These questions will help you decide which Congregational Management Software is right for you.
What do you want the software to do?
Use this list of 50 possibilities to help determine your needs.
- Keep track of people with different kinds of relationships to your congregation (members, visitors, constituents, children and spouse of members, etc.)
- Use different kinds of telephone numbers -- fax, cell, pager, etc.
- Have more than one address for a family or have individual addresses
- Keep email information and use it to communicate with members
- Track life events for members and families
- Track skills, gifts and talents and search for and use information based on this data
- Track committee service with dates (i.e., when terms expire, number of terms, etc.)
- Keep information about spiritual gifts identified and used
- Store digital photos of individuals and/or families
- Print church directories -- with or without photographs
- Use mail merge for personalized communications to congregation
- Use searches to define groups of people who meet certain criteria ( e.g. all married men who live in one zip code for a targeted mailing) and save frequently used searches
- Allow individuals and families to choose their own label names and salutations
- Retain information about people who die or leave the congregation, but keep that information from showing up on lists, reports and directories.
- Allow different family members to have different last names
- Import and export information to other software, such as Access, Excel, Word, and so on
- Keep attendance for worship, communion, church school, classes or other events
- Keep attendance for more than one kind of worship service and sometimes group services together
- Promote church school or other classes as a group and print class rosters and attendance marking sheets
- View or print attendance information about one person over a long period of time
- Do contribution entry on site or from a remote location
- Keep contribution information to more than one church fund (operating, building, mission, etc.)
- Track pledges to a fund, and credit contributions against a pledge
- Print contribution statements annually, quarterly, monthly
- Use mail merge containing contribution information
- Record check numbers for individual contributions
- Use pledge or contribution information in data searches for labels, directories or other reports
- Keep detailed contribution information for more than one year at a time
- Keep money in more than one bank account, or separate funds in the same bank account
- Track actual income and expenses by account
- Use budgets for each account -- vary by month based upon history, manual entry
- Create your own account number formats -- numerical, alpha, character
- Print balance sheets, statements of revenue and expenses, detailed journals on demand
- Maintain vendor and service provider information files
- Enter vendor invoices -- detail by account, combining all entries for one vendor
- Use cash accounting methods
- Use accrual accounting methods
- Reconcile bank statements
- Have on-line inquiry, MTD, YTD, all years by vendor and account
- Pay employees and automatically do tax calculations for employee payroll
- Take care of special tax circumstance for clergy - FICA, Medicare, housing allowance
- Account for deductions for insurance, extra tax, savings plan, other
- Direct deposit to one or more bank accounts
- Keep an employee information file
- Allow for variable pay periods and salary -- monthly, semi-monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, hourly
- Payroll check printing, gross pay, deductions to net
- Tax reporting -- W-2, 1099, Form 941, Federal summaries, state and local reporting
- Print payroll reports by individual, time period, accounts
- Keep inventory of assets -- quantity, location, value, and description
- Use on an individual computer or on a network with multiple workstations
Thirty Congregational Culture Questions
You want match software features to your congregation's practices. Individual congregational practices and culture vary greatly. You need to find software that meets your needs. Think about your congregation's "culture" - that is, how you do things. Knowing how your church's systems work -- how and why you do what you do -- will help you pick software that matches your needs, rather than making you fit your needs to a software's capabilities. For example: do you use offering envelopes? Some CMS requires envelope numbers to record a pledge or contribution. Or, when recording attendance, do you wish to keep track of who received communion? Some CMS offers this - others don't. Is your congregation large enough (or "family" enough) to have multiple people with the same first and last name (i.e. Joe Smith or Mary Jones)? Many software packages do a poor job of making distinctions between multiple people with the same names - especially when recording contributions or attendance The following questions will help you answer some of your congregation's most important culture questions as you choose which CMS package is right for your church.
- Do you use numbered offering envelopes? Do couples/families share a common envelope number?
- Does a person/couple/family keep the same envelope number year-to-year?
- Do you record contributions of people who aren't members?
- Do you take pledges to church funds? Are any of these pledges multi-year?
- Is your pledge year the same as a calendar year? Is your financial year the same as a calendar year?
- Are your contribution records kept on a computer at the church or at another location?
- Do pastors and/or other staff have access to contribution information? Do they need to?
- How often do you want to send contribution statements to the congregation?
- How often do you write checks? Do you use computer-generated checks?
- Do you want to process payroll for employees, or to use a payroll service?
- Do you use a cash or accrual method of accounting?
- Is the person who manages your day-to-day financial transactions an accountant, or do they have accounting experience?
- Do some couples within the same family wish to have both first names on labels and other correspondence (e.g. John and Mary Smith vs. Mr. And Mrs. John Smith)?
- Do some couples with different last names wish to have both last names on labels and other correspondence (e.g. John Smith and Mary Miller)?
- Do members of the same family sometimes have different addresses?
- What individual date information is important to your congregation (e.g. marriage, baptism, profession of faith)?
- Is email used for regular correspondence with the congregation? Individually and groups?
- Do you use a Phonetree or other automated voice system to send voice messages to the congregation?
- Do you send personalized correspondence to large numbers of people in the congregation?
- Do you print individual addresses directly on envelopes, or do you use labels all of the time?
- Is bulk mail sorting used for any communication to the congregation?
- When a person dies or leaves the congregation, do you still want to keep information about them -- family connections, address, contribution or attendance information? Is it important to keep the date when they die or leave?
- What are the special areas of ministry within your congregation that you would like to track within a computer database?
- Can the person in charge of your membership data make decisions about the design of the database (more powerful), or should the software provide all of the structure (less chance for error)?
- Do you want to know who has (or has not) attended worship, church school classes or other events? Both members and visitors?
- Do you want to know who takes communion during a worship service?
- Do you have multiple weekly worship services?
- Do you follow up with members who have missed several consecutive worship services, classes and other events? Do you want that information to be kept in a computer database?
- Do you have several levels of organization for church school or other classes, and do you wish to use them in reporting? (e.g. Area, Department, Age, Class Name)
- Do you use the Internet to publish membership, contribution or financial information?
