Software Made Especially for You
Catholic Churches Have Special Needs When it Comes to Managing Membership & Financial Data — and They’re Not Going Unmet

By Lauren Hunter

Most churches aren’t so different from one another. They all have similar needs when it comes to managing membership and financial data with software. Catholic churches, however, have specific needs for information management. They must collect and maintain accurate data on members and manage financial information. Then, they’re required to report this information to their dioceses. Because each parish must report membership and financial data in this manner, there are slightly different requirements for a Catholic church’s management software.

Catholic churches want what every church wants: one integrated software solution that can do everything. Who wants to waste time with multiple programs to handle membership tracking, financial-records management and facilities management? Programs that don’t “speak” to one another or share data can consume huge amounts of time and pose more of a problem than a solution.

By using one vendor for all their information-management needs, church leaders can ensure their records will be kept safe and that their church office operations will be more streamlined and secure.

Look for a software program that enables you to:

• Manage membership and financial data;
• Communicate more effectively with your staff, families, committees, diocese and community;
• Record and observe various church census statistics;
• Produce and distribute necessary year-end tax documentation; and
• Let families manage their own contact information online.

Managing Families. One of the key differences between Protestant churches and Catholic churches is the way in which they track members’ information. Catholic churches track membership by families, not by the individual, so their membership-management software must be tailored accordingly.

Vonnie Schlimgen, coordinator of census and finance for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Scottsdale, Ariz., uses PDS (an ACS Technologies solution for Catholic church data management) to manage her church’s 4,000-plus registered families.

“It’s so easy to go into the family selections and pull up parishioners by the first letter of their last name,” Schlimgen says by way of example. “You can insert whatever fields you need to and save your report, so next time you can pull the same report without having the customize it all over again. Every day, this reporting feature saves us time.”

By using a software program that’s specifically tailored to meet Catholic churches’ needs, leaders can ensure easy access to information and find exactly what they’re looking for by doing a simple lookup within the program.

“It’s wonderful to have the ability to keep track of each family member, their birthdates, sacraments, godparents and more,” says Becky Brookman, church secretary for Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Meadow Lands, Pa. “Once you enter the info into the system, it stays.”

Within each family record, churches can keep track of all members of the family, the classes they attend, sacraments and much more.

Tracking Contributions. At any church, tracking contributions is extremely important. But to Catholic churches, it’s absolutely critical because it needs to be reported to the diocesan office. Programs like PDS offer complete financial-management solutions, and what often excites more churches is the way in which the program is able to track contributions.

For Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal’s Brookman, it used to take nearly two hours each Sunday to sort and record envelopes by number; now it takes just 30 minutes to enter into the PDS program.

“I just have to enter the envelope number and amount,” she says. “They don’t even have to be sorted.”

Holy Family Catholic Church in Brentwood, Tenn., uses software every day to track incoming contributions and pledges. Office Manager Pam Comeaux keys in the contributions and pledges as the church receives them, and she uses the church software’s built-in reports feature to furnish data for the stewardship director. “Every time our stewardship director has a meeting, he asks me for a contributions report,” Comeaux says. “With our software program, it’s very simple and straightforward.”

Holy Family tracks three main funds: 1) annual pledges to the diocese, 2) annual pledges to the parish, and 3) ongoing capital-campaign pledges.

Because the data was organized efficiently in its software program, Sanford Comeaux, chairperson of the parish finance committee, was able to provide the board with historical contribution data that was instrumental in planning for the church’s future.

“I was able to help out a great deal with the fund-raising campaigns by providing historical contribution data,” he says. “We’ve been able to use this information very effectively.”

Holy Family also uses a software program for creating customized reports. It integrates with the membership and financial software to produce detailed, customized reports on any information needed.

“With the different levels of reports available within our software program — and the ability to filter information — I’m going to make 25 less visits a year to the parish to get them a piece of financial data they need,” notes Sanford Comeaux. “Now the office staff is going to be able to pull up data themselves to provide reports for the diocese.”

Pam Comeaux says she finds that generating reports from within PDS helps her easily provide detailed information for the diocesan annual census, for Rome, and for the Catholic directory. Having the ability to generate reports on the number of first communions, deaths, marriages, baptisms and more is invaluable to the church, she says.

Automating Parishes. Although it’s extremely valuable for each church to use a software program that provides many of the tools discussed in this article, it can be even more beneficial for a diocese to choose one program and disseminate it to each of its parishes. This way, everyone is using the same platform and can communicate with one another easily and effectively.

Ministering to more than 200,000 Catholics in 66,000 different households, the Archdiocese of Louisville, Ky., actively supports each of its 125 parishes in doing just that.

“The biggest thing we experience as a day-to-day benefit is that we now have a common software system where all the information is available in one place and all of the data is linked,” says Phylliss Wilkins, controller for the Archdiocese.

“This is particularly helpful when it comes to developing our chart of accounts.

‘We’re also able to issue reports to the Archbishop and our archdiocesan finance council and have that information broken down by parish, region and the Archdiocese as a whole,” she adds.

Because most of the parishes in the Archdiocese of Louisville are using the same software solution, it makes reporting easy for each parish. And collecting information from each parish is a breeze for the Archdiocese.

Additionally, by using the Data-share component to their management software, the Archdiocese is able to automate the way it gathers census and financial information using an online network between the parishes and the main office.

Accurate Monitoring. For the Diocese of Buffalo, N.Y., keeping track of information is easier with the help of a comprehensive software solution for both the diocese office and the majority of the 275 parishes it serves.

One example of how the Diocese of Buffalo uses its management software is in the Catholic Charities mission it monitors. This charity meets the needs of almost 200,000 Western New Yorkers each year. Because the campaign is so large in scope, a small mistake could result in thousands of unaccounted-for dollars. Error, then, is not an option.

“The importance of accuracy in conveying this information is foremost,” says Ray Beaudry, computer software training coordinator for the diocese. To help parishes bring this to fruition, the diocesan IT department developed a disc update system designed to export data from its parish databases to the diocesan network.

“Having a robust software system in place makes this process so much more efficient,” Beaudry says. “This is one of the main reasons that having all of our parishes use the same software program is a real benefit.”

Additionally, parishes are required to report births, deaths and other pertinent information. Because the Diocese of Buffalo covers more than 6,455 square miles and has a Catholic population of 703,000, keeping track of the parishioner information would be a monumental job at best. Using the census/contribution feature within their software, PDS can convert all the parishes’ existing family, member and contribution data in an instant.

As you can see, there are many ways Catholic parishes and dioceses can benefit from using an integrated church-management software solution across the board. Huge amounts of time can be saved, errors can be avoided, data records can be kept more up-to-date, and reporting can be done with ease.

Lauren Hunter is a trade writer and public-relations consultant specializing in the faith-based and non-profit technology markets. She currently consults to ACS Technologies as public relations manager. ACS Technologies serves more than 20,000 churches, schools and other faith-based organizations with its award-winning software solutions. For more information on ACS, visit www.acstechnologies.com or e-mail lauren@laurenhunter.net. To find out more about how software solutions can benefit your church, visit www.parishdatainc.com.