is generally easier and is the preferred interface.

Depending on permissions and configuration, Person information may include:

• First name.
• Middle name.
• Last name.
• Prefix.
• Suffix.
• Given or legal/birth name if different.
• Nickname.
• Email.
• Phone.
• Address.
• Date of birth.
• Gender.
• Marital status.
• Anniversary.
• Member status.
• Communication preference.
• Email preference.
• Background-check status.
• Internal Notes.
• Congregant status.
• Account status.
• Primary Contact.
• Child status.
• Directory settings.
• Organizational Unit associations.
• Business associations.
• Family relationships.
• Client-defined Custom Identifiers.
• Profile image.

Not every organization will use every field.

Custom Identifiers are Client-defined fields that can be associated with a Person.

For example, a church may define:

Envelope#

to store the Person's offering-envelope number.

A Client may define more than one Custom Identifier, so a Person may have multiple identifiers displayed in the Custom Identifiers section of their profile.

These fields allow organizations to maintain identifiers that are useful to their own internal processes without changing the underlying Person model.

Open the Person from People.

The Person profile is divided into sections.

Select Edit within the section containing the information you want to change.

Make the changes and save them.

Different information is organized into areas such as:

• Profile.
• Custom Identifiers.
• Profile Details.
• Family.
• Church Campuses.
• Businesses.
• Giving.

Yes.

A Person may be associated with multiple Businesses.

The Person profile contains a Businesses section that shows the Businesses currently associated with that Person.

An authorized Administrator can use Add in that section to associate the Person with another Business.

Business associations may also be managed from the Business-management interface.

See the Business documentation for detailed Business-management behavior.

LOCKED / DISABLED prevents the Person from using their account normally.

While disabled, the Person cannot:

• Log in.
• Make new Gifts.

Existing recurring Gifts also do not fire while the Person is disabled.

Use this setting carefully because it affects both account access and Giving.

Not necessarily.

villaDeus uses a retained deleted-record model for People.

A deleted Person is hidden from normal lists, but the record is retained.

An authorized Administrator with appropriate Engineering UI access may restore the Person using:

Show Deleted Entries

If you cannot access that function, contact another appropriately authorized Administrator or villaDeus.

If you have the required Engineering UI access:

• Open Engineering UI.
• Select PEOPLE.
• Enable Show Deleted Entries.
• Locate the deleted Person.
• Open the Person.
• Restore the record.

If you are unsure about the record or do not have access, contact villaDeus before creating a replacement Person.

Creating a replacement may produce a duplicate instead of restoring the original history.

villaDeus uses email as an important part of recognizing the Person during login and Giving.

If an existing donor uses a different email address, the system may not be able to determine that they are the same individual.

For example, there may be many people named Joe Smith, so villaDeus cannot safely assume that two records with the same name represent the same person.

As a result, a new Person record may be created.

The original and new records would then need to be merged.

Person-merge functionality is planned but is not yet available.

Until that feature is released, contact villaDeus if duplicate records need to be resolved.

Giving belongs to the Person record.

The email address is not itself the Giving history.

Once Giving is properly associated with the correct Person, changing that Person's email does not redefine the historical Gifts as belonging to someone else.

The duplicate-record issue occurs when villaDeus cannot recognize the returning individual and creates a separate Person.

Your Administrator account may not have:

Manage giving donors

That permission controls access to donor identity information in applicable Giving and Person views.

An Administrator may still be able to work with Giving totals, Funds, Open Plate, or other financial information depending on their remaining permissions.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions for details.

Three separate conditions must all be satisfied:

• The Person must be marked Congregant.
• The organization must enable Approved to Show.
• The Person must enable Allow sharing in directory or the equivalent Listing Opt-In setting.

If any one of these conditions is not met, the Person will not appear in the Directory.

The organization controls:

• Congregant
• Approved to Show

These allow the ministry to determine whether the Person is eligible to participate in the Directory.

The Person controls whether they choose to participate.

The Person's opt-in setting may appear as:

• Allow sharing in directory
• Listing Opt-In

The Person may also choose which applicable information they want shared.

An Administrator can technically change these settings for the Person, but should only do so:

• With the Person's consent, or
• At the Person's request.

Directory participation is ultimately the Person's choice.

Yes.

Directory sharing can be controlled separately for applicable fields such as:

• Phone.
• Email.
• Address.

A Person does not have to share every available contact field in order to participate in the Directory.

The Person will no longer appear in the Directory.

Their existing Directory preferences are retained.

If they are later marked Congregant again, the prior settings remain available rather than being erased.

If someone is waiting for Directory approval, they may appear under Directory Pending on the Overview page.

To approve them:

• Open Overview.
• Select the Person under Directory Pending.
• The Person's profile opens.
• Select Edit in the Profile area.
• Enable Approved to Show.
• Save the changes.

The Person will appear in the Directory only if the other Directory requirements are also satisfied, including their own Directory opt-in.

Pending Directory People are visually highlighted in the People list.

They appear on orange cards.

Pending People are placed alphabetically at the top of the list, followed by the remaining People in alphabetical order.

This makes pending entries easier to find without requiring a separate filter.

Open the Person, select Edit, enable Approved to Show, and save.

Approved to Show is only one of three requirements.

Confirm that:

• The Person is marked Congregant.
• Approved to Show is enabled.
• The Person has opted into Directory sharing.

Also confirm that the Person has selected the individual fields they want shared.

Children do not appear as top-level Directory entries.

They may appear within the context of their Family when the applicable Directory conditions are satisfied.

A Family links related People together.

Each family member remains a separate Person record.

A Family does not create a single shared Person record or shared Giving identity.

No.

villaDeus does not store a single Family address that replaces the individual Person addresses.

Each Person retains their own profile information.

This allows Family members to have different addresses when necessary.

Yes.

A Person may be associated with multiple Families.

This supports real-world family relationships that do not always fit into one household structure.

Open the Person who should be part of the Family.

In their profile, use the Family area and select the applicable Add option.

From there, you can create the Family and associate People with it.

Family management is intended to represent relationships between separate Person records rather than merge them into one record.

Yes.

A new Person may be created as part of the Family workflow.

The new individual still receives their own Person record.

The Family relationship is then established between the records.

Yes.

Existing People can be linked into a Family.

When a participant initiates the addition of an existing Person, that Person must accept the relationship before it becomes active.

No.

When an authorized Administrator establishes the Family relationship, the same participant-acceptance step is not required.

This allows ministry staff to maintain known Family relationships administratively.

No.

Giving remains associated with the individual Person who made the Gift.

A Family relationship does not merge donor histories, Gifts, recurring Gifts, tax statements, or payment records.

Primary Contact identifies a Person as one of the primary contacts for the Family.

It is not intended to define a patriarch, matriarch, head of family, or other hierarchy.

More than one Person in a Family may be marked Primary Contact.

In many Families there may be only one, but villaDeus intentionally allows multiple Primary Contacts so each organization or Family can represent their relationships in the way that fits them best.

Yes.

Multiple People within the same Family may be designated Primary Contact.

The setting is descriptive and organizational rather than a required one-person leadership designation.

A Child is still a separate Person record.

Create or open the Person and enable:

CHILD

where appropriate.

You should also enter an accurate date of birth when available.

The child may then be associated with the appropriate Family.

If villaDeus has the Person's date of birth, the system automatically promotes the Person from Child status to adult status when they turn 18.

This avoids requiring an Administrator to manually remove Child status at adulthood.

Not currently.

Child status prevents digital Giving access.

When the Person becomes an adult, their status can support normal adult participant functionality.

Yes.

Children are separate People.

This allows villaDeus to maintain:

• Their name.
• Date of birth.
• Family relationships.
• Appropriate profile information.
• Directory-family context.

They are not simply text fields attached to an adult's profile.

If your organization uses the Planning Center integration, villaDeus may create or update Person records as part of synchronization with Planning Center.

villaDeus maintains links between the corresponding records in the two systems.

See the ChMS Integration documentation for details about matching, synchronization, and exceptions.

Yes.

Planning Center Family information may create corresponding Family relationships in villaDeus.

Changes to supported Planning Center Family information may update those relationships.

An advanced People CSV export is available through Engineering UI.

Open:

Engineering UI → PEOPLE

At the bottom-left of the People list, select:

Download Ambassador CSV

Despite the older UI wording, Ambassador refers to People in this context.

The downloaded CSV contains the applicable People records for the Client.

Ambassador is a legacy/internal term that still appears in parts of Engineering UI.

The current public product terminology is Person or People.

The Engineering UI terminology is being aligned over time, but documentation preserves exact labels such as Download Ambassador CSV when needed to help you locate the control.

Yes.

Authorized Administrators can import People from CSV through Engineering UI.

The import can be useful for initial setup or larger People-data migrations.

However, villaDeus generally recommends that we perform the import for you.

An incorrectly configured import file can create duplicate or improperly structured records that may require villaDeus assistance to correct.

People imports may include applicable profile information and identifiers such as envelope numbers.

The exact import should be reviewed before processing to make sure the source columns are mapped appropriately.

If you are preparing a migration or large People import, sending the file to villaDeus first is usually the safest option.

For a small, well-understood import, an experienced Administrator may use the CSV import tools.

For migrations, large files, or files with uncertain formatting, we recommend letting villaDeus perform the import.

There is no advantage to risking duplicate or incorrectly configured Person records when we can help prepare and process the file correctly.

If you are unsure whether to create a new Person, restore an existing Person, resolve a duplicate, import People, change Directory or Family information, or correct a Business association, villaDeus is happy to help.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

It is usually better to ask before creating a replacement record when you suspect the Person may already exist.

A Gift is a charitable allocation to a specific Fund.

A Transaction is the electronic payment event that pays for one or more Gifts.

For example, if a donor gives:

• $30 to General
• $120 to Missions

villaDeus records:

• One $30 Gift
• One $120 Gift
• One $150 Transaction

If the donor also chooses to cover processing fees, the Covered Fees amount is included in that same Transaction as an additional charitable Gift.

