# Anyone here use church management software?



## rgrove (Jul 25, 2005)

I've seen what's out there for church management software and I'm just vain enough to think I can do better. :bigsmile: So I'm curious if your churches are using any, and what that might be. As it gets into somewhat usable state I'll be looking for beta sites as well. I don't intend to sell the software right now, but distribution will be strictly controlled. I'm not keen on my work assisting heretics in their work... Some of the companies I've seen on the Internet appear willing to sell their mediocre wares to just about anyone.


----------



## wsw201 (Jul 25, 2005)

I am not sure what we are using, I think its called My Church. Supposingly it not only does all the standard bookeeping it will also do all the congregational statistics.

Most of the "Church" software out there is not really that good, so if you can come up with something, I'm sure it will be better that 95% of the stuff out there.


----------



## rgrove (Jul 25, 2005)

> Most of the "Church" software out there is not really that good


I noticed.  They charge a lot (sometimes monthly payments) and the quality just isn't there. I use Developer Express components which are high quality, look great, and are widely used.

http://www.devexpress.com/


----------



## wsw201 (Jul 25, 2005)

You usually have three major problems with church software;

1) The person responsible for the books is not an accountant and does not know fund accounting!
2) A church will try and go cheap and use software that can't really be used by a non-profit company.
3) The software is too complex and inclusive that no one can figure it out.

These are only a few of the problems with number 1 being the problem with the staff not being accountants.

If you can come up with something for small churches that have limited resources and doesn't take an accountant to use, you will be on to something.


----------



## rgrove (Jul 25, 2005)

Thank you very much for the feedback. I've thought about the fund accounting aspect a lot actually. This is an extremely difficult area as you noted. I do own the code to a regular accounting application and a couple years ago looked at it to see how hard it would be to make it fund accounting capable. Very hard to do actually.  That's compounded by my personal accounting limitations (Greek to me...). I figure I'll start out without accounting and be looking at that closely and seeing what people need/want as it gets good enough to use. The accounting aspect needs to be done right if it's done so I'm inclined to take time with it. The rest shouldn't be too hard to implement. Pretty basic programming for non-accounting aspects of Church Managment.


----------

