Many churches use specialized software systems the assist the church in organizing financial data and people data. These Church Management Systems (ChMS) have been around for many years. New ones come along regularly, but only a few take hold.
The more traditional systems handle tasks in both the "back office" and in the "front lines" of ministry. However, they primarily do this through surrogates (the church secretary gets information for the pastor). Both back-office and ministry task are handled by the suite of applications that make up the system. They store both types of data in the same database.
My church uses Shelby v5 for both Financials and People at this time. The reasons are simple. The data is stored in an Microsoft SQL Server and the price is right.
This week I was asked once again for my thoughts in regard to a choice churches face when looking at new Church Management Systems (ChMS). Their question is about divorcing the financial and people data. Letting the back office do it's thing in one system and the ministry team do their thing in another.
This question presupposes they are in some way unhappy with their current system. They are probably MORE unhappy with one side over the other. Alternatively, they may simply have found a "killer tool" they like for managing one side and it doesn't do the other side.
When I answer this question I begin from the premise that if one tool did everything really well that would certainly be best since it would mean:
- One vendor to work with
- One system to train on
- One set of software requirements and issues
- Some level of interactivity between Finances and People data and tasks
- One user model with only one account per team member
However, the next thing I always say is:
How good is the integration between Finances and People in your current system?
- Usually I see some synergy at the point of contacts (people) and user accounts that are needed in both financial areas like payroll and accounts payable. Those same people are needed in the ministry side as they attend the church.
- Usually I see some synergy between Contributions and General Ledger as it becomes easier to transmit data as a journal entry to the GL. The same might be said of event payments.
I would argue that as important as these two things are, I don't think they are enough reason to limp along in one area or the other if your needs aren't being met.
In particular, I feel strongly that your financial data needs to be in a tool that can handle your size and complexity. Very large, mega-churches may find that the financial side is cumbersome if they have more than 7 or 8 people working at a time. They may find the reporting tools unacceptable. They may also find that the tools needed to manage a high volume of transactions are simply not there. Smaller churches may find something simple like Quickbooks is much more affordable, easily maintained. They may have several lay people familiar with Quickbooks whereas another system may represent a higher learning curve.
On the people side, I believe the software you use should be something a trusted lay person can safely engage without much training. I feel it should transparently reflect your ministry structure. This would include campuses, ministries, programs, groups, and events. More importantly, the people side of things should have a very strong focus on communications.
At the end of the day, the people side of information management in a church often boils down to being able to track what you need to track, communicate well, check people into events, and process contributions. It also needs to promote collaboration between paid and unpaid members of the church's ministry teams.
There are many other things that matter, but those things are fundamental. As a church grows, it may find that it is struggling in several of these key areas. The bottom line, split the two if you must to grow and include more people in the process!
It would be harder for me to take this position if anyone had acheived proper integration between these two areas. Integration between financial and people data should extend beyond shared addresses and names. It should go farther than transmission of journal entries.
Our churches are organized into ministries. Multi-site churches are organized further into campuses. The integration between financial data and people data should happen at this point. The ministry structure of the church should be reflected once. All information of both types should be related to that structure directly or indirectly. This sort of integration would have a huge value and it would make the proposition of splitting the two areas of information management much more complex. The value we might lose would be far more evident to me if I could look at one place and answer the questions:
- How are my ministries doing?
- How are my campuses (sites) doing?
- And by extension, how is my church doing?
Traditional Church Management Systems fall short at the fundamental point of properly reflecting our ministry structure in a single, central location.
It would be nice to find a commercially available system that did finances, facilities, events, people, and communications so well that nothing else would be needed. Until then, the belief that we simply must keep our finances and our people software in the same place has to take a back seat to getting ministry done with the ministers we have engaged as much as possible.