About Steward

What is Steward?

First7 Steward is a simple financial stewardship tool designed to help you record, organize, and understand the money entrusted to you.

Steward is intentionally smaller than traditional accounting software. Its purpose is not to make you become an accountant. Its purpose is to give you a clear record of what comes in, what goes out, where money is held, and what you have set aside for specific purposes.

The guiding idea is simple:

Good stewardship should be understandable.

Steward is part of First7, a broader project focused on helping people discover, understand, remember, and live out Scripture in practical ways.

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Why Steward exists

Many financial tools become complicated because they try to serve every possible financial need.

Steward takes a different approach.

It focuses on a small set of useful financial actions:

• Record Money In
• Record Money Out
• Record transfers between accounts
• Keep a clear financial history
• Set money aside for purposes
• Understand what remains available
• Back up and restore your own records

The goal is not to provide every accounting feature imaginable. The goal is to make everyday financial stewardship clearer and more manageable.

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Local-first by design

Steward is built around a local-first approach.

Your working financial records are stored locally in your browser using IndexedDB rather than requiring a central cloud financial ledger for the core application.

This gives you direct control over your working data and keeps the core Steward experience independent of a financial account or bank connection.

There is an important responsibility that comes with this approach: you should keep your own backups. Browser storage is not a substitute for a backup file.

For a detailed explanation of how Steward handles your records, see Your Data.

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Your records belong to you

Steward is designed around data ownership and portability.

The application does not hold your money, move real-world money, or connect directly to your bank.

Steward records the financial information you choose to enter. Its calculations and summaries are based on that recorded history.

You can export your records using Steward’s backup system and restore them when needed.

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What Steward is not

Steward is not a bank.

It is not a payment processor.

It does not connect directly to your bank account.

It does not automatically move real-world money.

It is not intended to replace professional accounting, tax, investment, or financial advice.

It is also not intended to become a large church-management or enterprise resource planning system simply because more features could be added.

Keeping Steward focused is part of the design.

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Built to preserve financial history

Steward treats financial history carefully.

Where a record needs to be corrected, the application is designed to preserve the history of what happened rather than making important records disappear without explanation.

This is why Steward uses concepts such as voiding and protected historical accounts instead of treating deletion as the default correction mechanism.

The aim is a financial record that remains understandable over time.

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Support Steward

Steward is being developed as an independent First7 project.

If Steward becomes useful to you and you would like to help support its continued development, you may choose to contribute.

There is no obligation.

Using Steward does not require a contribution, and support is simply a way for people who find the project helpful to help it continue.

If you have suggestions, questions, or ideas for making Steward better, the best place to start is the Feedback page.

If you would like to contribute directly, you can support Steward on Ko-fi.

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A work in progress

Steward is being developed carefully and incrementally.

The current version is intentionally focused on a small set of core financial functions. More capabilities may be added over time, but new features should earn their place by making stewardship genuinely clearer or safer.

The goal is simple:

Useful. Private. Understandable. Yours.