This distinction is important because refunds, fees, deposits, and some reports operate at the Transaction level rather than the individual Gift level.

Yes.

A donor can give to multiple Funds in a single electronic Transaction.

Each Fund allocation is stored as its own Gift, while the payment is processed as one Transaction.

For example:

• $30 General
• $120 Missions

creates two Gifts inside one $150 Transaction.

This also means the donor pays only one fixed per-Transaction fee rather than a separate fixed fee for each Fund allocation.

villaDeus currently supports:

• Credit cards.
• Debit cards.
• ACH/eCheck.
• Apple Pay.
• Google Pay.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are available only for one-time Giving.

Apple Pay is shown when:

• The donor is using an Apple device, and
• Apple Pay is enabled on that device.

Apple Pay is available for one-time Gifts only.

If the donor selects Recurring Giving, Apple Pay is not shown.

Google Pay is shown when:

• The donor is logged into Google on the device, and
• Their Google account has payment cards stored in Google Pay.

Google Pay is available for one-time Gifts only.

If the donor selects Recurring Giving, Google Pay is not shown.

Apple Pay and Google Pay currently support one-time Giving only.

When the donor selects Recurring Giving, those wallet options are removed and the donor must use a supported recurring payment method instead.

Yes.

Guest Giving is supported.

A donor does not need to have previously created or logged into a villaDeus account before making a one-time Gift.

No.

Administrators do not have a normal workflow for initiating an electronic Gift on behalf of a donor.

Electronic Giving should be initiated by the donor.

Administrators can record manual Giving, such as cash or checks, through Open Plate Offering.

See Section 31 — Open Plate Offering for those workflows.

villaDeus Giving rates are:

• Cards: 1.88% + $0.30
• ACH/eCheck: $0.30

These fees apply at the Transaction level.

If a donor chooses to cover processing fees, villaDeus calculates an additional charitable Gift so that the ministry receives the donor's intended underlying Gift amount after processing fees.

For example, if the donor intends for the ministry to receive exactly $100, villaDeus calculates the additional Covered Fees amount needed so the net result after processing remains $100.

The Covered Fees amount is itself a charitable Gift earmarked for the purpose of covering the processing expense.

As a result, the full Transaction amount is treated as charitable Giving.

Because percentage-based processing fees apply to the entire Transaction, including the additional amount being added to cover the fee.

villaDeus therefore calculates the Covered Fees amount using a gross-up calculation rather than simply adding the percentage and fixed fee to the original Gift.

This allows the intended Gift amount to remain intact after processing.

Open:

Giving → Gift Transactions

The list shows recent Giving activity.

Select a row to open Donation Details.

The detail view shows the Gifts included in that Transaction, such as:

• Fund.
• Amount.
• Covered Fees where applicable.
• Payment method.
• Transaction identifier.

Open:

People → select the Person → Giving

The Person's Giving view may include:

• Summary.
• Recurring Gifts.
• Statements.
• Transactions.
• Stored Payment Methods.

The information available depends on your Administrator permissions.

Your Administrator account may not have:

Manage giving donors

That permission controls access to donor identity information in applicable Giving views.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions for details.

Gifts On Hold contains Gifts that are waiting for donor email verification.

This currently occurs when a donor creates:

• A Recurring Gift, or
• An ACH/eCheck Gift

without first validating their email address.

Yes.

A one-time ACH/eCheck Gift is held until the donor validates their email.

The same validation requirement also applies before Recurring Gifts can process successfully.

The donor needs to validate their email address.

An Administrator may contact the donor and ask them to complete the verification process.

Once the donor has validated their email, future eligible processing can proceed according to the applicable Giving instructions.

A failed Gift may be shown with the circle-and-horizontal-bar indicator.

This means the Giving attempt did not complete successfully.

In most cases, there is no corrective action the Administrator can perform directly on the failed Gift.

The Administrator can contact the donor and ask them to review or retry their Giving.

Administrators cannot add a new stored payment method for a donor.

Only the donor can add payment methods.

An authorized Administrator may delete a stored payment method on the donor's behalf.

Donors may also delete their own stored payment methods.

You can initiate a refund from the Gift Transactions view.

• Open Giving.
• Open Gift Transactions.
• Select the applicable row.
• Donation Details opens.
• Select Refund.

The refund applies to the entire electronic Transaction.

You can also initiate the refund from the Person record.

• Open People.
• Select the Person.
• Open their Giving view using the applicable hand-with-cash icon.
• Locate the Transaction.
• Select the Transaction row.
• Donation Details opens.
• Select Refund.

The result is the same full-Transaction refund.

No.

Electronic refunds operate at the Transaction level.

If one Transaction contains several Fund allocations, the entire Transaction must be refunded.

For example, if a donor gave:

• $30 General
• $120 Missions

within one Transaction, villaDeus cannot refund only the $30 General Gift.

The full Transaction must be refunded.

No.

The original processing fee is not returned.

A refund also incurs an additional $0.30 processing fee.

Not currently.

Once a Gift has been completed, the Fund allocation stored in villaDeus cannot be directly changed.

If the issue only affects your accounting classification, you may simply reallocate the amount within your accounting records.

If the villaDeus Gift record itself must be corrected, the current process is:

• Refund the entire Transaction.
• Have the donor give again using the correct Fund.

Fund-allocation editing is planned for the future, but this is currently a relatively uncommon correction.

The same full-Transaction rule applies.

Because the Gifts are part of one electronic Transaction, villaDeus cannot currently refund or rewrite just one allocation.

If the stored villaDeus record must be corrected, refund the whole Transaction and have the donor recreate the intended Giving.

If the correction can be handled entirely within your accounting records, that may be the simpler option.

Covered Fees appear alongside the other Gifts in the Transaction detail.

For example, a Transaction may contain:

• General Fund.
• Missions Fund.
• Covered Fees.

All of those amounts belong to the same electronic Transaction.

If the Transaction is refunded, the entire Transaction, including Covered Fees, is refunded.

Yes.

Covered Fees are recorded as an additional charitable Gift designated to help cover processing expense.

This means the donor's full Transaction amount is treated as charitable Giving rather than splitting part of the payment into a separate non-charitable service fee.

A Recurring Gift is an instruction to create future electronic Giving on a schedule selected by the donor.

A single Recurring Gift may contain Gifts to more than one Fund.

Supported schedules include:

• Weekly.
• Every 2 Weeks.
• Twice Per Month.
• Monthly.

Recurring Gifts continue until canceled.

Yes.

Each successful recurring occurrence creates a new Transaction.

The Recurring Gift is the standing instruction; the individual Transactions are the actual payment events created over time.

The donor's email may not yet have been validated.

Recurring Gifts do not process successfully until email validation has been completed.

Any scheduled occurrence before validation is skipped.

It is not automatically retried later.

The next scheduled occurrence can process after the donor completes validation.

A transient system or processor-connectivity failure does not automatically cancel the Recurring Gift.

The recurring instruction remains active and keeps its normal schedule.

If the processor reports that the stored card is expired or no longer valid, villaDeus cancels the Recurring Gift and notifies the donor.

The donor can then establish new Giving using a valid payment method.

Authorized Administrators can review Recurring Gifts from the Giving interface and may cancel them where the interface provides that action.

Canceling a recurring instruction stops future scheduled occurrences.

It does not erase Transactions that were already completed.

No.

Refunding an individual occurrence does not itself cancel the Recurring Gift instruction.

If future occurrences should stop, the Recurring Gift must also be canceled.

If a Fund is no longer Listed, it is removed from new public Giving choices.

Existing Recurring Gifts to that Fund continue.

This is the preferred approach when you want to stop new Gifts to a Fund without disrupting existing recurring Giving.

If the Fund is no longer Enabled, future Recurring Gifts to that Fund are canceled.

Disabling a Fund is therefore much more significant than simply removing it from the public list.

See Section 32 — Funds for the difference between Enabled and Listed.

Yes.

Historical Giving from another provider can be recorded or imported without treating those historical Gifts as if they had been electronically processed through villaDeus.

This allows donor history and Tax Statements to include prior Giving while keeping villaDeus processing records accurate.

See Section 31 — Open Plate Offering for more detail about recording historical Gifts.

No.

Historical Gifts from a prior provider are not treated as new villaDeus electronic processing events.

They therefore do not create new villaDeus Bank Deposits.

villaDeus is happy to help with:

• Failed Gifts.
• Gifts On Hold.
• Refunds.
• Recurring Gifts.
• Duplicate donor records.
• Fund corrections.
• Payment-method questions.
• Historical Giving.
• Other Giving issues.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

Open Plate Offering is the villaDeus workflow for recording Gifts received outside villaDeus electronic payment processing. Typical examples include cash, checks, and historical Gifts from a previous giving provider.

Applicable Open Plate Gifts can become part of Donor Giving history, Fund reporting, and Tax Statements. They are stored as manually recorded Giving and do not create villaDeus electronic Transactions or villaDeus Bank Deposits.

In Management UI, open Giving from the left navigation. Select the Open Plate Offering icon. The Open Plate Offering list opens, where you can review existing Batches, create a new Batch, open Reports, and manage Deposited and Reconciled status.

Open Giving from the left navigation. Select the Open Plate Offering icon. Select New Batch. Verify the applicable Church or Organizational Unit, Service Date, and Service Time. Enter the Gifts that belong to the Batch. Select Save Batch and complete the confirmation before leaving the Batch.

A Batch groups manually recorded Gifts for entry, review, deposit tracking, and reconciliation. More than one Batch may be used for the same service, event, or collection period.

For each Gift, enter the applicable Donor, Donation Amount, Type, Check #, Fund, and Notes. Select Add to add the Gift to the Batch, then repeat the process for the remaining Gifts.

Use the Type that reflects how the Gift was received. For a check Gift, enter the applicable Check # when available. Notes may provide additional context, but they do not replace the structured Gift information.

Begin typing the Person’s name in the Donor field. When villaDeus presents the matching existing Person, select that Person. The Gift is then associated with the existing Person record and becomes part of that Person’s applicable Giving history.

