Know your housing allowance.
Plan your SECA tax every payday.

No. ClergyTrak provides organizational tools and educational guidance — not legal, tax, financial, or accounting advice. It helps you organize expenses and prepare documentation, but it is not a substitute for a CPA or tax attorney, does not file anything for you, and does not mark expenses as IRS-approved without your review.

Pro includes work you can use throughout the year: unlimited AI receipt scanning, housing-item selection from mixed receipts for your review, and fresh rental comparables when you re-run your Fair Rental Value estimate. It also provides the detailed FRV source packet, board-ready designation report, and receipt-backed year-end package. The $99 annual subscription covers these tools and included reports, with no separate fee for each document. Free remains useful on its own, with manual tracking, 10 AI scans, an annual FRV planning estimate per property, and the SECA planner and treasurer sheet.

Yes. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, protected so only you can access your records, and stored on SOC 2-compliant infrastructure. We never sell your data or use it to train AI.

Yes — two separate workspaces. Housing tracks your IRC §107 allowance; Ministry tracks Schedule C business expenses with reimbursement status. Switch between them anytime.

Fair Rental Value is the third housing-allowance number — and it can be the real ceiling: even if your receipts are higher and your board approved a generous allowance, the excludable amount can still be limited by Fair Rental Value. Most pastors have never documented it. The common fallback — a one-line realtor letter — typically reflects bare unfurnished rent, with no furnishings premium, no utilities, and no comparables on file. ClergyTrak builds the number from live local rental comparables and a disclosed property profile. Free accounts include one live estimate a year for planning. ClergyTrak Pro carries that number into the Church Board Report and the year-end packet for your CPA, with the source packet naming the comparables behind it. Either way, it is a self-adopted good-faith estimate for your records, not an appraisal or tax opinion.

Ministers generally pay self-employment tax on ministerial earnings, including housing allowance, even when they receive a W-2. Churches do not withhold Social Security and Medicare as FICA on those earnings. An employee minister can request extra federal income-tax withholding from each paycheck to cover the estimated SECA amount for that pay period. If the church agrees, that money is reported as federal income tax withheld and credited against the minister's federal tax liability, including SECA. ClergyTrak helps estimate the extra amount and provides a free treasurer sheet. An IRS-approved Form 4361 exemption changes how ministerial earnings are treated. Explore your SECA paycheck plan.

Partly, and it works the opposite of how most pastors expect. A down payment, closing costs, and mortgage principal are qualifying housing expenses in the year you pay them. But the exclusion doesn't scale with the check: after a famous Tax Court case (Warren v. Commissioner, 2000), Congress passed the Clergy Housing Allowance Clarification Act of 2002, which caps the exclusion at the home's Fair Rental Value — furnished, plus utilities — no matter how much you actually spent. A $60,000 down payment doesn't produce a $60,000 exclusion, and there's no carryforward for the excess. The planning happens before closing: have the board raise the designation in advance, and document the purchase year's Fair Rental Value, because that ceiling is the number you're really working against. The Playbook walks through the full purchase-year strategy.

The board must designate the housing allowance in advance, in writing — and most boards set the number as a guess. ClergyTrak Pro prepares a printable Church Board Report: your documented expenses and Fair Rental Value, a suggested designation with the math shown, and a sample resolution the board can adopt into its minutes. The board sets the final amount; ClergyTrak gives them real numbers to set it with.

Two formats, on purpose. A CSV of the year's records for your CPA or bookkeeper to work from (with a cover summary of period, totals, and source-document counts), and (with Pro) receipt-backed PDF reports plus the year-end packet and the Fair Rental Value source packet — all prepared from the Command Center. You and your advisor remain responsible for final classifications and filing decisions.