Core Docs - Church Management - Transactions

Rock Version: v19.0
Last Modified: 2026-02-17 1:58 PM

Like everything in Rock, it all starts with people. People make financial transactions with your organization through gifts, donations, subscriptions or dues. These transactions can be simple (like money given to a single purpose), or they can be more complex (perhaps a single transaction covers multiple purposes). To be able to handle multiple purposes, transactions have one or more detail records to hold the information for each purpose.

In our example below, Ted has given $110 dollars to Rock Solid Church. One hundred of these dollars are designated for the General Fund account with the remaining ten dollars going to the Building Fund account.

Transactions represent the actual exchange of currencies for activities like donations, event registrations, or other financial events. Each transaction is made up of one or more detail (or sub) transactions. This allows for giving to more than one account in a single transaction.

View Transactions in Batches

Where you view transactions in Rock will depend on what you're trying to do. If you're interested in transactions in the context of a specific batch, you can view them on the Batch Detail screen by selecting a batch from the Batch List.

Clicking on one of these transactions will then display the Transaction Detail page.

The transaction list on the Batch Detail page has a few extra options.

When you're searching for a specific transaction, it's often easier to use the transaction filtering capabilities found under Finance > Transactions. This screen allows you to provide a set of search options and list transactions that match.

Search for Transactions

Add a Transaction

While there are other entry points for transactions (e.g., check scanning, giving on the public website) you can manually add transactions to a batch. You can also edit existing transactions. In either case you'll be brought to the page pictured below.

Refund a Transaction

Sometimes you need to rollback a transaction. Selecting the Refund button from the Transaction Detail page will allow you to reverse the payment using the modal shown below.

Scheduled Transactions

Many transactions occur once and then they're done. However, sometimes your guests will want to set up automatic repeating payments that run on a selected schedule (weekly, monthly, etc.). Rock calls these Scheduled Transactions.

Administrate Scheduled Transactions

You can view all of the scheduled transactions in Rock under Finance > Scheduled Transactions.

From there you can choose a scheduled transaction to edit.

Adding A New Scheduled Transaction
Scheduled transactions must be entered from the individual’s Person Profile page. They can also be added by your guests on your external website.

From there you can choose a scheduled transaction to edit.

Adding A New Scheduled Transaction
Scheduled transactions must be entered from the individual’s Person Profile page. They can also be added by your guests on your external website.

Person Profile Page

Scheduled transactions can also be viewed on the individual's Person Profile page under the Contributions tab.

See our Contributions Tab article for more information.

Scheduled Transaction Frequencies

The following options are available as frequency patterns for scheduled transactions. Each payment gateway will support only a subset of these options. Each gateway will also have some special rules for how they calculate the schedules. Notes on these rules can be found at the end of this document under the articles for each gateway.

Download Transactions

There are two ways to configure this download. The first way is to set up a Get Scheduled Payments job to run every night. This can be done under Admin Tools > Settings > Jobs Administration. This job will run each night (or when you decide you want it to run) and create batches and transactions for new payments.

Don't Forget To Set Up The Download Job
It's important to remember to set up the Get Scheduled Payments job if you want the transactions to download automatically (highly recommended).

The download job has a few settings that you should review. These include:

You can also choose to manually download the new payments from the payment processor. You can do this under Finance > Download Payments. This does the same thing as the Rock job but requires you to manually run the download. This block also has settings that are similar to the job settings for setting the batch prefix and email receipt.

Setting a Payment Reversal Notification Workflow
The Scheduled Job Detail screen also includes an option to trigger a workflow when a scheduled transaction is declined (called a "reversal"). You can configure the workflow to perform any necessary follow-up task, such as sending an automated communication. Simply configure the workflow in your General Settings, then select it from the Failed Payment Workflow dropdown menu.

Downloading transactions from the gateway is actually a bit trickier than you might think because of certain edge-cases and advanced features. We'll cover some of these next.

Recent Scheduled Transaction Changes

Consider this example. Ted has a scheduled transaction set that takes $120 out of his account every week and puts it to the General Fund account. Early in the morning the payment gateway creates a new transaction for this amount. Ted arrives at work and changes his giving to $100 per week. Finally, later in the day, the church's Get Scheduled Payments job runs and pulls that day's transactions down from the gateway. The gateway's transaction says it's for $120 but Rock's information only has $100 allocated. When this happens (certainly a rare edge-case) Rock will apply any extra amount to a default account. This default account is the first active account that does not have a parent account and where the current date falls between the account's start/end dates.

Naming Batches for Online Giving

The way that Rock calculates the Batch Name is by combining a batch prefix and a batch suffix. The prefix is usually set by a block or job setting (the default value used by the Utility Payment Entry block, Scheduled Payment Download block, Get Scheduled Payments job etc. is Online Giving). The suffix depends on the currency type (Tender Type Defined Type). If it is not a credit card transaction, then the currency type value is used (e.g., ACH). If it is a credit card transaction, then the Credit Card type value is used (e.g., Visa, MasterCard, etc.). However, the Credit Card defined value also has a Batch Name Suffix that can be used to override this value. For example, if you want to combine Visa, MasterCard and Discover transactions into the same batch, you can set the Batch Name Suffix for all three to the same value (e.g., VMD) and then transactions of these types will be combined into the same batch.

Expiring Credit Card Notification

By default, a Send Credit Card Expiration Notices job is configured to run once a month. This can be found under Admin Tools > Settings > Jobs Administration.

The purpose of this job is to let people know that their credit cards are about to expire. Typically, this will mean that the job will send an Expiring Credit Card Notice system communication (Admin Tools > Settings > System Communications) to the person whose credit card will expire the following month. However, some organizations may use a bus message to signal their system to send an email by enabling the Enable Sending Bus Event option.

If you wish to do additional processing for each expiring scheduled credit card transaction, the job can optionally be configured to launch a custom workflow. You can also choose to delete any saved accounts with credit cards that have expired after the provided number of days.