Why We Built SundayHQ

If you've helped a church choose management software in the last decade, you've met the three available trade-offs.

You can buy the category leader and get real depth — at the price of six separately-sold modules, six line items, and the feeling that your church's data lives in six adjacent apartments that share a hallway. You can buy the easy one and get flat pricing and a gentle learning curve — until you need real worship planning, check-in security gating, or a custom report, and discover the ceiling. Or you can buy the giving-first tool and get excellent donation rails with a thin membership database syncing alongside them.

What you cannot buy, we kept noticing, is the obvious thing: one coherent app where the person record, the gift, the check-in, the service plan, and the group roster are the same database — priced so a church plant can afford it in year one.

So we built SundayHQ. A few convictions shaped it.

A church is one body, so the software is one app

The modular bundle isn't just a pricing annoyance; it's an architectural one. When people, giving, and check-ins are separate products, "did the Hendersons' first visit turn into a follow-up, a group, a first gift?" is a data-integration question. In SundayHQ it's just a query, because there's one spine — people in households — and every module joins to it.

That's what makes assimilation workflows work: a first check-in or a first gift can advance a card on the follow-up board because the check-in system and the giving system are the same system. No Zapier, no nightly sync, no "the integration broke in March."

Giving is a compliance problem wearing a generosity costume

We've written a whole piece on why donation receipts are legal documents. The short version: most ChMS products are US-born, and Canadian churches have been making do with receipting that doesn't actually meet CRA requirements — no true sequential serials, no split-receipting, no per-campus legal entities.

SundayHQ treats the receipt engine as core infrastructure: CRA official donation receipts with gap-tracked serials and split-receipting for Canadian charities, 501(c)(3) acknowledgments and quid-pro-quo disclosures for US churches, immutable snapshots that reproduce forever, and void-and-reissue with an audit trail when a receipted gift is refunded. Money is stored in exact cents, recurring charges are idempotent, and Sunday's cash batch commits atomically and reconciles to the deposit.

Kids ministry safety is non-negotiable, so it's not configurable-off

Matched security codes on the child label and the pickup tag. Rooms that refuse volunteers without a current background check. Allergy flags printed in bold where the volunteer will actually see them. An override path for the lost tag that requires a PIN and a reason and always leaves an audit entry. Check-in also keeps working when the venue Wi-Fi drops, because Sunday morning doesn't reschedule around the router.

The Thursday-night decline is the real test of scheduling

Every worship leader knows the moment: the drummer declines three days out. Most software records the decline. SundayHQ responds to it — the position reopens, the scheduler is notified, and ranked replacement suggestions appear: qualified for the position, not blocked out, not over-scheduled. Meanwhile the plan itself is live and multi-user, the song library carries arrangements and keys with per-service transposition, and CCLI reporting falls out of actual plan usage instead of someone's memory.

Switching churches' software is trust work, so migration is a feature

Church software is bought on referral and switched with dread. We made the importer a first-class product surface: Planning Center and Breeze exports map automatically, dry-runs surface duplicates and bad rows before anything commits, commits are batched and reversible, and imported giving history keeps its original dates and funds so historical receipts still reproduce. The scariest part of leaving your old system is the part we rehearsed the most.

Priced for the church plant, structured for the network

Two tiers, both flat: Congregation at $59 a month for a single campus, Multi-Campus at $179 for churches running several — including campuses that are separate legal charities with their own receipt sequences. Every module at every tier, unlimited staff. Growth in your congregation should never read as an invoice event.

See it yourself

The best argument we have is the product with data in it. The demo is a working church — check a family in, take a test gift, issue the receipt, schedule the band. No card, no call, two clicks. If something doesn't hold up, tell us directly; it goes to the people who built it.