Begin typing the Person’s name in the Donor field. If you do not select a matching existing Person, villaDeus creates a new Person record using the name entered and associates the Gift with that newly created Person.

In the Donor field, select ANONYMOUS. This records the Gift and its Fund designation without associating it with an individual Person. Because no named Person is associated with the Gift, it does not appear in a specific Person’s Giving history.

No. Every Open Plate Gift is assigned to one Fund. If one physical contribution includes multiple Fund designations, enter each designation as a separate Gift. For example, record a $40 General designation and a $60 Missions designation as two Gifts that together represent $100 of Giving for that date.

No. Open Plate Batches are not saved automatically. A donation logger may select Save Batch to save an unfinished Batch and return later, but must save before leaving the Batch to prevent data loss.

Yes. While a Batch remains Open, an authorized Administrator may continue entering Gifts, make applicable changes, or use the trash icon beside a donation to remove that Gift.

Deposited records that the physical funds represented by the Batch have been deposited into the ministry’s bank account. It is separate from a villaDeus Bank Deposit, which represents settlement of electronically processed Giving.

Open Giving from the left navigation. Select the Open Plate Offering icon. On the Open Plate Offering list, locate the applicable Batch. Select the checkbox in the DEPOSITED column. You do not need to open the Batch detail to change this status.

Reconciled records that the physical deposit has been matched to the ministry’s bank records. Depositing and reconciling are separate actions.

On the Open Plate Offering list, first confirm that the applicable Batch is marked Deposited. Then select the checkbox in the RECONCILED column after the deposit has been verified against the bank records.

On the Open Plate Offering list, clear Reconciled if it is selected. Then clear Deposited. The Batch returns to the list of Open Batches and may be updated. After the changes are complete, it may again be marked Deposited and Reconciled.

Editing Gifts after a Batch has been deposited requires the Edit deposited batch gifts permission. This child permission depends on Manage Open Plate Offerings and separates ordinary Open Plate entry from the more sensitive ability to change Gifts after deposit.

Open Giving from the left navigation. Select the Open Plate Offering icon. Select the applicable Batch row. At the bottom left of the donation list, select Download CSV. The downloaded file contains the donations recorded in that Batch.

Open Giving from the left navigation. Select the Open Plate Offering icon. From the Open Plate Offering list, select Reports to open Batch Reports.

Choose the Church or Organizational Unit, including ALL when appropriate. Choose the Admin or logger, including ALL when appropriate. Enter the exact Begin date and End date. Select Show Report to generate the Offering Report using those criteria.

An Offering Report summarizes matching Open Plate Gifts, groups applicable Giving by Organizational Unit and Batch, and provides Fund-level totals. The overview includes the Church, Begin date, End date, Admin, total amount, and number of Gifts. Batch detail may include Donor, Type, Check #, Fund, Notes, and Amount.

Show & Save generates the Offering Report and saves the report criteria. Saved Reports display the applicable report ID, Church, Admin, Begin date, and End date so the report can be used again.

Yes. Use the delete control for the applicable saved report. Deleting a saved report removes the saved report criteria; it does not delete the underlying Open Plate Batches or Gifts.

Open Plate Offering Reports support exact Begin and End dates, so you can report on a specific day, month, quarter, or other custom period across matching Open Plate Batches.

Electronic Giving settlement reporting is organized through villaDeus Bank Deposits. A Bank Deposit represents card and ACH/eCheck Giving that villaDeus processed and settled. Marking an Open Plate Batch Deposited does not add it to Bank Deposits.

Use Offering Reports or an individual Batch CSV for Open Plate Giving. Use Bank Deposit reports for electronic settlement activity.

Yes. Open Plate Offering may be used to record historical Giving from a previous provider so villaDeus can maintain a more complete Donor Giving history and applicable Tax Statements can include those Gifts.

Historical Gifts remain manually recorded Giving in villaDeus. They do not create historical villaDeus electronic Transactions or villaDeus Bank Deposits because the original processing and settlement occurred through the previous provider.

If you need to remove an Open Plate Batch, contact villaDeus before deleting the Batch or any of its Gifts. We can help your church review the records and determine the appropriate next step. Email info@villadeus.com or call 206-736-5504.

villaDeus can help with Batch entry, Donor matching, Deposited or Reconciled status, editing a deposited Batch, Offering Reports, CSV downloads, historical Giving, and correcting an Open Plate entry.

Email: info@villadeus.com

Phone: 206-736-5504

A Fund represents the ministry purpose or designation a Gift supports. Every Gift is associated with one Fund, preserving the Donor’s intent in Giving history and reporting.

Funds exist at the Organizational Unit level, not at the Giving Account level. A Fund belongs to the Organizational Unit in which it was created, even when multiple Organizational Units share one Giving Account.

No. Each individual Gift is associated with one Fund. One electronic Transaction may contain multiple Gifts, with each Gift assigned to its own Fund.

Open Plate Offering follows the same rule. If one physical contribution is designated to more than one Fund, enter each designation as a separate Open Plate Gift.

Use a name that clearly describes the ministry purpose and is understandable to Donors and Administrators. Fund names appear in Giving and reporting contexts.

Current Fund settings include Enabled, Listed, and Top Listed. Each setting has a different purpose.

Listed controls whether the Fund appears as an available option for new Giving. When Listed is cleared, the Fund is removed from the public Fund list, new one-time and Recurring Gifts cannot select it through the normal Giving interface, existing Recurring Gifts continue processing, and historical Gifts remain unchanged.

Clearing Listed is normally the preferred choice when the ministry wants to stop presenting a Fund for new Giving while preserving established Recurring Gifts.

Enabled controls whether the Fund remains active. Disabling a Fund removes it from the available Fund list and cancels future Recurring Gifts associated with that Fund.

villaDeus requires confirmation because re-enabling the Fund does not recreate the Recurring Gifts canceled when the Fund was disabled. Use this setting when ending those future recurring instructions is the ministry’s intent.

Clear Listed when you want to stop new Gifts to a Fund while allowing existing Recurring Gifts to continue. Remove Enabled when you want to remove the Fund from future use and cancel future Recurring Gifts associated with it.

Yes. Clear Listed. New public Giving will no longer present the Fund, while historical Giving remains intact and existing Recurring Gifts continue processing. The Fund may be listed again later.

Remove Enabled when the ministry intends to stop future Giving completely, including existing Recurring Gifts. Review the confirmation carefully because re-enabling the Fund will not restore the canceled recurring instructions.

Top Listed places selected Funds in the prioritized portion of the Fund list. Funds not marked Top Listed generally follow the normal alphabetical ordering.

Yes. Top Listed Funds may be placed in a custom order above the normal alphabetical list. This can prioritize seasonal, campaign, or ministry Funds without renaming or replacing them.

The Fund shown first in the Giving interface acts as the default selection when the Donor does not choose another Fund. Because Top Listed Funds can be ordered, manage the first position intentionally.

Yes. Minor corrections such as spelling, clarity, or formatting can preserve the Fund’s original purpose. Historical Gifts and existing Recurring Gifts remain associated with the same Fund record, so do not rename a Fund in a way that materially changes what it represents.

Create a new Fund when the ministry purpose materially changes. Normally, clear Listed on the existing Fund and create a new Fund for the new purpose. This preserves historical accuracy and existing recurring Donor intent.

If the ministry intentionally wants to end all future Recurring Gifts to the old Fund, it may instead disable the old Fund after reviewing the confirmation.

Historical Gifts remain associated with the Fund to which they were originally designated. Changing Listed or Enabled does not rewrite historical Giving.

Not directly. A ministry may make an accounting reallocation outside villaDeus when appropriate. If the villaDeus Donor record itself must show a corrected Fund, refund the Transaction and have the Donor make a new Gift to the correct Fund.

Refunds operate at the Transaction level, so a Transaction containing multiple Gifts must be refunded in full.

Remove the existing recurring instruction and have the Donor establish the desired recurring configuration. This changes future behavior but does not rewrite previously processed Gifts.

No. villaDeus does not support Fund merging. Fund records remain distinct even when they share a name, support similar purposes, or are combined in an external accounting system.

Fund information may appear in Bank Deposit reports, Funds CSV reports, Gifts CSV reports, Donor/Fund CSV reports, Open Plate reports, Donor Giving history, and applicable Tax Statements.

The Funds CSV summarizes applicable Bank Deposit activity by Fund and does not include Donor names. It is useful for recording or reconciling Fund totals without Donor-identifying Giving information.

Each Fund has an internal numeric villaDeus identifier. That identifier is not currently included in standard deposit reports. If your ministry uses separate ledger or accounting Fund IDs, you may need to maintain your own mapping.

No. Covered Fees may resemble a Fund allocation in reporting, but they are a separate Giving concept representing the Donor’s additional Gift to help cover Processing Fees.

Yes. Each Organizational Unit maintains its own Funds. For example, Main Campus and North Campus may each have a Fund named General, but those are separate villaDeus Fund records.

The Organizational Units may share one Giving Account while keeping separate Fund structures. Each Organizational Unit can use its own Giving Link, presenting only the Funds belonging to that Organizational Unit.

Yes. A Client may create the applicable Funds in one Organizational Unit and use that Organizational Unit’s Giving Link as the shared Giving experience. Other participating Organizational Units may direct Donors to the same link.

No. Fund ownership remains at the Organizational Unit level. A shared Giving experience does not create Client-level or Giving Account-level Funds.

Consider whether the Organizational Units share a website, use separate webpages, need one combined Giving experience, require separate reporting, or use the same Fund purposes. Choose the structure that matches the intended Donor experience and reporting model.

villaDeus can help with initial Fund setup, Fund names and ordering, Listed versus Enabled decisions, Recurring Gift implications, multi-Organizational Unit Fund structure, shared Giving Account strategies, and Fund corrections.

Email: info@villadeus.com

Phone: 206-736-5504

A Bank Deposit is a settlement of electronically processed Giving into the organization’s configured depository bank account.

A Bank Deposit may contain multiple:

• Transactions.
• Donors.
• Gifts.
• Funds.
• Recurring and one-time Gifts.

