For Catholic parishes using Mass intentions, this guide follows a request from start to finish: what the parishioner sees, what the office does and which settings you choose along the way.
Most online Mass booking systems assume the offering is paid by card when the request is made. That doesn’t fit many UK parishes. Offerings still come in envelopes, older parishioners may not want to pay online, and plenty of parishes would rather not take card payments at all. So Pewbook works the other way round: the request goes online and the offering arrives the way it always has.
What the parishioner does
A parishioner opens your parish’s page (from your website, the QR code on the porch poster or a link in the newsletter) and taps Ask for a Mass. They don’t need an account.
- They choose a Mass. A calendar shows the Masses they can ask for, each marked Available or Taken. If your parish has more than one church, they can pick the church first. They never see anyone else’s intention, only whether a Mass has a place left.
- They say who the Mass is for, and what it’s for: someone who has died, a birthday or anniversary, thanksgiving, someone who is ill, and so on.
- They give their name and email address. A phone number is optional.
- They choose whether the intention can go in the newsletter. The box is ticked to start with. If they untick it, the intention is never published.
- They send it, and we email them a link.
The link is there to stop spam and mistakes. Until the parishioner clicks it and taps Confirm my request, the Mass isn’t held for them, and the office never sees the request. Links last 24 hours. A request nobody confirms is deleted.
Once they’ve confirmed, they see a Thank you page and get an email that tells them how to give the offering, along with a reference like MASS-7K3Q.
The reference
The reference is the small thing that makes everything else work. A parishioner paying cash writes it on the envelope. One paying by bank transfer puts it in the payment reference. When the office finds an envelope or a transfer, they type the reference into Find by reference and the right request is highlighted. No more guessing which Mrs Smith the envelope came from.
Paying by bank transfer
If your parish adds its bank details in Settings, parishioners are shown them after they send their request, with their reference and a Copy button next to each detail to paste into their banking app. The details are never on your public pages.
Bank details are a target for fraud, so changing them is deliberately slow. A change takes 24 hours to take effect, and every admin and member of the clergy is emailed about it. Any admin can cancel a change they don’t recognise. The first details you add work straight away.
Pewbook only shows your details. Money goes straight from the parishioner’s bank to yours, and Pewbook never touches it.
What the office does
Requests appear in Mass intentions, under Waiting for the offering. Each one shows the intention, the Mass, who asked and their reference.
When the offering arrives, tap Confirm, enter the amount and how it was given (cash, cheque, bank transfer or other), then tap Confirm and email them. The intention goes into the register and the parishioner gets an email saying their Mass is confirmed.
If something’s wrong, you can Move the request to another Mass or Decline it with a reason. Either way the parishioner is told by email. A request that has waited more than 14 days is highlighted, so a forgotten envelope doesn’t go unnoticed.
Not everyone will use the website, and they shouldn’t have to. When someone rings or calls in, use Add an intention for someone. You enter it on their behalf, record the offering, and it’s confirmed straight away. Their email address is optional.
The settings you choose
Every parish does this a little differently, and diocesan norms differ too. So each rule is a setting in Settings, under Mass intentions:
- Notice needed. How close to a Mass people can still ask for it, so the office has time to sort the offering and the newsletter.
- How far ahead people can ask. Many parishes open the book a year ahead. If you release dates in blocks, you can set the first date too.
- Suggested offering. Shown on the form, and never enforced.
- How to give the offering. Your own words: “Put it in an envelope with your reference and hand it in at the presbytery.”
- Services that don’t take intentions. Leave off any Mass that’s always kept for the parish, for example.
- Collective intentions. Off unless you turn it on. If you do, you set how many intentions a Mass can take, and parishioners must tick to agree to share the Mass before they can ask.
- When a Mass is full. You can let people still ask for it, to be offered elsewhere, with your own wording on the form.
- Remember a parishioner’s device. Regular parishioners can skip the email check on their own phone or computer. You choose how many days, or 0 to turn it off.
Standing intentions
Some intentions aren’t requested by anyone: “People of the Parish” on Sundays, or “Holy Souls” in November. Add these as standing intentions, for every week at a service or for a single Mass. They take a place at the Mass, appear in the newsletter and are marked in the register with no offering.
And then it’s in the newsletter
Confirmed intentions go into the services table of your weekly newsletter automatically, by Mass. Anything a parishioner asked not to publish shows as “Private intention” on your own copy, and intentions are never shown on your public page. You can choose whether intentions still waiting for their offering appear too. There’s more in Stop retyping the parish newsletter every week.
Getting started
Set up your churches and service times first, then go through the Mass intentions settings. Make a test request yourself from your parish’s page, so you see what parishioners will see. Then put the link in the newsletter and the poster in the porch.
The help centre has a step-by-step article for each part: asking for a Mass, confirming a request, the settings and adding your bank details.