A friend told me that the Church is piloting a new LDS.org-based online payment site in their stake. This source heard it announced in church, then logged into his LDS.org account to check it out. He/she captured the below screenshot and graciously passed it on to me. It should make it easy to pay tithing, fast offerings, and other donations to the Church, electronically!

Our post about how to pay your tithing online has long been one of our most viewed posts. More people have found found Mormon Life Hacker by searching for how to pay tithing online, than any other method. Unfortunately it’s not a great system as some of the updates and comments on that post point out. So we’re really excited to tell you that the Church has a beta version coming soon! And it works for anyone with an LDS.org account and a US bank account.

Here was my source’s thoughts after trying a first donation:

Very very simple to use. Just need to know your routing number and then your account number to a checking or savings account. (They have a check sample on the page that shows you where to quickly find those sets of numbers.) It doesn’t look like there is an option to set up recurring payments—but you can save your account information so that when you manually pay, you don’t have to re-enter your information. It looks like the transaction happens though Zion’s Bank on their (the Church’s) end of things.

What we can surmise from the info available:

It’s super simple! It uses the familiar tithing slip as the layout for entering the amounts to donate to the different items.

A record of your past donations will also be available, even if they were not paid through this new site (see the sidebar where donations are listed, even though my source paid their first donation online, after taking this screenshot).

You’ll be able to download some kind of statements (see left-sidebar). I’d assume that this will be monthly and yearly ones similar to those sent out by email, for people who pay using the BillPay method now.

It’ll probably be available only in the United States, for starters. If Zion’s is doing the processing, it’ll probably take more integration with international banks to get it elsewhere.

If you’re using your bank’s Billpay to auto-pay your tithing (as our previous post outlines) you may want to continue using that method even after this launches. My guess is the Church will add auto-recurring payments at some point. But if this is the feature-set they go public with, you may want to stick with your billpay setup until the Church adds automatically recurring payments.

It saves at least one bank account, making any donations from that account quick and easy in the future.

Who else is stoked about this? I sure am. I’ve been wanting to update the previous post for years, but just haven’t had any really helpful news on this front. Glad to see the church recognized the demand and prioritized it as an integrated service as part of our LDS.org accounts.