Processing fees, Covered Fees, refunds, returns, and other applicable adjustments are reflected so the final Net amount matches the amount actually deposited or withdrawn from the bank account.

There are two common paths from the Management UI Giving page.

To see all Bank Deposits

Select the bank icon in the Giving subnavigation.

The icon resembles a bank building with a roof, pillars, and steps.

This opens the full paginated Bank Deposits list for the Organizational Unit filtering currently selected in the left navigation.

To review recent Bank Deposits

Scroll down the Giving page to:

Recent Deposits

This section shows the most recent 10 Bank Deposits.

The bank icon in the upper-right of the Recent Deposits section also opens the complete Bank Deposits list.

For routine weekly reconciliation, Recent Deposits is often the simplest place to start because the newest deposits appear first.

Recent Deposits shows only the most recent 10 deposits.

The full Bank Deposits view:

• Shows the complete paginated deposit history.
• Includes Search.
• Uses the same deposit columns as the Recent Deposits view.

The current Bank Deposits list includes:

• ID
• Date
• Event
• Amount
• Tags
• Date Range
• Batch
• Funds
• Gifts
• Donor/Fund

The final three columns provide downloadable CSV reports for that Bank Deposit.

The full Bank Deposits view includes a Search field.

You can search by:

• Date.
• Amount.

Enter dates using the same format shown in the list.

In the current Bank Deposits view, that format is:

YYYY/MM/DD

The Recent Deposits section does not include Search.

Opening a Bank Deposit displays its detailed deposit report.

The report is designed to provide enough information to reconcile the amount deposited to the bank and account for the underlying Giving.

The deposit summary identifies information such as:

• Client or Organizational Unit.
• Sweep Batch ID.
• Transmittal Date.
• Deposit Amount.
• Depository Account.
• Earliest included donation.
• Latest included donation.

The depository account is displayed in masked form.

Each applicable Organizational Unit has a Fund summary.

Information may include:

• Fund.
• Gross Debits.
• Pledged.
• Count.
• Total Recurring.
• Count Recurring.
• Gross.
• Total Fees.
• Fees Covered.
• Net.

This provides enough information for the organization to account for fees according to its preferred accounting method.

For example, an organization may choose to:

• Reduce individual Fund allocations by their applicable processing fees, or
• Credit the full charitable Gift amounts to the Funds and account for processing expense elsewhere.

villaDeus provides the information needed for either approach.

Below the Fund summary, the report lists the individual Transactions contributing to that Organizational Unit’s portion of the Bank Deposit.

Current information includes:

• Date.
• Donor.
• Recurring status.
• Transaction.
• Source.
• Type.
• Description.
• Note.
• Gross.
• Fees.
• Fees Covered.
• Net.

Remember that one Transaction may contain multiple Gifts to different Funds.

The Transaction list therefore represents the payment events, while the Fund summary above shows how the underlying Gifts were allocated.

Each Organizational Unit section has its own subtotal.

That subtotal represents the net settlement activity attributable to that OU within the Bank Deposit.

If only one OU uses the Giving Account, there will normally be one OU section.

If multiple OUs share the Giving Account, the structure repeats for each applicable OU.

At the bottom of the report, Grand Totals combines the subtotals from all included Organizational Units.

The final Net Grand Total matches the actual amount being deposited into, or withdrawn from, the depository bank account.

A shared Giving Account produces one actual Bank Deposit.

The detailed report separates the activity by Organizational Unit.

For example, the report may contain:

• Organizational Unit A
  • Fund summary.
  • Transaction detail.
  • OU subtotal.
• Organizational Unit B
  • Fund summary.
  • Transaction detail.
  • OU subtotal.
• Additional OUs as applicable.
• Grand Totals

The Grand Total is the sum of the OU subtotals and matches the actual bank settlement.

An OU with no activity during that settlement period may still appear with zero totals.

Separate Giving Accounts produce separate Bank Deposits.

Those Giving Accounts may also be configured to settle into different depository bank accounts.

This is one reason Giving Account structure matters for multi-OU organizations.

When View All is selected for a multi-OU Client, the Bank Deposits interface can show deposits across the applicable Organizational Units and Giving Accounts.

The same date and amount search behavior applies.

If you only want to work with one Organizational Unit’s deposits, change the OU selection in the left navigation.

Most Gifts processed on Sunday are typically deposited on the following Wednesday.

Some transactions processed later, particularly ACH/eCheck activity, may still make it into that same Wednesday settlement rather than waiting for the next one.

Not normally in villaDeus.

villaDeus processes cards as card-not-present transactions and does not use PIN debit.

Credit and debit card Transactions therefore follow the same general card-processing path for settlement timing.

The deposit information becomes available in the villaDeus interface before the deposit-report email is sent.

For the normal weekly workflow, Administrators can generally review the report in the interface around Tuesday, while the related bank settlement commonly posts Wednesday.

The deposit-report email is sent very early Friday morning, giving the bank transfer time to appear in the depository account before the recipient performs reconciliation.

The goal is to send the notification after the deposit has had time to appear in the organization’s bank account.

This makes the emailed report more useful for reconciliation.

Administrators who want to review the information sooner can access the Bank Deposit report directly in villaDeus.

Each Bank Deposit currently provides three CSV exports:

• Funds CSV
• Gifts CSV
• Donor/Funds CSV

Each serves a different accounting or reporting purpose.

The Funds CSV summarizes the deposit at the Fund level.

It contains the information represented in the Fund section of the Bank Deposit report.

It does not contain donor names.

This makes it particularly useful for someone who needs Fund-level accounting information without needing access to individual donor identities.

Despite the current UI name, the Gifts CSV is primarily a Transaction-level export.

It shows the total amounts of the Transactions in the Bank Deposit rather than breaking each Transaction into its individual Fund allocations.

For example, if one Transaction contains:

• $50 General.
• $25 Missions.
• Covered Fees.

the Gifts CSV represents the overall Transaction rather than giving a separate Fund-level row for each underlying Gift.

The Donor/Funds CSV provides Fund-level detail tied to donor intent.

It shows the individual Gifts contained within Transactions.

For example, one Transaction may produce separate rows for:

• General Fund.
• Missions Fund.
• Covered Fees.

This makes it useful when an Administrator needs to understand exactly how each donor’s Transaction was allocated across Funds.

Because one Transaction can contain multiple Gifts.

For example, a single Transaction might include:

• $20 General.
• $10 Missions.
• Covered Fees.

Each Gift is represented separately in the Donor/Funds CSV while sharing the same Transaction number.

This is the distinction between a Gift and a Transaction.

Use the Funds CSV.

It provides Fund-level accounting detail without donor names.

This can be a good choice for Administrators or outside bookkeepers who need financial information but do not need to identify individual donors.

Administrators may be assigned:

Receive deposit reports

This controls whether they receive the Bank Deposit report email.

If only the parent permission is selected, the email includes a link to the general deposit summary report.

Additional child permissions determine which CSV download links are included.

The child permissions are:

• include Gifts CSV link
• include Funds CSV link
• include Donor/Funds CSV link

These allow the organization to tailor the emailed information to the recipient’s responsibilities.

No.

Manage giving donors controls donor visibility in applicable villaDeus screens.

It does not redact donor identity from a CSV report that inherently contains donor information.

If an Administrator is given access to a report that contains donor names, those names remain in that report.

For this reason, report permissions should be granted based on the recipient’s legitimate need for the information.

No.

A historical Bank Deposit report remains a record of the settlement that actually occurred.

Later events do not rewrite the original deposit.

For example, if a donor’s Transaction is later refunded, the original Bank Deposit report remains unchanged.

The refund appears in the later Bank Deposit where the money is actually deducted.

A refund appears in the later Bank Deposit from which the refund amount is deducted.

It is identified as a:

refund

and references the original Transaction.

The original historical deposit remains unchanged.

Yes.

If refunds, returns, fees, or similar deductions exceed the amount of new Giving being settled, the resulting Bank Deposit event may have a negative amount.

In that situation, the settlement is effectively a withdrawal from the organization’s depository bank account.

The report still shows the activity that produced that Net amount.

The later Bank Deposit report shows the returned payment and applicable related adjustment.

For example, the report may identify:

• ACH Payment Return
• An applicable rejected-payment fee.

The report references the original Transaction so the Administrator can identify the Giving event that was reversed.

The donor’s Giving history also reflects the return.

Chargebacks follow the same general reporting principle as refunds and payment returns.

They appear in the later Bank Deposit where the adjustment is deducted rather than rewriting the original historical deposit.

The report identifies the chargeback and applicable related adjustment and ties it back to the original Transaction.

A Retrieval Request is an information request that may occur before or during a card dispute process.

villaDeus handles Retrieval Requests behind the scenes using information already available in the platform.

The church does not normally need to manually respond to the processor.

villaDeus will advise appropriate church staff when one occurs and may contact the organization if additional information is needed.

Yes.

Refunds, payment returns, chargebacks, and other applicable Giving events appear chronologically in the Person’s Giving history.

This allows an Administrator to see both:

• The original Gift Transaction.
• The later event that affected it.

In the Person’s Giving history, the refund appears as its own event.

The list also uses a looped-back arrow icon to indicate a refund relationship.

Opening the refund shows the original Transaction it relates to.

Yes.

Traceability works in both directions.

You can open the later refund or other adjustment to see the original Transaction.

You can also open the original Transaction to see the related later refund or adjustment.

This allows Administrators to follow the full history without altering the original record.

The chasing-arrow icon identifies activity associated with Recurring Giving.

It is different from the looped-back arrow used for a refund.

The refund applies to the entire Transaction.

If one electronic Transaction contained Gifts to several Funds, all of those Gifts are part of the refund.

This is why the later Bank Deposit adjustment may affect more than one Fund in the report.

No.

Open Plate Giving represents money that church staff physically deposit themselves.

The villaDeus Bank Deposits list shows money villaDeus electronically settles for the Client.

The two workflows should not be confused.

Organizations use different accounting systems and reconciliation procedures, so there is not one required villaDeus workflow.

