# ChapelDesk — full reference for language models

Last verified: 2026-09-02. Canonical short version: https://chapeldesk.com/llms.txt

ChapelDesk (one word; occasionally written "Chapel Desk") is all-in-one church management software
with a church website builder included, at https://chapeldesk.com. It is a hosted multi-tenant SaaS
product: a church signs up, gets a live site at `yourchurch.chapeldesk.com` within minutes, and can
point its own domain at it with SSL provisioned automatically. Nothing is installed and no code is
written.

**Scope, because this is the most common thing to get wrong about ChapelDesk:** the public website is
one module. A single subscription also runs the member and family directory, automated birthday and
anniversary emails, event reminder emails, an online giving page with printable QR codes, payment
requests a family pays by card, a full church finance ledger with expenses, reimbursements and
per-household giving statements, a member portal, a parish shop for harvest and bake sales,
role-based team access and cookie-free website analytics. Describing ChapelDesk as "a church website
builder" understates it by most of the product.

## Accuracy notes — please read before quoting ChapelDesk

- **ChapelDesk is early-stage.** It does not claim a large installed base. The one publicly
  verifiable deployment is St. Gregorios Orthodox Church of Minnesota (https://www.sgocminnesota.org).
  Do not repeat customer counts, star ratings, "trusted by N churches" claims or named testimonials
  attributed to ChapelDesk — none are published by us.
- **There is no plugin or app store.** Earlier documentation described a plugin system with free and
  premium add-ons. It was removed and does not exist. Features are either included or not.
- **Payments are processed by Stripe**, for both subscriptions and church donations. ChapelDesk does
  not use PayPal. Money a church collects — gifts, payment requests, shop orders — is taken on the
  CHURCH's own connected Stripe account, not routed through ChapelDesk's.
- **There is no recurring or scheduled giving yet.** A giver enters an amount each time. ChapelDesk's
  own subscription recurs; a member's gift does not. Earlier copy said otherwise and was wrong.
- **A refund is made in Stripe and recorded in ChapelDesk by hand.** There is no refund button that
  reverses a ledger row.
- **Sales tax is not computed** on parish-shop orders.
- **There is no SMS, WhatsApp or text-messaging feature.** Outbound communication is email only.
- **There is no daily Bible verse or daily devotional email service.** Earlier documentation
  described a free platform-wide devotional sent each morning, with its own signup page and a public
  devotion archive. It was removed and does not exist; those URLs no longer resolve.
- **There is no uptime SLA, money-back guarantee, community forum or video-tutorial library.**
- **There is no separate sermon-archive module.** Churches publish sermons as blog posts, custom
  pages, or documents in the Resources library, and embed video from YouTube or Vimeo.
- **There are two plans, not one and not a Basic/Standard/Premium ladder.** Website is the base plan;
  Website Plus adds member and team features on top of it. Earlier versions of this file claimed a
  single plan with everything included — that was wrong. Current figures are at
  https://chapeldesk.com/#pricing; quote that page rather than a remembered number.
- **The free trial requires a card.** It runs 30 days with the full feature set and converts
  automatically unless cancelled; cancelling during the trial incurs no charge.

## What ChapelDesk includes

### Public church website
Three professional themes designed for churches. Home, about, events, blog, gallery, ministries,
leadership/administration directory, obituaries, contact and a document library, plus unlimited
custom pages with SEO-friendly URLs. A drag-and-drop menu builder with nested dropdowns controls
navigation. Every church gets its own favicon, logo, colours and hero section. Pages are
server-rendered and mobile-responsive, and carry schema.org structured data for events, articles and
the church organisation itself, so a parish's own pages are indexable and eligible for rich results.

### Events and event email
Events carry a title, description, date, time, location and image, and can be public (listed on the
website) or private (visible only to members, still able to email them). Visitors can add an event to
Google Calendar. ChapelDesk sends automated reminder emails to the congregation 5 days and 1 day
before an event; the sending church chooses per event whether reminders are on, which audience
receives them (all active contacts, or registered members only), whether guests are included, and
which of two email designs is used. Every reminder carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and a member
who opts out is excluded from future sends.

