A Church Management Software Story
When people are called to serve the Lord and share the Gospel, it may seem like a simple, straightforward calling. But when it comes to running a church or ministry, it can be anything but easy.
In fact, managing a church can be about the most complicated business you can imagine. Even the smallest churches will have to look after the physical structures they own, manage numerous groups — from Sunday schools to Bible studies, and, inevitably, they will have to track and manage their finances.
When churches get bigger, the complications get bigger too. Do regular events mean volunteer management? Are there staff that need to be paid? Or church vehicles to look after? The church might even be running its own sub-ministries, like a nursery or Christian school, and need to manage background checks as well as tuition, payroll and taxes.
And all of this is in addition to the spiritual work of the church and its pastor. Regular services need to be managed, tracking things like the sermons and music. Life events like baptisms, weddings, and funerals have to be scheduled. The church will want to have knowledge about their congregation and will need to be able to communicate with them, especially those that cannot physically attend services. The pastor might want to track the outreach work to individuals and groups or have a way of welcoming new arrivals to the neighborhood or getting in touch with people they haven’t seen for a while.
That simple mission of sharing the teachings of Christ isn’t easy, and the more successful a church is, the more complicated it gets.
ChurchPro was created with a single aim: to provide church management software with the most features, at the most affordable price, so churches can focus on building the Kingdom of God. And it was started by a pastor as a practical way to overcome the challenges he faced.
Dennis Keen, as well as being a pastor, had an interest and skill in computing. ChurchPro began when he realized that he could use a computer to manage his youth work and mailing lists. As time passed, and his work flourished, he kept adding functions to help him manage his ministry.
By 1994 he started selling the software as ‘Complete Church Manager’. After expanding the sales through the internet, the software developed into ChurchPro and is now used by thousands of churches. The pastors, staff, and volunteers for ministries in Maryland, across the country and around the world use it every day to help them manage every aspect of their church and its community’s life.
But although ChurchPro might have developed far beyond the first system Dennis developed, its founding premise remains the same. The software exists to improve the work of churches and give more time for people and ministry work. It’s developed and designed by people who truly understand the challenges of church management and accounting, because they are the problems they faced too.
ChurchPro’s success is because it does the work it needs to do, not the work that a software engineer thinks it might need to do! “It does exactly what a church needs,” is one reviewer’s conclusion.
And it does it for another essential reason, so the costs are kept as low as possible so as many churches as possible can benefit. In the last thirteen years, the price has only increased by $100, despite all the functions that have been added in that time.
This means that a small church can benefit from ChurchPro just as much as a big church, and be safe in the knowledge that it already contains all the components it will ever need as the church or ministry grows.
ChurchPro is designed to be a single application for all your needs. It has a rich feature set that means you’ll never find yourself exporting data to Excel, or mail-merging letters in Word (although it’s also sophisticated enough that you can if you want), but instead takes care of everything you need within the software itself.
Building the Kingdom is at ChurchPro’s heart, so you can use ChurchPro to schedule and manage all the services and events that are taking place in and around your church, create printable calendars or exports for use elsewhere. It can manage things like attendance, whether it’s at schools, groups, or even the whole church. You can even use it to create self-check-in points, so attendees can use touch screens to check in and out. And it can maintain a database of all your church’s members and other key people, so you can track their contact details and information about them, ensuring that you can always find the important facts and stay in touch.
ChurchPro can manage every aspect of church finance, helping to track offerings and tithes, as well as the expenditures and staff costs. It comes with a range of reports built in, as well as being able to print account status, actual checks, and tax forms to submit. One church treasurer was overwhelmed before he found ChurchPro. When it took just a couple of hours to do work that took a week before, ChurchPro gave him his life back, and he could only conclude that it performed miracles!
Patsy Burnette of Joshua’s Place wrote, “I have been doing accounting for almost 60 years. Most of that time I did business accounting and bookkeeping. When looking to use accounting software for church accounting, I realized that it had to be specialized software to accommodate contributions, family records, etc.
“I found Church-Pro and have been using it for about 14 years. It does exactly what a church needs and is easy to use. Church-Pro is being constantly updated to make it more user friendly and to address any issues.
“I have checked many other church software Programs but nothing even comes close. I highly recommend this software and guarantee that the support team will help you all the way.”
And if you somehow find something that ChurchPro doesn’t already do, you can use its project and action tracking functions to create your own projects, or even it’s ‘Track Everything’ module, which you can use to, well, track everything.
Most importantly, ChurchPro will help to plan and track your ministry work. Whether it’s keeping a log of your services and sermons, tracking your visits, or using it to promote and support your work through outreach in Maryland and, if your mission takes you, beyond.
People are called to the Church because they want to share the Gospel, not to do the administrative work, however important and essential that may be. ChurchPro is a single, affordable, package that, as one user has said, does everything for the business side of a spiritual center, allowing you to worry less about the paperwork, and spend more time on God’s work.