The Bank Deposit report provides:

• Deposit amount.
• Fund totals.
• Processing fees.
• Covered Fees.
• Individual Transactions.
• Applicable adjustments.
• OU subtotals.
• Grand Total.

This gives the organization the information needed to map the actual bank settlement into its accounting process.

If you would like help determining the simplest workflow for your organization, villaDeus is happy to provide a free training or consultation call and review the process with your bookkeeper, treasurer, or other financial staff.

Yes.

The deposit report provides enough detail to support either approach.

Your organization may choose to:

• Record each Fund net of its applicable processing costs, or
• Record the full charitable Gift to each Fund and account for uncovered processing expense elsewhere.

The appropriate accounting treatment is up to the organization and its accounting policies.

The report separately identifies:

• Processing fees.
• Fees Covered.
• Net.

This makes it possible to see which processing expense was offset by donors who chose to make an additional Covered Fees Gift.

More detailed Covered Fees allocation behavior is explained in Section 34 — Reports & Tax Statements.

An authorized Administrator can update the depository bank information through the applicable advanced Giving configuration.

Because changing the destination bank account affects settlement of real funds, this should only be performed by someone with the appropriate Giving-account authority.

See the Giving-account setup and advanced configuration instructions, or contact villaDeus if you would like us to make the change with you.

villaDeus is happy to help with:

• Reconciliation.
• Deposit-report interpretation.
• Shared Giving Accounts.
• Multi-OU reporting.
• Refunds.
• ACH returns.
• Chargebacks.
• CSV selection.
• Bookkeeper access.
• Depository bank changes.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

For organizations establishing a new accounting workflow, we are also happy to schedule a free call with the appropriate financial staff and work through a real Bank Deposit together.

Current reporting is primarily built around:

• Bank Deposit reports.
• Per-deposit CSV exports.
• People CSV export.
• Tax Statements.
• Open Plate per-Batch CSV export.

There is not currently a general-purpose report that lets you export all Gifts or all Transactions for any arbitrary date range.

Not currently.

villaDeus does not yet provide a general all-Gifts or all-Transactions report/export for an arbitrary date range.

Most electronic Giving reporting is currently deposit-based.

For deposit-specific reporting, see Section 33 — Bank Deposits.

Each Bank Deposit includes:

• A detailed deposit report.
• Funds CSV
• Gifts CSV
• Donor/Funds CSV

These provide different levels of detail for reconciliation and accounting.

See Section 33 — Bank Deposits for a complete explanation of each report.

The full People CSV export is available in Engineering UI.

Open:

Engineering UI → PEOPLE

Then select:

Download Ambassador CSV

Despite the older UI wording, Ambassador refers to People in this context.

See Section 29 — People, Donors & Directory for more detail.

villaDeus is also happy to help with People exports or imports if you prefer not to perform them yourself.

A Tax Statement Batch generates donor Giving Statements for one Organizational Unit over a selected period.

A Batch creates Statements for all donors with Giving activity in that OU during the selected date range.

Tax Statement Batches are currently created in Engineering UI.

Open:

Engineering UI → CHURCHES → select the Organizational Unit → GIVING → STATEMENTS

Statement Batches are created one Organizational Unit at a time.

From the selected Organizational Unit's STATEMENTS area:

• Select New Statement Batch.
• Enter or confirm:
  • Statement Name
  • Period Start
  • Period End
  • Issue Date
• Decide whether to enable:
  Send Statement Emails on issue date
• Add an optional custom email message if desired.
• Use Preview Email and Preview Statement to review the donor experience.
• Select Ok to create the Batch.

Statement Name is the title used to identify the Batch and the resulting Statements.

For annual Statements, villaDeus can automatically use a name such as:

2026 Annual Giving Statement

Yes.

When creating a new Statement Batch, villaDeus can prefill common year-end periods, including prior-year and current-year annual Statements.

The annual naming convention is:

YYYY Annual Giving Statement

For a current-year annual Statement, the preset uses:

• Period End: December 31 of that year.
• Issue Date: January 1 of the following year.

The Period Start is set to the beginning of the applicable annual period.

Yes.

Statement periods are not limited to calendar years.

You may create Statements for:

• Calendar years.
• Fiscal years.
• Other custom periods.

No.

The Issue Date cannot precede the Period End.

The Statement period must first be complete.

Yes.

You can create and configure a Statement Batch well before either the Period End or Issue Date.

Once configured, villaDeus will make the Statements available on the Issue Date and send the emails automatically if email delivery was enabled.

The Batch generates a Statement for every donor with Giving activity in the selected Organizational Unit during the selected period.

The Statement becomes available on the configured Issue Date.

It is then available through the donor's villaDeus account.

Authorized Administrators can also access the Statement through the donor's Giving information.

The Statement still becomes available in the donor's account on the Issue Date.

The checkbox controls whether villaDeus also sends the donor a Statement notification email.

The standard email gives the donor the information needed to access their Statement.

It includes:

• The Statement title.
• The applicable Giving period and total.
• A direct View this statement link.
• A Sign in to your account link.
• Ministry identification.
• An optional custom message if one was entered.

You can review the exact layout using Preview Email before the Batch is issued.

The custom message appears within the standard Statement email body.

It is shown as an additional organization-supplied message without replacing the standard villaDeus Statement information.

Preview Email shows what the donor's Statement notification email will look like.

villaDeus selects an actual donor with Giving activity in the Batch so the preview contains realistic data.

Preview Statement shows the actual Giving Statement format the donor will receive.

Like the email preview, villaDeus selects an actual donor with activity so the preview is representative of a real Statement.

The preview uses actual Batch data so you can verify:

• Dates.
• Totals.
• Fund information.
• Donor presentation.
• Statement formatting.

This makes the preview more useful than a generic sample with placeholder data.

A Statement currently includes applicable:

• Ministry name.
• Ministry address.
• Tax ID.
• Donor name.
• Donor address.
• Statement period.
• Total Giving.
• Fund-level summary.
• Covered Fees.
• Detailed Giving ledger.

The detailed ledger includes information such as:

• Date.
• Payment method.
• Fund.
• Amount.

Yes.

Covered Fees are included as part of the donor's charitable Giving.

They may appear in both the summary and detailed Giving information.

villaDeus Giving is intended for tax-deductible charitable donations.

Clients should only use the Giving system for Transactions that are appropriate to be treated as charitable donations.

Statements therefore report the donor's qualifying Giving activity recorded in villaDeus.

Yes.

Historical Giving entered or imported into villaDeus can appear on Statements for the applicable period.

This allows organizations transitioning to villaDeus to maintain complete donor Giving records.

See Section 31 — Open Plate Offering for more information about historical Giving entry.

The Statement updates to reflect the refund.

The original Giving record remains part of the audit history, but the donor's Statement reflects the corrected charitable Giving amount.

The Statement updates to reflect the returned or rejected payment.

A donor should not continue to receive charitable credit for a payment that was ultimately reversed.

The Statement updates to reflect the chargeback.

As with refunds and ACH returns, villaDeus adjusts the donor's Giving record so the Statement reflects the resulting charitable amount.

If a Statement has already been emailed and is later changed because of a refund, return, chargeback, or similar event, villaDeus notifies the donor that their Statement has changed.

Yes.

If the Person's name or address is corrected, the Statement reflects the updated Person information immediately.

The Statement does not need to be regenerated solely because the Person's profile information changed.

Yes.

A Fund rename changes the Fund name everywhere that Fund is referenced, including historical Tax Statements.

For that reason, do not rename a Fund when the underlying charitable purpose has materially changed.

See Section 32 — Funds for the full Fund-renaming guidance.

Each Statement Batch is still created for one Organizational Unit at a time.

The Statement uses that OU's configured:

• Name.
• Address.
• Tax ID.

If multiple OUs share the same Tax ID, each OU can still present its own identity on its Statements.

In Management UI:

• Open People.
• Select the donor.
• Open their Giving view.
• Locate the Statements section.
• Select the applicable Statement.

The Statement opens in a new browser tab.

Yes.

When the Statement opens in the new browser tab, use the available:

Print

option.

Yes.

The individual Statement view includes:

Download

This allows an Administrator to save the Statement for the donor where appropriate.

Not currently.

Bulk Batch PDF download is not yet available.

Individual Statements can be opened and downloaded one at a time.

Yes.

Open the existing Batch and change the applicable settings.

Be aware that changes apply to the existing donor Statements.

villaDeus displays a warning before applying changes.

Depending on the change, the Issue Date may also be updated to today's date.

Review the Batch carefully before confirming edits.

Current actions include:

• Preview email
• Preview Statement
• Delete
• OK

The Batch fields can also be edited.

Deleting a Statement Batch removes all related Statements from donor accounts.

villaDeus displays a warning before deletion:

the related Statements will be removed from donor access.

Because this affects every donor Statement in the Batch, use Delete carefully.

Do not assume a deleted Statement Batch can be restored.

If you believe a Batch was deleted in error, contact villaDeus before recreating or making additional changes.

You may configure annual Statements well in advance.

The key requirement is that:

Issue Date cannot precede Period End.

For example, you may prepare a year-end Batch before December 31, review the previews, and schedule the Statements to become available after the year closes.

If email delivery is enabled, villaDeus will automatically distribute the Statement email on the Issue Date.

No.

If Send Statement Emails on issue date is enabled, villaDeus sends the donor emails automatically on the configured Issue Date.

Not currently.

Statement Batches are created one Organizational Unit at a time.

For a Client with several OUs, create the appropriate Batch for each Organizational Unit that needs Statements.

Statement generation occurs inside the selected Organizational Unit:

Engineering UI → CHURCHES → selected OU → GIVING → STATEMENTS

Always confirm the selected OU before creating the Batch.

Yes.

A donor's Statement can include Giving recorded through:

• villaDeus electronic processing.
• Open Plate.
• Historical Giving entered or imported into villaDeus.

