How to Easily Keep Track of Your Tithing
I use Google Sheets to track my giving, and you can too.
In church, you may have heard of the word “tithe.” According to Oxford Languages, the word tithe literally means “one tenth of annual produce or earnings, formerly taken as a tax for the support of the Church and clergy.”
Although tithes are no longer taken as taxes, many Christians continue to use the concept of tithing to give at least 10% of their income away. Some will give all 10% back to their church while others might distribute the amount among different organizations.
When I first started tithing, I couldn’t seem to find the right spreadsheet online to track my tithes so I went ahead and made my own. You can go ahead and make a copy of the sheet for yourself to use here. You can also download it as an Excel spreadsheet if you prefer.
This sheet includes my giving up until April. I continue giving every month, but I have included some more calculations in the sheet to fit my giving targets better. I just wanted to include enough information in the sheet to make the sheet configurations more intuitive and easy to adjust for personal use.
Walking through the Spreadsheet
Income
In this column, I enter my take home pay (after taxes, insurance, retirement, etc.). You can choose to put your gross income if you plan to give based on that target.
Amount to be Tithed
By default, this column has been set to equal 10% of the Income column. You can change the formula in the column by clicking on one of the cells in the Amount to be Tithed column, typing the new formula in the top bar, and then dragging down from that cell to apply to the rest of the cells. If you need a refresher on how to update that, this video does a good job of teaching Google Sheets.
You might notice that I have a $19,380.67 amount at the top of that column. That number is there because I wanted to give my entire bonus, and I replaced the formula in that cell with that amount to reflect that.
Donation Organization
These are all the organizations I give to by name. I like logging every donation in the sheet because it gives me a better idea of how I’m distributing my donations. That way if I want to add in a new organization or rebalance my giving amounts, I already have a record of what I was doing before.
Amount
Since this comes right after Donation Organization, this directly refers to the amount given to that organization. I make it easier for myself to keep track of these individual amounts by mostly giving on a schedule to my favorite organizations. I also use Mint, a personal finance app that helps me track all of my earnings and spending. Under transactions, I can easily search through transactions that are tagged as Gifts and Donations. Sometimes if I want to make sure I’m not forgetting any one-off donations, I’ll do a quick search there.
Tithing Goal
If you click on the cell, you’ll see that it’s a sum of everything in the Amount to be Tithed column.
Total Tithed
Similarly, this one is a sum of everything in the Amount column.
Tithe Left
This is just the difference between Tithing Goal and Total Tithed. You can see that there was quite a bit left during mid-April, but I’m happy to say that the gap is smaller now. This column is more for keeping me accountable to the promises I’ve made to God and myself.
Conclusion
I hope this spreadsheet was useful to you. If you have any suggestions for keeping track of giving, I would love to hear them. This is what’s worked for me so far, but there are definitely better ways of tracking everything.
