How to set up tithe, Zakat or any standing giving commitment

Most money apps treat giving as just another expense category. That works right up until you need to answer how much do I owe this month — because that answer depends on your income, your convictions, and sometimes a lunar calendar.

Moneytaw has a dedicated system for it. Here's how to set yours up properly, including the parts most people don't know are configurable.

Where it lives

Settings → Giving & Obligations.

Two screens: the main one tracks performance against your active obligations, and Configure is where you set them up. Three come pre-loaded, and all three start switched off — nothing calculates or tracks until you enable it.

	Default	Calculated from	Cycle
Tithe	10%	All income	Monthly
Zakat	2.5%	Qualifying wealth	Lunar year
Offering	5%	All income	Monthly

Every one of those columns is editable. The defaults are a starting point, not a doctrine.

Step 1 — Pick the calculation basis

This is the setting that matters most, and the one nearly everybody leaves on the default without realising there are four options.

All income — a percentage of everything that came in during the period. The straightforward reading of tithe, and right for most salaried people.

Profit — a percentage of income minus expenses, floored at zero. If you run a business, tithing on gross turnover and tithing on what you actually made are very different numbers. This basis also means a month where you lost money generates no obligation, which the gross-income approach can't express.

Qualifying wealth — a percentage of the balances in account types you flag, rather than of income at all. This is the Zakat model: you're giving on held wealth, not on earnings.

Fixed amount — a flat figure per period. This is the one to use for commitments that aren't proportional at all: a monthly pledge, school fees you cover for a relative, a standing amount you send your parents.

Step 2 — Set the cycle

Monthly is the default, but the full set covers per-income, monthly, quarterly, annual, lunar year, and custom.

Lunar year is there for Zakat specifically. A Zakat obligation calculated on a calendar year is wrong by about eleven days annually and drifts further every year — so if you're tracking Zakat, set the Lunar year start and let it compute properly.

Per-income is worth knowing about too: if your income is irregular — freelance, commission, business — computing at the moment money lands is far easier to sustain than reconstructing a month at the end of it.

Step 3 — Exclude what shouldn't count

This is the step that makes the number honest, and it's easy to miss.

Money landing in your account isn't automatically income. A loan you received is not increase. Neither is a refund, or a friend paying you back, or moving your own money between your own accounts.

Under an obligation's settings you can mark categories as Exempt income — so Loan Income, for instance, stops inflating what you owe. If you've ever looked at a tithe figure and thought that can't be right, this is usually why.

For Zakat, the equivalent control is Qualifying accounts: choose which of your accounts count toward the Nisab rather than having every balance swept in.

Step 4 — Add your own

Add Custom Obligation creates one from scratch. This is the mechanism for anything that isn't tithe, Zakat or offering:

• A monthly target for what you send your parents
• A standing family commitment
• A school-fees pledge for a sibling or cousin
• Any personal giving discipline you want held to a number

Name it, choose whether it's a Percentage or a Fixed amount, set the frequency, and it behaves exactly like the built-in three.

Step 5 — Let it track itself

Here's the part that turns this from a calculator into a record.

Every obligation gets its own linked category. When you pay, categorise the transaction under it — or let a rule do that for you — and the payment is matched to the obligation automatically, straight from your transaction feed.

The tracking screen then shows Total Due, Total Paid and Remaining for the period you're viewing. No second ledger, no separate note, no spreadsheet you stop updating in March.

There's one more setting worth a deliberate decision: Track as expense versus Not tracked as expense. This controls whether your giving counts against your spending elsewhere in the app. Convictions differ on whether giving is an expense or a transfer of something that was never yours — Moneytaw doesn't take a position, it just asks.

The whole point

The hard part of faithful giving has never been the arithmetic. It's knowing, at any given moment, whether you're current or behind — without doing a reconstruction from memory across four bank accounts.

Set it up once. After that, it's a glance.