Two questions to ask when employing Church Management Software
- Does the software do what was promised?
- Is their technical support team capable and available?
Solutions from church and donor management software (ChMS) providers keeps getting better and better in their ability to help churches and ministries fulfill their mission! With more features to track and communicate with people, improved web and mobile device interfaces, and powerful database tools, this category of software is a big help and a useful asset for today’s ministries.
Church Software Historical Perspective
In the mid-1980s the number of these programs had grown to 262! Then some merged, some consolidated, and some went out of business, reducing the number to only 34. Then the Internet made it so easy for those writing solutions to share them that the number of solutions more than doubled! Our research this year found 87 focusing on the church and ministry market
Why Church Management Software?
Tracking more than just names, addresses, and phone numbers, many of these also help build community and track family relationships, spiritual gifts, talents, interests, attendance, nursery security, contributions, fundraising campaigns, volunteerism, small groups, and more.
Church Management Software Defined
Some time ago Steve Hewitt, Editor-in-Chief of Christian Computing Magazine, labeled the software category tailored to meet the needs of churches as Church Management Software, or CMS. More recently some began calling it ChMS to help prevent confusion since so many software categories are called ‘CMS’.
Not-for-Profit Accounting
Churches and ministries exist in a unique accounting niche that most software (and even most CPAs!) can’t help with. But many ChMS packages can help in this area
One of a ministry’s most vulnerable areas is finance. All too often we hear about churches and ministries that have suffered embezzlement by a trusted team member. One of the best protections is an accounting system that has a good audit trail, tracking the detail of every transaction and that cannot be altered in any way. For these reasons, some ChMS providers have written their own fully-integrated accounting system
Church Software Comparison Sites – (this is old info)
http://www.servantpc.com/servantkeeper/sk_church_software_compare.php
- Servant Keeper starts at $250 one time licensing fee
http://www.servantpc.com/spcwordpress/index.php
- Breeze is very simple and only $50 a month, in the cloud.
- Here are just three examples below. This is a good beginning and you can click on each one to get a good picture.
- You can click on the following link to display many programs: http://www.capterra.com/categories
- ACS Technologies
- Customers
- 50,000 Members
- 50,000,000 Twitter
- 1,985 Facebook
- 6,444 LinkedIn
- Servant Keeper
- Customers
- 25,000 Members
- 18,750,000 Twitter
- 6,515 Facebook
- 2,067 LinkedIn
- ParishSOFT/Logos
- Customers
- 12,500 Members
- 20,000,000 Twitter
- 142 Facebook
- 259 LinkedIn