Creating an All-in-One Platform for Giving, Members, and Ministry Operations

Overview

Squad for Churches is an all-in-one church management platform built on Squad's payment infrastructure. It gives churches everything they need to manage giving, engage members, and streamline operations — without the administrative overhead that pulls leaders away from ministry. I designed and built the product end-to-end, from the giving flows to the branch and communications layer.

The Challenge

Churches handle a unique blend of financial operations, people management, and mass communications — across multiple branches, member groups, and giving purposes. Most existing tools solve one piece of the puzzle. Church admins were stitching together payment links, spreadsheets, WhatsApp broadcasts, and separate email tools, with no unified record of who gave what, who attended which branch, or which announcements reached which group.

My Approach

• 1Mapped the full admin workflow across giving, membership, and communications to identify where time was being lost and where data was siloed.
• 2Designed the Giving module around three instruments: payment links for one-time and campaign giving, virtual accounts for dedicated purposes (tithes, building fund, missions), and a unified giving records view for reconciliation and reporting.
• 3Built the Members module with group-based organisation and a public member registration link flow — so new members could self-register via a form without admin intervention.
• 4Designed the Branches module to centralise communication — bulk SMS and email for general announcements or targeted group messages — with branch-level audience scoping.
• 5Implemented a Roles & Permissions system in Settings that lets super-admins assign users to specific branches with tailored access levels, ensuring branch leaders only see and act on their own data.
• 6Used Squad's existing payment APIs for the giving infrastructure, keeping the financial layer reliable and PCI-compliant without rebuilding from scratch.

Outcome

Squad for Churches launched to an initial set of pilot churches. Admins reported a significant reduction in the number of tools they managed week-to-week. The self-registration link feature eliminated manual member onboarding for most churches in the pilot cohort, and the giving records module gave finance teams a single source of truth for the first time.