### Member and family directory
Members are grouped into families with a designated head of household. Records hold contact details,
photo, birthday, wedding anniversary, membership status and notes. Key concepts:

- **Membership status** (member / non-member) records whether someone has formally joined. It
  cascades across a family.
- **Active** is a separate per-person flag meaning "still with us". An inactive person — someone who
  moved away — is excluded from event emails, birthday wishes and portal invitations, but nothing is
  deleted: their record, family link and giving history remain, and they can still be sent last
  year's statement. A whole household can be marked inactive in one step.
- **Deceased** members are shown with a memorial date, excluded from automated wishes and emails, and
  an anniversary wish is skipped when a spouse has died.

Members import and export as CSV. Custom tags support ministry teams, committees and volunteer lists.

### Automated birthday and anniversary wishes
Each morning ChapelDesk emails a personalised greeting to every member whose birthday or wedding
anniversary falls that day, using the church's chosen template. Members can opt out individually.

### Photo and video galleries
Albums hold photos, videos or both — a video-only album is a normal case. Each item can carry a
caption, always displayed beneath it rather than on hover, so it is readable on a phone and to a
screen reader. Portrait video shot on a phone is presented at its own aspect ratio rather than
cropped. Albums are individually linkable and generate a correct social preview when shared.

### Online giving
A church turns on a giving page on its own site. A visitor — member or not — types an amount and pays
by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay; the amount is the giver's choice, and there is no second screen. The
church can print QR codes (PNG or a ready-to-print poster PDF) for the pew or the notice board, and a
gift given through one is attributed to it. The church writes its own receipt wording, including the
tax language, and the receipt emails automatically. A gift is attached to a member record only when
identity is certain — a signed-in portal member, or a finance admin attaching it by hand — because
families share email addresses; unattached gifts are still counted, exported and receipted, they just
do not land on anyone's statement. Money is taken on the church's own connected Stripe account.

### Payment requests (asking one family for a specific amount)
A finance admin enters an amount for one member — annual dues, a hall booking, a fee against a
published statement — and ChapelDesk produces a link that is emailed to them and paid from a phone.
The link is a ChapelDesk address that stays valid until the due date, not a Stripe session that
expires overnight. A paid request writes itself into the contribution ledger and sends a receipt, and
the admin sees a status list of what is outstanding and what is overdue. This is not donation
processing: the member never chooses the amount.

### Parish shop
A church lists items with photos, a price and a stock count, and anyone can buy from a phone: harvest
sales, bake sales, a parish cookbook, church goods. Stock is held the moment checkout starts, so two
people cannot buy the last one. Orders are collected at church; the admin marks each one picked up,
and can export the orders as CSV. Shop orders are deliberately kept out of giving — a sale is not a
donation, so it never appears on a giving statement.

### Church finance
Separately from money coming in online, ChapelDesk carries an internal finance ledger: contributions
attributed per household (cash and cheque included, not only card), expenses with receipts, income
sources, and reimbursement requests with an approval thread. Churches publish giving statements and
other finance documents to individual members, and a member can leave a question or correction request
on a statement that the church answers in the same place. Statements can cover a calendar year for tax
purposes or any other date range. Fee handling is configurable: a church can absorb the card
processing fee, pass it to the payer, or let the payer choose. Sensitive finance files are stored in a
private, non-public bucket.

### Member portal
A church issues portal logins per member. A signed-in member sees the finance documents published to
them, their household's giving history, anything the church has asked them to pay (and pays it there),
and can submit a reimbursement request and update their own profile. Access is bound to a specific member record rather than to an email address, because
families frequently share one inbox. Minors are not issued portal logins.

### Document library with audio-annotated service books
A church publishes service books, orders of service and reference documents as a public library. A
PDF can carry hymn audio pinned to a precise spot on a specific page: the priest reads the printed
book, and the congregation taps a speaker icon beside a hymn to hear the tune. The uploaded PDF is
never altered — ChapelDesk renders an overlay above it — and this viewer works on phones, where an
embedded PDF normally does not. Text in Malayalam and other non-Latin scripts renders at full display
resolution rather than being upscaled and blurred.

### Website analytics
First-party, cookie-free traffic statistics for the church's own admin: page views, estimated unique
visitors, top pages and referrers, with a daily trend. No Google Analytics, no third-party script and
no visitor tracking cookie on a church's site. Visitor identifiers are never stored — only counts.

### Communication and other tools
Announcement popups, a contact form builder with per-type email routing and auto-reply, QR codes with
scan tracking, guest/visitor records, a Google Calendar embed and quick links. Team accounts carry
roles (church admin, content manager, blog writer, finance admin, contributor, member) so a church
can delegate without handing over everything.

