Why the paperwork is the whole game

For most pastors the housing allowance is the single largest tax benefit they receive, while working and in retirement. It is also the one that depends entirely on numbers set in advance and expenses you can actually show. Three things decide how much of it you keep.

Next year's number is set in advance

Your church or ministry designates the amount before the year begins, and it can never be applied backward. Designate too little and you pay income tax on housing money you could have excluded, with no way to fix it afterward. A year of real expense data turns that guess into a number you can stand behind.

Unspent allowance becomes taxable

Anything designated but not actually spent on providing your home is taxable income at year end. Knowing where you stand in September leaves you time to do something about it. Finding out in April does not.

The records are yours to keep

The exclusion covers what you actually spent, and the burden of proof sits with you. Receipts saved as you go are ordinary bookkeeping. Receipts reconstructed years later are a bad weekend, and sometimes not possible at all.

Start free

No card required. Takes about a minute.

Tracking it the usual way

Receipts spread across a photo roll, a drawer, a shoe box, and email folders
Next year's designation is a guess built on last year's guess
No idea whether you are on pace until the year is already over
Hours of reconstruction every spring, usually at the worst time
Nothing organized to hand your board or your tax preparer

Tracking it with MHA Tracker

Every expense in one place, on your phone, tablet, or computer
A running total that shows exactly where you stand today
Next year's number built from what you actually spent
Receipts attached as you go, and flagged when one is missing
A designation worksheet, filled in and ready for your board
Year-end reports and a receipt archive your tax preparer can use

Know where you stand

A live usage bar shows how much of your designated allowance you've used. Spot a gap mid-year and your board can still amend the designation for the months ahead, rather than finding out at tax time when the number is already settled.

Snap it, AI files it

Photograph a stack of receipts and let AI read the dates, amounts, and payees, ready to review and add in one tap. The record gets made in seconds, which is why it actually gets made.

Year after year

Track each year's designation and running total, and flip between years anytime. The same records matter in retirement, when distributions from a church-sponsored retirement account can be designated as housing allowance too.

Designate with confidence

Reports and a designation estimator turn your real spending into next year's housing allowance number, plus a plain-English FAQ built from IRS Publication 517.

How it works

Create your account.

Free, and no card required. It takes about a minute.

Enter this year's designated amount.

That is the housing allowance figure your church board approved for the year. Not sure what yours is? The FAQ walks through how it gets set.

Add expenses as you go.

Snap the receipt, pick a category, done. Your running total updates right away.

By year end you have organized records for your tax preparer, and real numbers to set next year's designation with confidence.

Simple pricing

Steward is genuinely free and genuinely useful. It keeps everything on the device you are using, which is private, and also fragile: clear your browser or lose the phone and the records go with it. Steward+ is for when those records are worth more than that.

Steward

Free forever

Your records stay on your device.

Full expense tracker with categories & filters
Dashboard with allowance usage bar
Receipts saved on your device
CSV export
Housing allowance FAQ
Records stay private on your own device

Worth knowing: because we keep no copy, we cannot recover free records. On iPhone and iPad, Safari also deletes a site's saved data after about a week without a visit, so add MHA Tracker to your Home Screen (we show you how) or export a CSV now and then.

Start free

Steward+

$70 / year

That works out to $5.83 a month, and paying for the year saves you three months.

Audit-ready records, backed up and everywhere you are.

Everything in Steward, plus:
AI receipt scanning: snap a stack, it reads & files them
Secure cloud storage: receipts safe if your device isn't
Sync across phone, tablet & computer
Multi-year history with yearly designations
Printable tax reports (PDF, CSV, receipts ZIP)
Designation estimator built from your real spending
Board-ready designation worksheet, filled in for you

Create your account

Steward+ is not open for signups yet. Start free, and we will say here the moment it opens.

Housing allowance records are worth keeping for years, which is a long time to trust a single device. And the scanning is the part that matters most day to day: the reason pastors stop tracking is almost never that they stopped caring, it is that typing in receipts got old. Photograph them instead and the habit survives.

Exclude even a few hundred dollars you would otherwise have missed, and the year has paid for itself.

Churches & ministries

Cover your whole pastoral staff with one invoice at a discounted group rate. Each pastor keeps their own private account.

Get in touch →

A look inside

What it looks like once you are in

Real screens from the app, filled in with a sample account. Every payee, date, and amount below is invented, and the receipts attached to them are the same sample documents you can open further down this page.

Know where you stand today

The usage bar shows how much of the allowance your board designated has actually been spent, with what is left, your monthly pace, and where the money is going. The lighter run is what your usual monthly costs still expect before December, so you can see where the year is heading without it counting as money spent.

New here? Read the three-minute getting started guide.

Examples

What a supporting document looks like

Bills, statements, and store receipts that show who you paid, when, how much, and, whenever possible, an itemized view of what you bought. Photograph one with your phone or upload a file, and it stays attached to the expense. Each tag is the category the expense would be filed under, not a ruling on what qualifies.