My church is working to upgrade our technological and organizational structure. One of the things we are considering is purchasing and subscribing to a “Church Management System” software package.
Do any of your churches use such a software? Are you impressed? Upset?
Tell me what you know about Church Management software.
No, but I have in the past and it’s great.
If you have someone who keeps it up-to-date and knows how to use.
So, Pastor Dinosaur, you’re going to need some help.
We use ACS and are generally dissatisfied with it. While it is a powerful system, it is anything but user-friendly, and requires yearly training (at $$$) to have much chance of manipulating it to its potential. Of course, if the people using it are already computer geeks, it is probably easier, but this is the second church I have been at that used it, and the 4th (I think) church secretary, and they all have had the same complaint.
John
Dave, I have used ACS and have been completely satisfied. If your office help is stable and does not turn over much they can master it and it has all bells and whistles, financial, church attends, you can customize reports tracking membership service. It’s awesome to have secretary print off all committees and classes that a senior adult has served on through the years to add to a funeral message. My last secretary entered visitors on ACS and used it to print off maps to their addresses for visitation. I find it has good support service as well. Any question… Read more »
We have used ACS for many years and find it to be difficult to use and poorly supported. Our users have been with us 19 & 11 years with an I.T. guy who has been with us 11 years. They all complain of the lack of “user-friendliness” of ACS. In the last decade, most every time ACS has made an upgrade, it has messed something up on our end, requiring hours of time on line with their support to correct the issues. Sometimes over a period of days. It is also not compatible with virtually any other applications. For instance,… Read more »
Frankly, this is the kind of information I am looking for. If you find it unfriendly, I most certainly will.
I’ve been using Church Management Software off and on for the last 20 years. Every church I have pastored has eventually gone to a computer based system.
Currently I am just getting to know and use BVCMS which originated out of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis. It is an open source system and so far has impressed me with its low cost and its power. Let’s face it – if a church the size of Bellevue is happy with it then I’m sure it will do more than what I need to do in my small church.
Mr Miller,
If I can make one suggestion it would be to use open source or free software whenever possible.
Typically savings are usually around 50 percent for TCO(total cost of owner?ip).
Here is a great list of 100 top choices for cms software
http://www.communicatejesus.com/the-ultimate-list-of-church-member-database-providers/
This series of articles at the link Robert points to can help you work through some key issues: http://www.communicatejesus.com/series-selecting-a-church-member-database/ One thing to watch out for is trying to wrap your church around the software by coming up with a way to capture everything possible. That both wears you out and becomes a maintenance nightmare. Also realize that your choice includes a certain amount of vendor lock in since there isn’t a universal data format and conversions between different systems either may not exist or might have a cost component. A key question to answer is whether there is a data… Read more »
In the realm of open-source, Bellevue Baptist Church has a program they have developed and make available. I have not used it, but blogger Tony Morgan recommends it.
http://www.bvcms.com/
Thank you.
This is a true story about ACS. This happened two weeks ago. We printed all of our W-2s. They were fine. Two of our staff members withhold additional funds from their paychecks to make extra contributions into their Guidestone 403(b) retirement accounts. This requires a modification to their W-2s. We followed the ACS procedure. It worked fine. Then we went to print our W-3. The modifications to the W-2s were not reflected in the totals on the W-3. We tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. We called ACS. They said, “You’re not on our most recent version. You… Read more »
That’s kinda scary.
Experience of an average sized SBC church (75-150 in attendance) and a hacking and plodding pastor: 1. We had a top notch part time secretary who kept it all on paper. No problems. A volunteer kepts contributions on paper. 2. A brilliant new pastor initiated a move to computerize the financial records and took the advice of a businessman in church to buy sophisticated financial software. We struggled with that for a few years. It was way beyond our needs and the upgrades and tech support expensive and time consuming, respectively. 3. We went to PowerChurch Plus. The new part… Read more »
I bought my first church management program back in 1989 – It was ACS…through the years I have used ACS…Probably because my service has been in Small-to-medium size churches, we have never experienced those issues like described by others. Yes, there have been some issues, but generally, they were easy fixes. Support was suspect during the late 90’s because the company had grown so quickly they could not keep up. Today, we are well pleased. The only time I didn’t use ACS was from 2002-2006 when I was at a very small church (who couldn’t afford the purchase)…We started with… Read more »
Just a reminder to everyone that if you use a the Windows based system and want the latest version; the price for upgrade is increasing from 40 dollars to 199 dollars on Jan 31.
Dave I think Leo Endel is fairly knowledgeable on all the CMS stuff too. I suspect you have already talked to him!
Here is a good side by side comparison of the most popular linux distro and Windows latest version.
http://tinyurl.com/ag7tjms
We use http://www.shelbysystems.com/ and are very satisfied with it.
Our ministry assistants describe it as “requiring a lot of steps” but built into this system are checks and balances on data entry and financial records which greatly improve accuracy and provide safeguards.
We use PowerChurch Plus. It is quite user friendly for our part time Financial Secretary. We also purchase the support system from them also. The secretary calls and may stay on the phone one hour at the most and she can find a fix. My Financial Secretary is not that computer savvy but she is very efficient. We have been very satisfied with the software performance.
Have served in churches that use Shelby. Have served in churches that use ACS. Prefer Shelby by about a bazillion to one over ACS.