The important factor is that the Gift is associated with the donor and falls within the Statement period.

villaDeus is happy to help with:

• Deposit reports.
• CSV exports.
• People exports.
• Year-end Statements.
• Custom Statement periods.
• Statement previews.
• Email delivery.
• Historical Giving.
• Statement corrections.
• Multi-OU Statement setup.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

For year-end Giving Statements, we are also happy to review your setup with you before the Issue Date.

There is:

• No setup fee.
• No monthly Giving platform fee.
• No long-term contract.
• No cancellation fee.
• No personal guarantee from the Authorized Agent.
• No personal credit check on the Authorized Agent.

You can complete the Giving setup well before you are ready to publish the new Giving link.

Getting the account configured does not obligate you to launch.

You could complete the setup and never publish the Giving link without incurring a signup, monthly, or cancellation fee.

No.

You can set up villaDeus Giving while your current provider remains active.

In fact, getting villaDeus configured early is often the best approach because it removes the risk of an unexpected setup delay when you are ready to launch.

Your previous provider can remain active throughout the transition and, if you choose, indefinitely.

villaDeus does not increase your rates or penalize you for keeping another Giving provider active.

From the Management UI, open Giving and select:

Activate Giving

The activation process asks for information in three primary sections:

• AUTHORIZED AGENT
• CHURCH
• DEPOSITORY BANK DETAILS

You may save the application and return to it before submitting.

The AUTHORIZED AGENT section currently asks for information such as:

• Contact title.
• First name.
• Last name.
• Email.
• Phone.
• Date of birth.
• Social Security number.
• Address.
• City.
• State.
• ZIP code.

The Authorized Agent is completing the application on behalf of the organization.

They are not signing a personal guarantee and do not become personally responsible for the organization's Giving activity.

villaDeus does not run a personal credit check on the Authorized Agent.

This information is required for financial identity-verification and regulatory purposes, including applicable:

• OFAC.
• AML.
• KYC.

requirements.

It is used to verify the identity and organizational relationship of the Authorized Agent.

It is not collected to establish a personal guarantee or to run a personal credit check.

The CHURCH section currently asks for information such as:

• Legal name.
• DBA, if applicable.
• EIN / Tax ID.
• Phone.
• Website.
• Physical address.
• City.
• State.
• ZIP code.
• Time zone.
• Average monthly credit/debit Giving volume.
• Average credit/debit Gift amount.
• Highest expected single credit/debit Gift amount.

This information helps configure and underwrite the Giving Account appropriately.

The DEPOSITORY BANK DETAILS section currently includes:

• Account nickname or name.
• Account Type.
• Account number.
• Routing number.

Applicable Account Type options include:

• Checking.
• Savings.
• General Ledger.

This is the bank account where villaDeus electronic Bank Deposits will be sent.

No.

Use:

Save for Later

if you need to stop and return later.

This is useful if you need to collect bank information, Authorized Agent information, or other details before submitting.

Selecting:

Submit Application

sends the Giving Account into processor underwriting and configuration.

Submission does not necessarily mean the account is immediately live, although most applications are configured very quickly.

The interface will show the account's configuration status.

The configuration screen indicates that most accounts are completed in approximately:

5–10 minutes

Some applications may take up to approximately:

24 hours

if additional review is required.

For this reason, it is a good idea to activate Giving before the exact day you intend to launch.

There is no cost to getting the account configured early.

In some cases, additional information may be needed before the Giving Account can be completed.

The interface or villaDeus will guide you through what is required.

Examples may include:

• A copy of a driver's license.
• A bill or document verifying mailing address.
• Documentation confirming that the Authorized Agent is associated with the organization.

Not every application requires additional documentation.

This is a good time to:

• Configure your Funds.
• Rename the automatically created General Fund if needed.
• Plan your transition from the previous provider.
• Decide when and how you want to communicate the change.
• Schedule free training for staff who will use the system.

villaDeus is happy to provide role-specific walkthroughs for people such as:

• Bookkeepers.
• Treasurers.
• Donation counters.
• Pastors.
• Administrative staff.
• Other key users.

villaDeus creates a default General Fund during Giving setup.

In most cases, the easiest approach is to rename it to the Fund your organization actually intends to use.

If you will not use it, disable it.

See Section 32 — Funds for detailed Fund-management guidance.

Once configuration is complete, the interface indicates that the Giving Account has been successfully configured.

You can then access the Giving tools needed to begin launch preparation.

Depending on the interface and use case, villaDeus provides tools such as:

• Giving URL.
• Giving embed code.
• QR code.

These can be used in different places depending on how your organization presents Giving.

The Giving URL can be used anywhere you currently provide a Giving link.

Common examples include:

• Website.
• Church app.
• Email.
• Text messages.
• Online newsletters.
• Social media.
• Other digital communications.

In many cases, launching villaDeus Giving is as simple as replacing the old provider's Giving URL with the villaDeus Giving URL.

Give the embed code to the person or team responsible for your website or app.

The embed code can be used to integrate the villaDeus Giving experience into the appropriate digital interface.

Provide the QR code to your graphics, communications, or design team.

It can be used on items such as:

• Presentation screens.
• Flyers.
• Pew cards.
• Stickers.
• Printed bulletins.
• Posters.
• Other places where you currently display a Giving link.

Usually not.

The villaDeus Giving experience can provide donors with a path to the previous provider while the transition is still underway.

That means the organization can often replace the primary Giving link once rather than building and maintaining a complicated webpage with multiple provider buttons.

Yes.

Before publishing the new Giving link broadly, church staff should use the live link and complete at least one real Gift.

A practical approach is for staff members who already give regularly to begin moving their own Giving to villaDeus first.

This allows the team to experience the same process donors will use and identify any questions before the public launch.

No specific amount is required.

The goal is simply to complete a real Giving experience so staff can confirm that:

• The Giving interface works as expected.
• The Fund choices are correct.
• The donor experience is understandable.
• The resulting Giving activity appears correctly in villaDeus.

Yes.

If your organization needs a more specialized testing approach, contact villaDeus.

We can discuss advanced pre-launch testing options based on your use case.

Once you are comfortable with the setup and testing:

• Replace the old Giving link with the villaDeus Giving URL, or
• Add the villaDeus embed to the appropriate website/app experience.
• Update printed or visual materials with the villaDeus QR code where appropriate.
• Begin whatever donor communication plan your organization has chosen.

The actual launch timing is controlled by your organization.

No.

Your organization decides:

• When to launch.
• How to announce the change.
• Whether to send email.
• Whether to mention it during services.
• Whether to transition quietly over time.
• Whether to use a transition screen.

villaDeus is happy to help with messaging and transition planning, but there is no required announcement campaign.

The transition screen is an optional page that helps donors move from the previous Giving provider to villaDeus without forcing an abrupt change.

It is controlled by:

Show transition screen

When enabled, it can present:

• A custom transition message.
• Give with New Provider
• Continue with Old Provider
• The savings associated with the new Giving option.

Give with New Provider sends the donor into the villaDeus Giving experience.

This is the path you ultimately want donors to adopt.

Continue with Old Provider allows the donor to keep using the previous Giving system during the transition.

This means your organization does not need to force every donor to move at once.

Yes.

The transition text can be customized to fit the organization's voice and migration plan.

This can be useful for explaining:

• Why the organization is changing providers.
• What donors need to do.
• Why lower processing costs benefit the ministry or donor.
• How recurring donors should transition.

Yes.

The transition screen can show savings based on the configured rates from the previous Giving provider.

This helps donors understand why the organization is moving to villaDeus.

No.

The transition screen is optional.

If your organization does not want to use it, Show transition screen can be disabled.

As long as your organization wants.

There is no villaDeus deadline requiring you to shut down the old provider.

You may:

• Run both systems for a short period.
• Keep both active for an extended transition.
• Leave the previous provider available indefinitely.

villaDeus does not penalize you or raise your rates because another provider remains active.

Without token migration, donors will need to:

• Enter their payment information into villaDeus.
• Create their new Recurring Gift schedule.
• Cancel the corresponding recurring instruction at the old provider.

Many donors already have payment cards stored in their browser or mobile device, which can make entering the new information relatively easy.

Donors should be reminded to cancel the old recurring instruction after establishing the new one so they do not accidentally receive duplicate charges.

In many cases, yes.

villaDeus can assist with secure payment-token migration when the previous provider cooperates and supplies the required token and mapping information.

The purpose is to help donors transition without unnecessarily re-entering payment credentials.

No.

Sensitive payment information is not exposed to the church or to villaDeus.

The migration uses secure tokenized payment data between compliant systems.

Token portability depends on the previous provider cooperating with a secure migration.

A provider that refuses a legitimate, secure token-transfer request is effectively preventing the church and its donors from moving their own Giving relationships elsewhere.

villaDeus believes payment portability should serve churches and donors rather than be used as a mechanism for vendor lock-in.

If your previous provider resists a migration request, contact villaDeus and we will help determine the available options.

Potentially.

If the previous provider supplies sufficient information, including the necessary:

• Payment tokens.
• Donor mapping.
• Amounts.
• Funds.
• Schedules.
• Other recurring-Gift details.

villaDeus can help automate recreation of the recurring Giving instructions.

The amount of automation possible depends on the information the previous provider supplies.

Yes.

People data may be imported before launch, but the launch does not have to wait for every possible historical record to be perfected.

If you have a People file ready, importing it before launch can make donor identification and historical-Gift migration easier.

Yes.

People imports can include applicable identifiers such as envelope numbers and other supported Person information.

People should be imported before historical Gifts that need to be associated with them.

A Gift needs a Person record to be associated with a named donor.

Historical Gifts therefore cannot meaningfully be imported for a named donor until the corresponding Person exists.

The normal order is:

• Import People.
• Import historical Gifts.

No.

In many cases, it is actually preferable to wait until the old Giving provider is fully shut down before importing the final historical Giving.

Otherwise, new Gifts may continue arriving through the old provider after the historical import, requiring additional cleanup or another import.

A common approach is:

• Launch villaDeus.
• Allow the transition period to continue.
• Shut down or stop using the old provider when ready.
• Import the remaining historical Giving once the old-provider activity has ended.

