Your controls pass on paper.Here is what they are actually worth.

Free, no account, no email gate, no watermark. We build background-check software, so two of the six touch something we sell — the rotas hold screening dates a screening service can keep current. The other four have nothing to do with our product. The catch, such as it is, is that we would like you to remember who gave them to you.

In general, no. Two-adult supervision, a waiting period before serving with children, and volunteer screening are widely adopted child-safety practices and are commonly expected by church insurers and denominations — but they are not, as a rule, statute, and this toolkit does not tell you what your obligations are. Your denomination, your insurer, your state and your own policy set them. Mandatory reporting is a separate matter entirely: who must report suspected abuse, to whom and how quickly is set by state law, applies to individuals regardless of church policy, and is never satisfied by recording something in a spreadsheet.

No, and we are not affiliated with the IRS. The thresholds in it are general federal figures included so a church knows which question to ask — the written acknowledgment a donor needs for a single gift at or above $250, and the written disclosure a church must issue for a quid pro quo gift over $75. Both are cells you can change. Whether a specific gift is deductible, and what your church must issue, should be confirmed with a CPA or attorney experienced with churches. Church tax law is genuinely specialized.

Because a log showing only approvals evidences money leaving, not discretion being exercised — and discretion is the whole test. For contributions to a benevolence fund to be treated as gifts to the church rather than to a person, the church must have full control over the funds and their use. Recording that requests were considered, and that some were declined or referred elsewhere, is what shows the church deciding rather than passing along a donor’s instruction.

Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Drive and open with Sheets. Every formula used here — COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIF, MAXIFS, VLOOKUP, EDATE, DATEDIF — carries over, and there are deliberately no array formulas anywhere, precisely so nothing silently returns a different answer in a different spreadsheet. Conditional formatting usually survives; if a colour rule does not, the underlying status text still does.

The controls scale down better than they look. A church of forty people can still have two unrelated counters, still record who decided a benevolence request, and still know which of its funds are restricted. What small churches genuinely cannot do is run a rota of a hundred volunteers — so use the tabs you need and ignore the rest. Nothing here requires you to fill in everything.