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church managment software

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techidave:
Our church is looking to purchase some management software to track attendance, offerings, etc.  we are small so there is not a lot of funds available to use.

Does anyone here have any experience using one like Church Windows here

Or even a template for a spreadsheet that would track contributions made and give you yearly totals and a nice report.

Dave

Edvard:
I know a lot of churches have been using Fellowship One, no idea how much it costs.
For a small church, I would also recommend one of the many open source solutions that have cropped up in recent times.
ChurchInfo is a nice full-featured project forked from InfoCentral after they decided to abandon PHP and re-tool with Java (they are still re-tooling).
ChurchLedger goes another step in that they bundle an open source software package with domain hosting.

I've seen a few projects started here and there for other purposes like church social networking and website CMS aimed specifically at churches, but these are the fullest feature-wise.
I'll put out some radar and see if I can't pick up more...

Edvard:
I've been recommended to look beyond church-focused projects and look at CRM software.
SugarCRM comes highly recommended, and there is also the free (both ways) vTiger which implements SugarCRM's open source engine.

techidave:
Thanks Edvard, I have been looking at your checking out those sites.  Web based is out for us as we have no internet at the church currently.  We only have 50 or so active members so spending lots of money (like $500) is out for us.

I will continue to look at if you find other stuff, please post back.

40hz:
Sourceforge is showing 94 hits on "church" Take a peek here.

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=church

Don't know if you need so-called "pastoral functions" in the app, but if you don't, another thing you might want to take a look at is software that falls under the heading of "club" or "membership" software. These are good for tracking memberships, dues, issuing newsletters, etc.


Also, don't automatically rule out web-based apps, because you can 'easily' set up your own inexpensive webserver and run such applications from that. Most times it can even be done on the same machine, so you won't need two computers.

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