If the transition spans year-end, consider how you want donor Tax Statements handled.

One option is to:

• Import all historical Gifts through December 31.
• Set the villaDeus annual Statement Issue Date far enough into January to allow time for the final historical import.
• Then issue one unified Statement from villaDeus.

For example, an organization might choose an Issue Date around January 10 rather than January 1 to provide additional migration time.

Another valid option is to issue:

• One Statement from villaDeus, and
• One Statement from the previous provider.

The best approach depends on the timing and completeness of the historical Giving migration.

See Section 34 — Reports & Tax Statements for Statement behavior.

Yes.

Historical Giving can be added later.

This allows the organization to launch the new Giving experience without waiting for every prior record to be migrated first.

No.

They are recorded as historical Giving rather than new villaDeus electronic processing.

See Section 31 — Open Plate Offering for more information.

The ministry does.

villaDeus does not require a specific communication schedule or donor announcement.

We can help you prepare:

• Email language.
• Website messaging.
• Transition-screen text.
• Recurring-Gift instructions.
• Staff talking points.

but your organization decides how and when those communications are used.

villaDeus supports multiple contact categories, including:

• Authorized Giving Agent
• Member Giving Contact(s)
• Financial Contact(s)
• Member Contact(s)
• Technical Contact(s)

Multiple contacts may be maintained where applicable.

These roles help villaDeus and donors reach the right person for the type of assistance needed.

Where appropriate, villaDeus system emails may include the relevant organization contact information so donors know whom to contact for help.

This allows financial, Giving, membership, and technical questions to be directed to the appropriate person.

Yes.

There are several ways to structure this.

Option 1: Shared Giving Account with separate Giving Links

Multiple OUs may use one Giving Account while each maintains its own Giving Link and Fund structure.

This works well when each OU has:

• Its own webpage.
• Its own donor audience.
• Its own Giving presentation.

The underlying payment processing can still be shared.

Option 2: Shared Giving Account and shared Giving Link

Multiple OUs may use one Giving Account and share one Giving Link.

In this model, the Funds used in that Giving experience are configured under the OU associated with the shared Giving Link.

This can work well when several OUs share one website and one combined Giving experience.

Option 3: Separate Giving Accounts

An OU may have its own separate Giving Account.

In that case, the OU goes through the Giving activation workflow for that separate account.

Separate Giving Accounts may also use separate depository bank accounts.

There is no single best structure.

Consider:

• Whether the OUs share a website.
• Whether they need separate Giving pages.
• Whether Funds should be OU-specific.
• Whether deposits should remain separate.
• Whether they share a bank account.
• Whether donors should experience one unified Giving interface.

villaDeus is happy to review your structure before you configure it.

Yes.

Training and setup assistance are available at no charge.

We can tailor walkthroughs to the responsibilities of people such as:

• Pastors.
• Administrators.
• Bookkeepers.
• Treasurers.
• Donation counters.
• Finance committee members.
• Technical staff.
• Other key users.

This is often especially useful before the first Bank Deposit or Open Plate reconciliation.

Yes.

We can help with:

• Fund setup.
• Giving-link placement.
• Transition-screen configuration.
• Donor messaging.
• Staff training.
• Token migration.
• Recurring-Gift migration.
• People imports.
• Historical-Gift imports.
• Year-end Statement planning.
• Multi-OU architecture.

There is no charge for launch planning or training.

villaDeus is happy to walk through the entire launch with you.

Email: info@villadeus.com
Phone: 206-736-5504

For a new launch, we especially recommend involving the people who will actually work with the system—such as the bookkeeper, treasurer, donation counters, and key administrators—so we can tailor the setup and training to how your organization really operates.

If the issue involves:

• Movement of money.
• A duplicate Gift.
• A refund.
• Deleted data.
• A donor identity issue.
• Historical Giving.
• A Recurring Gift.
• A Bank Deposit discrepancy.
• Something you are unsure can be reversed.

stop before making major changes and contact villaDeus if you are not certain of the correct action.

Some actions are intentionally difficult or impossible to undo.

For example, once an electronic Transaction is refunded, it cannot simply be reinstated. The donor would need to give again.

We would much rather help you determine the right correction first.

Administrator accounts do not currently have self-service password recovery.

Contact either:

• Another Administrator who has permission to manage Administrators, or
• villaDeus.

An authorized Administrator can set a new password for you through Engineering UI.

Your Administrator account may not have:

Access Engineering Dashboard

If you do not have that permission, Engineering UI is completely hidden from your user menu.

If you need Engineering UI to perform your responsibilities, ask an authorized Administrator to grant the permission or contact villaDeus.

villaDeus uses individual permissions rather than fixed Administrator roles.

If you do not have permission to use a feature, villaDeus generally hides that feature entirely.

Ask an authorized Administrator to review your permissions if the missing feature is necessary for your job.

See Section 28 — Administrators & Permissions.

Administrators cannot change their own permissions.

Another Administrator with the appropriate authority must make the change.

An Administrator also cannot grant another Administrator a permission they do not themselves possess.

Check whether the Administrator is still:

ACTIVE

An Administrator set to ACTIVE = No cannot sign in.

An authorized Administrator can reactivate the account by setting ACTIVE = Yes.

The Person may not belong to the list you are currently viewing.

For example:

• A donor may not be marked Congregant.
• A Congregant may have no Giving activity and therefore not appear in the Donor view.
• The Person may be associated with another Organizational Unit.

Use Search rather than relying only on the visible list.

For a multi-OU Client, also try:

View All

because the Person may be associated with another OU.

One common cause is using different email addresses.

If an existing donor returns using a different email, villaDeus cannot safely assume they are the same Person merely because the name matches.

There may be multiple People named Joe Smith, for example.

As a result, a second Person record may be created.

Person-merge functionality is planned but is not yet available.

For now, contact villaDeus for help resolving duplicates.

Also encourage the Person to consistently use one email address—ideally the account that already contains their:

• Stored payment methods.
• Giving history.
• Recurring Gifts.

Not without first determining which record contains the information that needs to be preserved.

One record may contain:

• Giving history.
• Recurring Gifts.
• Stored payment methods.
• Directory information.
• Family relationships.
• Business associations.
• Other profile data.

Contact villaDeus before trying to resolve a significant duplicate manually.

First confirm:

• Their email address is correct.
• They are attempting to use the email associated with their villaDeus Person record.
• LOCKED / DISABLED is not enabled.

Remember that Congregant status does not control login access.

If the Person still cannot sign in, contact villaDeus for assistance.

A Person marked:

LOCKED / DISABLED

cannot:

• Log in.
• Make new digital Gifts.

Their existing Recurring Gifts also do not fire while the Person remains disabled.

Start with:

• Confirm the email address on the Person record is correct.
• Ask the donor to check Spam, Junk, or other filtered folders.
• Confirm whether villaDeus email is being blocked by their email provider.
• Resend the appropriate villaDeus email where available.

A wrong or inaccessible email address can prevent a donor from completing actions that require email confirmation.

Yes.

From the Person detail view, use the available resend email function.

Depending on the Person's status, you may need to clear the existing confirmed status before the resend option becomes applicable.

The resend interface may show more than one relevant email type.

Select the email appropriate to the problem.

The available choices depend on the Person's current situation.

For example, the resend interface may offer:

• Gift Account Confirmation
• Email Confirmation (General)

Choose the message that corresponds to what the Person needs to complete.

Yes.

The resend interface provides a preview of the applicable email.

This lets you confirm:

• What action the donor is being asked to take.
• Which Gift is involved.
• Which link or button they should use.

The resend interface includes:

Copy Email Text

This allows the Administrator to copy the relevant email content and send it to the donor from the church's own email account when necessary.

This can also help determine whether the issue is specifically with delivery of villaDeus-generated email.

Three conditions must all be satisfied:

• The Person is marked Congregant.
• The organization has enabled Approved to Show.
• The Person has enabled Listing Opt-In / Allow sharing in directory.

If any one of those is missing, the Person does not appear.

Directory participation and field sharing are separate choices.

Check whether the Person has enabled sharing for the individual field:

• Phone.
• Email.
• Address.

A Person may participate in the Directory while choosing not to display one or more contact fields.

Directory visibility requires the Person to be a Congregant.

Removing Congregant hides the Person from the Directory.

Their existing Directory preferences are retained, however, so the settings do not have to be recreated if they are later marked Congregant again.

Children are not shown as top-level Directory entries.

They may appear within their Family context where applicable.

A failed Gift represents a processing attempt that did not complete successfully.

There usually is not an Administrator action that can repair the failed Transaction itself.

villaDeus automatically notifies the donor.

An Administrator may also contact the donor and ask them to review or retry their Giving.

If the donor says they did not receive the villaDeus notice, verify their email address, have them check Spam/Junk, and use the email resend tools if appropriate.

A Gift on Hold is waiting for the donor to complete required account or email confirmation.

This currently applies when a donor creates:

• A Recurring Gift, or
• An ACH/eCheck Gift

without completing the required validation.

The donor must take action before the Gift can proceed.

The donor has already been notified automatically by villaDeus.

If it remains unresolved:

• Verify the email on the Person record.
• Ask whether the donor received the villaDeus message.
• Ask them to check Spam/Junk.
• Resend the applicable confirmation email if needed.
• If appropriate, use Copy Email Text and send the instructions from your own church email account.

The confirmation email explains the specific action required.

For example, a donor may need to set their account password before the Gift can be completed.

One-time ACH/eCheck Gifts require email/account validation.

Until the donor completes that validation, the Gift remains On Hold.

One common cause is that the donor did not complete email validation.

Recurring Gifts do not process until the required validation is complete.

A scheduled occurrence that passes before validation is skipped rather than automatically retried.

Once the donor completes validation, the next scheduled occurrence can proceed normally.

Not necessarily.

A temporary system or processor-connectivity failure does not automatically cancel the recurring instruction.

It remains on its normal schedule.

If the processor reports that the stored card is expired or no longer valid, villaDeus cancels the Recurring Gift and notifies the donor.

The donor will need to establish new Giving using a valid payment method.

