Question for those using Church Management Software

[gldni]

I have a question for Pastors, Sunday School Teachers, Church Secretaries, anyone who has started using a software package to help manage church membership, finances, missions, etc. I need to know if switching to a management system has helped moved your church in a positive direction with efficiency and time savings over pen and paper or Excel worksheets. I also want to hear from those who's experience has not been enjoyable.

Thanks!

 

[Cameraninja]

Our church moved to a church management software several years back and we've found it much faster. Obviously, there's a commitment in getting the information into the system, but once it's in you can eliminate a lot of the steps that you would otherwise have to take. The software we use is called Excellerate and it has a lot of features designed to weave records together and let you quickly update multiple related fields. For instance, we have a class that all prospective members are required to take before becoming members. Excellerate lets us link that class to a listing of member steps that we keep. All we have to do is record attendance for the class (Excellerate lets us do that via a printed roster with barcodes next to each person’s name, then we just scan those who came). Once we record that someone came to the class, the computer automatically checks off that they completed that member step as well and there’s no hassle in trying to go in again after doing attendance and record who completed the membership class. This gives us an up to date listing of were everyone is on their spiritual journey. We can also create reports listing those who’ve competed one step, but not another, so we can contact those people and encourage them to keep moving forward. That’s just one example and, obviously, there are hundreds of other ways it helps. We’ve found that the benefit to having all your info in the same program is enormous. You never realize how much time you spend jumping between computer programs or looking through file cabinets until you don’t have to do it anymore. Plus, a computer program can reduce how much a single person has to enter. Excellerate has a feature where it links to your church’s website and small group leaders enter their own group’s attendance. The church secretary just has to click a button to sync the web records with the database. It’s a lot quicker to have thirty people spend five minutes entering data than having to have one person spend two and a half hours entering the same data.
As for excel spreadsheets or the like, I’ve used something like that in the past, and it is better than pen and paper, but they just aren’t built for what you want to do. You can’t it set up to let group leaders enter their own results. You can’t do much beyond the most basic of statistical analysis. You can’t build org charts for your cell groups. It’s just better to go with a program designed to do what churches want to do.
Hope that helps you and good luck in your ministry.
Sean