What Can Church Membership Software Do For Your Church?
The world has entered the Digital Age. Computers are being depended upon more than ever to keep people connected and organized. Every year, businesses spend millions of dollars on software packages trying to improve performance and become more efficient. Churches are also finding the benefits of specialized computer programs, especially as congregations grow and become more connected to the community. Trying to understand church membership software can be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with no picture to guide you. Most churches will not need the large software packages that businesses require, but the alternative is software from small companies or individuals. This type generally has less guidance on hardware requirements and technical support can be sketchy. Typically, church software comes in three types: bookkeeping, organizational, and management. It is important to establish what your church’s needs are in order to choose the proper software.
Bookkeeping software is essentially a database for financial information. This keeps track of your expenditures and income. Church specific software has a membership database included so individual offerings and donations can be tracked as well. This type of software is great for organizing tax documents, creating receipts for members, formulating budgets, payrolls, and creating statistical reports. There are many great church financial software programs on the market today that can meet most any needs of a church. The great thing is that they are written with a church in mind, so you don’t need to create custom categories or modify things to understand your spreadsheets or reports.
The next step up in software is the organizational program. In addition to the basic bookkeeping functions, this type of software allows for maintaining contact information of members, visitors, and guests, and correlates this with your accounting section to monitor donations from specific individuals. This software type is essentially a large database that can be used to organize what would previously have been multiple spreadsheets of information. It then allows you to make queries within the system to quickly locate individuals based on the information you keep about them. For example you may wish to look up members with poor attendance, volunteer records, or high donations over the last month.
Church management and tracking programs offer more bells and whistles than the others. The full capabilities of the bookkeeping and organizational programs are contained in these and much more. Finances can be documented for multiple accounts, inventory can be logged, information pertaining to classes such as adult bible study or youth groups is preset into software. There can even be options for events such as scheduling calendars, attendance records, volunteer timetables, and much more. This type of software package will come with internet guides to provide assistance and aid your church with email, online calendars, and websites.
The requirements for each type of program will vary. Most of the programs are Windows based. A PC running Windows XP, Vista, or 7 will be able to run all but the most obscure programs. Some of the programs will have built-in web access for technical assistance, online help, and website development tools. The website development tools will be helpful in determining if specific hardware considerations are needed. Internet access, while necessary to utilize those specific aspects of the software, is not required to run the basic database and spreadsheet programs. ChurchSoftware.com offers a very basic bookkeeping program, and an organizational program that can work with multiple computers and aid in website development. Richmond Software has an excellent management package offering free technical support, a program demonstration download, and the ability to print reports in either French or English. ACS Technologies has multiple programs for various needs.
Like homes, schools, and businesses, churches will be fully enveloped in the Digital Age soon. There are many programs on the market. It is best to examine your congregation now. Doing so will help you find a church membership software system to best suit your need.