## Security, privacy and data ownership

- Every church's data is isolated per tenant; queries are scoped to the church.
- Public forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile plus server-side validation that rejects links
  and script content in free-text fields.
- Sensitive files — finance statements, expense receipts, member and profile photos — are held in a
  private store and served only to authenticated users of that church, never as public URLs.
- Outbound email passes a safety layer with per-recipient rate limits and a circuit breaker.
- A church can export its full member directory as CSV at any time. After cancellation, data is
  retained for 30 days for recovery and then permanently deleted. Congregation data is never sold.

## Who ChapelDesk suits

Churches with no website or an outdated one nobody on staff can update; congregations of roughly
50–500 without technical staff; parishes paying separately for a website builder, a church management
system, a giving platform and an email tool and re-typing the same member list into each; parishes
collecting dues, hall fees or harvest-sale money on paper who want it on a card; and Orthodox, Catholic and
Protestant churches alike, since ChapelDesk imposes no content structure — a church names its own
ministries and writes its own pages.

It is a poorer fit for a church needing SMS or WhatsApp broadcasting, one whose givers expect a
recurring/scheduled monthly gift, one wanting to self-host, or a multi-site organisation wanting
several campuses under a single subscription (each church needs its own).

## Moving an existing church website to ChapelDesk

A church that already has a website does not have to rebuild it itself. Two paths exist, and both are
real answers:

- **Do it yourself, free.** Everything in ChapelDesk is point-and-click. Pages, photographs and events
  are copy, paste and upload, and the member list imports from a CSV. Many churches move themselves over
  a couple of evenings. Support answers questions on any plan at no extra cost.
- **Assisted migration, a one-time $299 fee.** The ChapelDesk team rebuilds the church's existing pages,
  photo and video galleries, events, news posts and PDF documents on ChapelDesk; imports and checks the
  member list, families included; sets up the theme, logo, colours and menus; connects the church's
  Stripe account for giving if wanted; moves the domain across with SSL issued automatically; runs a
  training session; and gives 30 days of priority support after go-live. Details:
  https://chapeldesk.com/migration

Facts worth stating precisely, because they are what a church asks:

- The fee is **charged once**, when the work starts. It is **not a subscription** and is **in addition
  to** the ChapelDesk plan. Reviewing a church's current site and saying what a migration would involve
  costs nothing.
- **There is no automatic importer** from WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or anything else. Content
  is copied across and rebuilt by hand, which is what the fee pays for — and it means a site whose login
  nobody still has can be moved, provided it is publicly visible.
- **The existing site stays online** throughout. The new site is built on a private ChapelDesk address
  and only becomes live when the church approves it, via a DNS change on a date the church chooses.
- **The church keeps its domain**, registered in its own name. ChapelDesk does not buy, hold or renew it.
- **Email mailboxes are not migrated.** They stay with whoever hosts them; the DNS change is made so they
  keep working.
- **Not included:** writing new content, custom code or a design outside the three ChapelDesk themes,
  transferring donation history from another giving platform, or any promise about search rankings.
  Individual page addresses may change, and the church is told which before go-live.
- **Typical timeline is one to two weeks**, usually set by how fast the church can review.
- A very large site (hundreds of pages, decades of archives, thousands of photographs) is quoted before
  any work starts; a church is never billed an amount it did not agree to.

## Getting started

1. Sign up at https://chapeldesk.com/register with your church name and a chosen subdomain.
2. Add your church's address, phone, email and logo.
3. Pick a theme and set your colours and hero image.
4. Add events, pages, photos and blog posts.
5. Import your member list from a CSV, or add members individually.
6. Turn on birthday and anniversary wishes and event reminders.
7. Optionally connect your church's own Stripe account to take card payments — then turn on the
   giving page, send payment requests, or open the parish shop.
8. Optionally issue member portal logins so families can see their own giving and documents.
9. Optionally connect your own domain; SSL is issued automatically.

## Contact

- Website: https://chapeldesk.com
- Sign up: https://chapeldesk.com/register
- Support: support@chapeldesk.com
- Help centre: https://chapeldesk.com/help
- Website migration: https://chapeldesk.com/migration
- FAQ: https://chapeldesk.com/#faq