Church Software

When faith-based organizations need to organize the information accumulated by the different churches in their ministries, whether in the USA or international, they require robust software that can handle the basic functions of the organization, but that are also robust enough to handle the numerous demands of large constituencies.

The General Council of the Assemblies of God has endorsed ACS Technologies as one software provider able to tackle the organization of data created by the over 25 million members world-wide and the 3 million members in the United States.

ACS Technologies, a software provider of over 20 years, works with their clients on-site to study their needs and anticipate them. ACS is then able to customize their products in a way that makes them highly useable and easily adapted to the needs of the client. Their continued support makes their products extremely user friendly and time saving. The following list glosses some of products available from ACS Technologies.

People Suite is church management software capable of handling people (the members, ministers), contributions, special mailings, reservations, and organizations. Financial Suite accommodates the financial reports required by today's non-profit organizations.

Growth Products are different programs created to schedule ministries and design the different reports needed by the assemblies. Extend Platform is a group of web products to help with the integration and up-dating of the web sites used by the different churches and councils.

Still other Assembly of God Churches have chosen Blackbaud to meet their needs. Blackbaud is a market leader in accounting software and has modules available for other functions need by churches and academic institutions. The required FASB Statement No 17 and GASB reports are built into the software for ease of reporting. However, the program is somewhat difficult to use and not very intuitive.

Mark Christianson of the General Council of the Assemblies of God recommends Standard Time from Scoutwest to record billable and non-billable time of project/task activities. The program interfaces well with PCs, (Dell) Axim, PDAs and Palms OS. Through the use of this software, project directors and other administrators are able to estimate future projects and to calculate costs more accurately.

When choosing any software, the first consideration must be the needs of the assembly. Once the necessities have been determined, then other considerations such as price and cost should be taken into account. With the release of Windows Vista, compatibility of the software should be taken into account by the purchaser, as this market leader continues to be the benchmark of software programs.

Software providers will undoubtedly hold off on new up-dates of their products until the bugs have been worked out of Windows Vista. Nevertheless, it is important to ask when these up-dates are expected.