church managment software

[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.

[nogojoe]

Came across this site which may suit you its free up to 100 members and you get the full version seems like what you want

www.churchtrac.com

nogojoe

[Stoic Joker]

www.PowerChurch.com seems to be popular with some of the churches in this area. I haven't had to deal with it much (which is a good thing), other than upgrading a client to a new version. From what I've seen it's fairly straight forward, quite stable, easy to use, and given I don't recall anyone saying they wish it had X...feature rich.

[techidave]

So far Churchtrac seems to be the best in my opinion but have only glanced at the websites mentioned.  It looks like it will be a bit before I can look at them in depth.

thanks to all who posted!

[Renegade]

I know a lot of churches have been using Fellowship One, no idea how much it costs.
...

With most packages where there is no price, they're usually pretty expensive. Somewhere around mortgage/sell your soul. But at that rate, they wouldn't have many customers in their niche now, would they? I suppose it's a bit cheaper then.


[Sorry -- couldn't resist that one there.  ]

[mouser]

Maybe starting a new church program would be a good project for NANY 2009.

[Darwin]

Fellowship One Pricing
Monthly pricing, setup and implementation consulting fees vary based on the desired edition and the Typical Worship Attendance (TWA) of the church. The TWA is the average number of adults and children that attended your church's worship services each week over the past 3 months.


A Fellowship Technologies Account Executive will consult with you to determine the edition that best fits the unique needs of your church, ensuring that you only pay for the features you can fully utilize. Please click here to have someone contact you with pricing details and a live demonstration of Fellowship One.

Looks like it should be pretty easy to find out how much it costs, but I tremble at the thought of how much the Basic version (let alone the others) is likely to cost!

[mustangrider]

There are like 27 chruch software programs on http://www.imfreeware.com/[church]/. Not sure if any of them are what you are looking for... This is a freeware site so I'm assumingthey are free......

[techidave]

thanks, I will check it out.

[bassclarinetl2]

http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/

This is the application that my church is implementing.

[drewp6903]

Here's another good choice.  it's a web based application and the pricing can be found in the shopping cart.  They have been around for 5 years +.
www.connectionpower.com/church_software