This article was last checked in June 2026. Software offers, not-for-profit pricing, and eligibility rules change often. Confirm the current details with the provider and with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission before you rely on them.
Most small churches run their whole office on one or two computers, often looked after by a volunteer who never set out to be the tech person. This article covers the everyday software that office genuinely needs, and two honest ways to get it: a free path, and a discounted path if your church qualifies. It leaves church management systems and email-sending platforms to one side, as those are their own topic.
You don't have to pay for an office that works
A small church office can run at no cost. For documents and spreadsheets, LibreOffice is a free, open-source suite that does what Word and Excel do, and it works offline on any computer. If you would rather work in a browser, both Microsoft and Google offer their core apps free with an ordinary account: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the web, or Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. For email, a free Gmail or Outlook.com address costs nothing, and Mozilla Thunderbird is a free program for reading and sending it from your computer.
That is enough to run a one-laptop office. It helps to know the limits before you commit. Free accounts come with modest storage, around 5GB with a personal Microsoft account and 15GB with Google, which fills up faster than you would think. And a free personal account cannot give you a church-branded email address like [email protected]; that needs a paid or not-for-profit plan. For many small churches, neither of those is a dealbreaker. The point is that paying for software should be a decision you make on purpose, not a default you fall into.
Choose few tools, and choose them well
The most useful thing to know is to choose one productivity suite and set it up properly, rather than running two half-configured ones. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are both free for eligible churches, so the choice is about fit, not price. A church already on Windows, with people who know Word and Excel, will have the least friction staying with Microsoft. A church that lives in a browser, or already uses Gmail, will be at home with Google. Either is a sound choice. The mistake is keeping a foot in both.
After that, install only what you will actually use. A lot of what church offices once downloaded is now free or already built into the computer. Windows comes with Microsoft Defender, which is enough antivirus for an ordinary office, so you rarely need to pay for more. Recent versions of Windows open and create zip files on their own. For helping someone at another computer, Microsoft Quick Assist is built in and free, without the catch attached to the old standby TeamViewer, whose free version is for personal use only. And you can save a file as a PDF (Portable Document Format) straight from your browser or from Word.
A few free tools still earn their place. VLC plays almost any video or audio file. 7-Zip makes password-protected archives for the times you need to send something sensitive. PDF24 handles the fiddlier PDF jobs like merging and splitting. Turn on automatic updates, switch on multi-factor authentication for your email, and you have covered the basics.
Getting not-for-profit pricing in Australia
Whether you want a free not-for-profit suite or a cheap paid upgrade, the software companies run their church and charity programs through the same gate, and it catches a lot of people out. The gate is registration as a charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC). It is not Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status. Most churches cannot get DGR endorsement, because advancing religion is not by itself a DGR category under Australian tax law. The programs that matter here, including Microsoft and Google, ask only for charity registration, which most small churches can obtain.
In Australia the usual route is Connecting Up, run by Infoxchange, the local counterpart to the American TechSoup service. You create a free account, it confirms your charity status, and you reach the not-for-profit offers from there. Some providers, including Google, verify through a separate service called Goodstack instead. One thing not to carry over from older guides: if you remember Microsoft giving churches the full Office suite for free, that was cut back in 2025. There is still a free Microsoft tier, but it is the web-based one, so check what you would actually receive.
The next step is small. Check whether your church is registered as a charity with the ACNC, which you can look up on the public register. Some churches are covered by a wider denominational or diocesan registration rather than holding their own, and the register will tell you either way. If your church is registered, start at Connecting Up, or with Goodstack if you are leaning towards Google. If it has never formalised its legal structure and has no Australian Business Number, that is the thing to sort first, because every one of these programs is built on it.