Church admin automation · UK
Nothing typed twice. Paper trail intact.
I help UK churches and Christian charities get their pastors' hours back by connecting their ChMS, accounting and Gift Aid into one automated flow — running inside your church's own accounts, where your trustees can see everything.
No obligation · 30 minutes with your treasurer or administrator · you keep the audit numbers either way
The problem
Your systems don't talk to each other — so people do the talking, by retyping.
The ChMS holds the members. The accounts live in another package. Gift Aid is a spreadsheet. The rota is a third thing. None of them connect, so every piece of information is entered twice or three times — by paid staff and faithful volunteers whose hours were given for ministry, not data entry.
“Drowning in spreadsheets.”
Church administrator“Manually entering every name into a spreadsheet later that night — exhausting.”
Events volunteer“An old clunky Access database no one knew how to make work.”
Church office“We had no idea our cut-and-paste processes could all be automated.”
Operations leadHow it works
Audit, build, and it keeps running — in your accounts, not mine.
The hours audit
Thirty minutes with your treasurer or administrator, walking through the monthly close. We count where the retyping actually happens and put a number on it — your number, in your hours. You keep the audit whether or not we go further.
- Free, no obligation
- Your figures, not my estimates
- Ready to take to the PCC or deacons
The build
I connect the systems you already have — ChurchSuite, Planning Center, your accounts package, your spreadsheets — so information entered once flows everywhere it's needed. Every automated step leaves a record a trustee can inspect.
- Works with your existing software
- Every step logged and traceable
- Documented in plain English
It runs where you can see it
Everything runs inside your church's own accounts — your Google or Microsoft workspace, your logins, your data. Nothing sits on my servers. If I disappeared tomorrow, your automations wouldn't.
- Your accounts, your data, your control
- Monthly monitoring on Engine & Operator
- GDPR posture built in, not bolted on
Plain pricing
A number your treasurer can take to the meeting.
No “book a call to find out.” These are the prices. For context: a virtual assistant doing the same typing costs from £275 every month, forever; a part-time administrator costs £12,000+ a year.
Foundation
One workflow automated end-to-end. Prove it works before committing further.
£450 one-off
Founding rate: £225 · first 6 months, in exchange for a testimonial
- One workflow, built and documented
- Runs in your own accounts
- Handover training included
- Typical payback: about 3 months
Engine
Full integration audit plus your 3–4 core workflows, monitored monthly.
£250/month
Founding rate: £125/mo · 6-month minimum · +£500 setup
- Integration audit of all your systems
- 3–4 core workflows automated
- Monthly monitoring & fixes
- Documentation your office keeps
Operator
Engine, plus an ongoing automation partner for your staff team.
£550/month
6-month minimum
- Everything in Engine
- New workflows every quarter
- Staff & volunteer training
- Priority support
The case I'll help you make to your PCC or deacons is a stewardship case: we count the hours your church currently spends retyping, value them at your real staff rate, and compare honestly against the alternatives. If the numbers don't justify it for your church, I'll say so in the audit.
Who's behind this
I do this admin myself, in my own church, as a volunteer.
I'm Gellért. By profession I'm a data engineer; by conviction I'm a Baptist church member who spends part of each month annotating our church's bank statements against receipts for our treasurer — by hand. Metanoia Automation exists because I got tired of doing work that a well-built system should do, and realised every church I know has a version of the same problem.
“An IT company learns your church on your invoice — I already live it. A VA would do the typing every month forever — I build the system so nobody has to do it at all.”
I understand Gift Aid and GASDS, what a PCC or deacons' meeting needs to see before approving spend, why the membership register must remain the authoritative record, and why your data must never leave your church's control. I work in English, Hungarian and Romanian, and serve congregations in the UK and in Transylvania.
Questions treasurers ask
Fair questions, straight answers.
Does this work with our accounting software and ChMS?
Almost certainly. I build around what you already have — ChurchSuite, Planning Center, common UK accounts packages, and yes, your legacy spreadsheets. The audit confirms exactly what connects to what before you spend a penny on a build.
Who keeps this running when a volunteer leaves?
That's the problem I'm built to solve. Every automation comes with plain-English documentation your office keeps, and the Engine and Operator tiers include monthly monitoring — so the system doesn't depend on any one person's memory, including mine.
What about GDPR and our members' data?
Everything runs inside your church's own Google or Microsoft account, under your logins. Your data never sits on my servers or my hardware. You get a short data-processing note for your records, and workflows are designed so the authoritative registers stay authoritative — automation reads and routes; it never replaces your legal records.
What can we actually afford, including implementation?
The prices above are the prices — setup fees included where they exist. The audit puts your current hidden cost (staff and volunteer hours spent retyping) next to the fee, so your finance team can judge it as a stewardship decision, not a leap of faith. Foundation typically pays for itself in about three months.
Will this replace our administrator?
No — it gives them their job back. Automation removes the retyping layer: the copy-paste, the re-keying, the chasing. The judgement, the pastoral awareness, the welcome at the door — that's people's work, and it's exactly what your staff get more time for.
Start here
Book your free hours audit.
☞ This form is a live example of what I build. When you press send, you'll get an instant confirmation email, I'll be notified, and your answers will land — structured, categorised — in my system. Nobody at my end will retype a thing. That's the service, in miniature.