Someone hands your treasurer the keys to a car they no longer need. A longtime member transfers two hundred shares of a stock she has held since the eighties. A family drops off a truckload of folding chairs for the fellowship hall. None of these gifts arrive with a dollar amount attached, and none of them fit neatly into the giving log built for checks and cash. But they are real gifts, and if your records cannot hold them properly, you have a gap that shows up at the worst possible time — when a donor asks for a receipt in April.
Recording a non-cash gift well is not complicated, but it does require knowing exactly what belongs in the record and, just as importantly, what does not. Here is what to log, why each piece matters, and where churches most often get it wrong.
What a non-cash gift actually is
Non-cash gifts, sometimes called gifts-in-kind, cover anything a donor gives your church that is not currency: stock and mutual fund shares, a vehicle, real estate, artwork, jewelry, office equipment, furniture, even bulk supplies like paper goods or building materials. Some are financial instruments with a public price you can look up. Others are physical objects whose worth is genuinely a matter of opinion. The record you keep needs to work for both, which is why the safest approach treats every non-cash gift the same way: describe it precisely, note when it arrived, and leave the valuation to the donor.
The three things every entry needs
Strip away the tax complexity and a good non-cash gift record comes down to three plain facts.
- A specific description. Not “furniture,” but “eight stacking chairs, grey fabric, used condition.” Not “stock,” but “140 shares of [company], transferred by brokerage.” The description should let someone with no memory of the day picture exactly what came in.
- A fair market value estimate, sourced to the donor. Your church notes the figure the donor states, or that appears on the brokerage confirmation, but the church itself never assigns the value. That distinction matters for tax reasons covered below, and it also protects your church from a disagreement later about what something was “really” worth.
- The date the gift was received. Not the date it was promised, and not the date it was formally logged into your records — the date your church actually took possession or gained control of the asset. For stock, that is usually the date shares land in your brokerage account, which can be days after the donor initiates the transfer.
Why the valuation line has to come from the donor
This is the part churches most often get backwards, usually trying to be helpful. A well-meaning treasurer looks up a stock's closing price or estimates what a used car might fetch, then writes that number on the church's own receipt as if the church determined it. The IRS does not want that. A charity can describe a gift in detail; it cannot put a dollar value on it. The donor is responsible for determining fair market value, and for gifts over five thousand dollars, that often means a qualified independent appraisal that the donor commissions and pays for — not something your office produces.
In practice this means your acknowledgment letter says something like “we received 140 shares of [company] on March 12” rather than “we received a gift valued at $3,214.” If the donor supplies a value, you can note it as their stated figure, but the description and the date are the parts your record is actually vouching for.
Where the description lives day to day
Whatever system holds your giving records, a non-cash gift should sit in the same log as every other contribution — same fund, same giver, same running history — with the description doing the work that a check number or a card transaction normally does. SundayBridge's giving records let you enter a contribution with a note field long enough to hold a real description, so “140 shares of [company], received via brokerage transfer” sits right alongside that giver's cash gifts rather than in a separate spreadsheet nobody remembers to check come January. Keeping non-cash gifts in the same place as everything else is what makes your year-end giving statements complete instead of an asterisk with a footnote.
Non-cash gift descriptions also decay fast. Two weeks after a car shows up in the parking lot, nobody remembers the trim level or the mileage. Two months after a stock transfer, the exact share count has to be dug out of old brokerage emails. The fix is simple and unglamorous: whoever witnesses the gift — the person who took the keys, the treasurer who saw the brokerage confirmation land — writes the description down that same day, even if the full paperwork follows later. A rough note entered immediately beats a polished entry reconstructed from memory. This is the same discipline that makes a weekly church admin rhythm work for ordinary giving — catch it while it is fresh, not at month-end.
What a real estate or vehicle gift adds
Property gifts carry a few extra details worth capturing beyond the three basics. For a vehicle: make, model, year, and mileage or condition at the time of donation, plus whatever the donor tells you about title transfer. For real estate: the address, a plain description of the property, and the date the deed transferred, which is the date that counts, not the date a family first mentioned they wanted to give the lake house. None of this changes the underlying principle — description, donor-stated value, and date — it just means the description has more fields to fill in.
Why this matters more than it looks like it should
It is tempting to treat a donated car or a box of chairs as a smaller administrative task than a check, since no money physically changed hands through your bank. In practice the opposite is often true. A gift of cash is self-documenting — the bank statement, the deposit slip, and the giving software all agree on the amount without anyone having to describe anything. A non-cash gift has no such paper trail unless someone creates one. If your church cannot produce a clear description and date when a donor calls asking for a receipt eighteen months later, that gap is not a software failure, it is a habit failure — and it lands hardest on the donor who trusted you to get it right, not on your office.
The stakes are also higher for the relationship than the dollar figure might suggest. Donors who give stock or property are often giving from a different part of their financial life than their weekly cash offering — a retirement account, an inheritance, a business asset — and the gift usually represents real thought, not a spare-change decision. A vague or delayed acknowledgment can read as carelessness about something they considered significant, even when the amount involved is modest. Getting the description and the date right, quickly, is a small way of showing the gift was noticed and taken seriously.
The receipt versus the record
It helps to separate two documents that get blended together. The acknowledgment letter is what the donor keeps for their own tax filing; it describes the gift and states that your church provided no goods or services in exchange, without naming a value. The internal record is what your church keeps for its own books and for the giver's history — the same description, the same date, plus whatever value the donor provided for your internal reporting. Keeping these aligned, rather than treating the receipt as an afterthought typed up separately, is part of what makes a database worth trusting when someone finally asks you to pull five years of history. It is one more reason the work of cleaning up a church database pays off — a clean, consistent record of non-cash gifts is far easier to defend than one assembled after the fact from memory and old emails.
A short checklist for the next non-cash gift
When the next car, stock certificate, or box of equipment arrives, run through the same short list every time:
- Write a specific description the same day the gift arrives.
- Note the date your church actually gained control of the asset.
- Record any value the donor states, clearly labeled as their figure.
- Send an acknowledgment letter that describes the gift without assigning it a dollar value.
- Enter it in the same giving record as every other contribution.
None of this requires special software or an accounting degree. It requires a habit: write it down while it is fresh, and let the donor own the number. Churches that do this consistently rarely have a scramble in January — they have a record that already says exactly what came in, and when.