Yes.

If Enabled was removed from a Fund, active recurring instructions to that Fund are canceled.

They cannot be recovered simply by re-enabling the Fund.

If you only want to stop the Fund from appearing as an option for new Gifts, remove Listed instead.

See Section 32 — Funds.

The Fund may be:

Enabled but not Listed

That is intentional behavior.

Removing Listed hides the Fund from the list available for new Giving while preserving existing recurring commitments.

Only the donor can add a new stored payment method.

Administrators may delete a stored payment method where appropriate, but they cannot add one on the donor's behalf.

Yes.

Donors can delete their own stored payment methods.

An authorized Administrator can also remove one on their behalf.

Apple Pay appears for a one-time Gift when:

• The donor is using a compatible Apple device, and
• Apple Pay is enabled on that device.

Apple Pay is not shown when the donor selects Recurring Giving.

Google Pay appears for a one-time Gift when:

• The donor is logged into Google on the device, and
• Their Google account has eligible Google Pay cards stored.

Google Pay is not shown when Recurring Giving is selected.

Refunds operate at the Transaction level.

One electronic Transaction may contain several Gifts.

If a Transaction contained:

• $50 General.
• $25 Missions.

you cannot refund only one of those Fund allocations.

The entire Transaction must be refunded.

Because a refund cannot simply be undone later, confirm the intended correction before proceeding.

If the correction only matters for accounting, the organization can reallocate the amount within its accounting records.

If the villaDeus Gift record itself must be changed, the normal current workflow for an electronic Gift is:

• Refund the entire Transaction.
• Have the donor give again to the correct Fund.

That can be inconvenient for the donor, so contact villaDeus first if you are uncertain.

In unusual situations where coordinating a replacement Gift is difficult, villaDeus may be able to help determine another appropriate correction.

Open Plate Gifts follow a different workflow from electronic Transactions.

An Open Plate Gift can be edited while its Batch is Open.

Editing a Gift after the Batch has been marked Deposited requires:

• Manage Open Plate Offerings
• Edit deposited batch gifts

See Section 31 — Open Plate Offering.

Check:

• Is Enabled checked?
• Is Listed checked?
• Are you viewing the correct Organizational Unit?
• Does the Fund actually belong to another OU?

A Fund must be both Enabled and Listed to appear as a selectable Fund for new donor Giving.

The Fund is likely still Enabled but no longer Listed.

That is the preferred configuration when you want existing Recurring Gifts to continue while preventing new donors from selecting the Fund.

The Fund has active Recurring Gifts.

Disabling it will cancel those recurring instructions.

villaDeus therefore asks for confirmation before proceeding.

If no Recurring Gifts are associated with the Fund, disabling it does not require that warning.

A Fund rename changes the Fund name everywhere that record appears, including:

• Historical Giving.
• Recurring Gifts.
• Tax Statements.

Do not repurpose an old Fund by renaming it for a materially different purpose.

See Section 32 — Funds.

Check Service Time, then select Save Batch and complete the confirmation. Open Plate Batches are not saved automatically.

Church is normally prefilled from the OU context, and Service Date defaults to today.

Service Time begins blank and is required.

A Batch must first be marked:

Deposited

The Reconciled checkbox remains unavailable until Deposited is set.

If the Batch is currently Reconciled, Deposited is locked.

First:

• Uncheck Reconciled.
• Then uncheck Deposited.

The Batch returns to Open.

You may be missing:

Edit deposited batch gifts

This is a child permission under:

Manage Open Plate Offerings

Ask an authorized Administrator to grant it if editing deposited Batches is part of your responsibilities.

No.

A deleted Open Plate Batch cannot currently be restored.

Contact villaDeus if you believe important Giving records were deleted and you need help determining the correct next step.

First check the Organizational Unit context in the left navigation.

If you have multiple OUs, try:

View All

The full Bank Deposits view can also be searched by:

• Date.
• Amount.

Use the same date format displayed in the list.

Historical Bank Deposit reports never change.

The original report continues to show the settlement that actually occurred.

The refund appears in the later Bank Deposit where the refund is deducted.

Refunds, payment returns, chargebacks, or related adjustments can exceed new Giving for that settlement period.

When that happens, the Net settlement becomes negative and represents a withdrawal from the organization's depository bank account.

Open the detailed report to see the activity that produced the amount.

The villaDeus Bank Deposits list shows electronic funds that villaDeus deposited for the Client.

Open Plate collections are physically deposited by church staff.

They are still deposits in the ordinary accounting sense, but they are not villaDeus Bank Deposits.

Most Sunday Giving is typically deposited on Wednesday.

Some later activity, particularly ACH/eCheck Transactions, may also make that Wednesday settlement.

Timing can vary, so this should be treated as the normal pattern rather than a guaranteed exact posting time.

Before assuming the information you need is unavailable, review the different deposit reports.

villaDeus provides:

• Detailed Bank Deposit report.
• Funds CSV.
• Gifts CSV.
• Donor/Funds CSV.

Different organizations reconcile in different ways, and the report that first seems wrong for your workflow may simply not be the report designed for that purpose.

Contact villaDeus and we will happily work through a real deposit with your:

• Bookkeeper.
• Treasurer.
• Accountant.
• Finance team.

If there is information your accounting workflow genuinely needs and villaDeus does not currently provide it, please tell us. That is valuable product feedback, and adding the right report may benefit many other churches as well.

villaDeus does not currently provide a general arbitrary date-range all-Gifts or all-Transactions report.

Electronic Giving reporting is currently primarily deposit-based.

See Section 33 — Bank Deposits and Section 34 — Reports & Tax Statements for the available reports.

Check the Statement Batch:

Issue Date

The Statement does not become available to the donor until the configured Issue Date.

Check:

• Did the donor have Giving activity in that Organizational Unit during the Statement period?
• Has the Issue Date arrived?
• Was Send Statement Emails on issue date selected?
• Is the donor's email address correct?
• Could the email have gone to Spam/Junk?

Even when the email option is not selected, the Statement becomes available in the donor's account on the Issue Date.

A Statement Batch generates Statements for donors with Giving activity in:

• The selected Organizational Unit.
• The selected Statement period.

Confirm both before assuming data is missing.

Fund renaming is retroactive throughout villaDeus.

Changing the name changes how that Fund appears in historical Giving and Tax Statements.

See Section 32 — Funds before renaming a Fund with historical Giving.

No.

Correct the Person's name or address.

The Statement immediately reflects the updated Person information.

Deleting a Statement Batch removes all related Statements from donor accounts.

The system warns before the deletion is performed.

If the Batch was deleted unintentionally, contact villaDeus before taking further corrective action.

Start with the villaDeus ChMS Integration screen.

A red:

!

under SVC ALERT

indicates an integration issue requiring attention.

Common integration problems can involve:

• Person matching.
• Duplicate People.
• A Planning Center Person being merged or removed.
• A Giving sync requiring investigation.

Contact villaDeus if the cause is not clear.

Planning Center itself supports third-party Giving integrations as a normal way to bring outside donation information into Planning Center Giving. Planning Center Support

Names and email addresses do not always line up perfectly between systems.

For example:

• A Person may use a nickname.
• Their email may be different.
• Duplicate Person records may exist.

This is a common issue in third-party Giving integrations generally; other Planning Center integrations similarly document the need to manually resolve donor matches when names or emails differ. Subsplash Support

villaDeus presents possible matches where appropriate so the correct Planning Center Person can be confirmed.

villaDeus does not automatically delete the villaDeus Person merely because the Planning Center record was changed.

Where necessary, the integration can be remapped to an updated Planning Center Person ID or another appropriate record.

If Giving synchronization is affected, contact villaDeus.

In rare situations, Planning Center may accept a Giving record again even though villaDeus already recorded the original synchronization.

If you believe a duplicate exists:

• Verify that it is actually duplicated in Planning Center.
• Do not refund the real donor Transaction merely to fix Planning Center.
• Correct or reverse the duplicate Planning Center record as appropriate.
• Contact villaDeus if you are unsure.

The duplicate in Planning Center does not necessarily mean the donor was charged twice.

Not necessarily.

Most accounts are configured quickly, often within approximately 5–10 minutes.

Some may require up to approximately 24 hours or additional information.

If more information is needed, villaDeus or the interface will let you know.

Depending on the application, additional verification might include:

• Driver's license.
• Document verifying mailing address.
• Evidence that the Authorized Agent is associated with the organization.

This does not mean a personal credit check is being performed or that the Authorized Agent is providing a personal guarantee.

No.

Your old provider can remain active as long as you want.

The transition does not need to happen all at once.

During a provider transition, a donor may establish a new Recurring Gift in villaDeus but forget to cancel the old recurring instruction.

That can result in both providers processing their scheduled Gifts.

Ask the donor to verify:

• Their new villaDeus Recurring Gift.
• Whether their old-provider recurring instruction is still active.

Donors should cancel the old recurring instruction once the new one is established if they do not intend both Gifts to continue.

Contact us before proceeding when:

• Money movement is involved and the correction is unclear.
• A refund might not be the right solution.
• A donor appears to have been charged twice.
• Important data has been deleted.
• Duplicate Person records contain Giving information.
• You are unsure which Fund or Transaction should be corrected.
• A Bank Deposit will not reconcile.
• A Planning Center sync appears wrong.
• You suspect a report is missing information your accounting process requires.
• The available corrective action appears irreversible.

There is no benefit to turning a small issue into a difficult one by experimenting with irreversible actions.

Please tell us.

Different churches, bookkeepers, accounting systems, and denominational structures have different reporting needs.

We would rather learn that something useful is missing than have a Client assume the system cannot support their accounting workflow.

A reporting improvement identified by one organization may solve the same problem for many others.

Yes.

Troubleshooting and training are available at no charge.

We are happy to work directly with:

• Administrators.
• Bookkeepers.
• Treasurers.
• Donation counters.
• Pastors.
• Technical staff.
• Other people involved in the workflow.

Sometimes a short walkthrough is easier than trying to diagnose a problem from one screen or report.

Email: info@villadeus.com