Choosing a Church Management Software

Kathy John

Church management software (CMS) is very helpful in creating, developing, and maintaining a strong and successful establishment, the church. It makes the financial issues much simpler and more organized for the individuals who work with the financial aspects. This allows leaders to see how they are growing, and how to outreach programs needed for improving membership and attendance. The overall administration can also be tracked with church software including everything from gathering information at meetings to votes and other decisions that are made by the church body. Using software to perform many functions of the administrative work can be very helpful.

CMS is a database and set of programs that allow a congregation to keep and use information related to activities of the church, including its people, its money and its physical assets. Products vary widely. Some software offers only a people database; others feature a complete set of modules for membership, accounting, scheduling and inventory management.

Church financial activities include utility bills, payroll and supplies for Sunday school and other events. The congregation also needs to use church management software to monitor money that is used for bills, expenses and payrolls. While churches are tax exempt, the members who donate can record donations and claim those need to keep up with every check and recorded donation in order to give this information to members and those who have tithed over the last years. Running a church is very much eliminating wastages and increasing efficiency, but should be done with love, respect, and care for all.

Well, how about choosing church management software? Before choosing a CMS, match its features to your congregation's practices. Knowing how your church's systems work--how and why you do what you do—will help you pick software that matches your needs.

It's about managing people and fund. Think of the relationships of the people with your church (members, visitors, constituents, children and spouses of the members)? How to keep information about their spiritual gifts and how they use them? Do you want to print your own directory or the contribution entry is going to be done from a remote location, such as a volunteer's home? Do you need to maintain invoices? Is it important to for you to record the payrolls? And so on.

The best option still is to for a list of other congregations using the software you're considering. Capitalize on compatibility and look for a CMS that integrates membership, attendance and contributions. On the pure performance ground you should look for accounting first, scheduling second, membership database third, attendance & contributions fourth, in a priority basis.

Also value those CMS who give training and support to avoid user mistakes. Sometimes many of a package's helpful & useful features go unused because the people using it don't have enough training. Include plans and a generous budget for training.

Let's count what a basic CMS should have: • Provide easy-to-use data entry and inquiry screens • Contain a search/query function • Include extra user-defined fields. • Provide directory listing options and contribution statements • Track joint contributions • Feature easy-to-use documentation • Offer user training and support • Be continually improved by the vendor • Contain its own security with access to different information and functions • Produce feature flexible reports • Be cross-compatible with any Microsoft, Linux and Mac environments • Be based on current database technology.

Following these suggestions and spending time matching your congregation with the right church management software, you can greatly increase the ability to communicate with, learn about and provide ministry to your members.

Kathy John is a business writer, he has done MBA in Intenational business management. And currently assisting Iconcmo. For more information please visit: http://www.iconcmo.com/

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