Church Donation Software 4 Key Elements.

When churches are looking for church donation software, they should make a list of the specific functionality they want immediately. Additionally, what needs exist in the next 5-10 years for the church donation software? Smaller organizations and church plants may not be ready for online donations however; the availability of this option later is crucial.

Entry of Data – Technology has helped contribution entry in various ways to get data into church donation software. Church donation software should include manual data entry, data file upload, and the ability to update donors records for online and EFT donations seamlessly. Additionally, mistakes happen and contribution corrections should be easy to make. The process should allow you to modify the giving date, fund assignment, check/cash tracking, comments, amount, or remove the transaction completely. Integration into the church accounting module from contributions removes additional key entry mistakes and time for double entering during posting.

Pledging – Pledge tracking by fund(s) is an important way for the church to know how much can they expect to come into the organization. Pledging can tell churches when people are falling behind throughout the year. It can also advise overall how much donations are ahead or short of the total pledge for the year. Pledging on multiple year funds with various donor commitment date ranges is essential.

IRS Statements – Entering data is useless if the system cannot provide an IRS statement for donors. Churches should be able to print or email statements, with the later saving on postage. Other options on statements include the pledge amount, church logo, different formatting styles, a personal message and comments. Criteria for producing the statement can vary such as: status codes, date range, sort options, funds to include, people that have given, non givers, people that have pledged but have not given, etc.

Tax Type Categories – Tax Exempt, Taxable or IRA, should categorize all the funds to allow removal of certain fund during IRS statement preparation. The organization should be able to add or change the fund names at any time but still maintain the category. A taxable fund example is money collected for coffee or donuts on a Sunday. A tax-exempt fund is money given with no return of good or services and donors expect a donation statement. Additionally, the IRA contribution is when someone donates his or her IRA proceeds to the organization.

Church donation software is an important aspect to any church and should have the most streamlined processes in place. It should also include some of the basic concepts above for starters and additional features like a link to an acceptable fund accounting package. Additional features include transferring monies from one envelope to another, ability to change envelope numbers, print deposit slips, and create reoccurring batches. Icon Systems’ IconCMO can help churches with this process and we look forward to hearing any comments you may have on this topic.

It is Here – The First Android Church Software

Icon Systems has released the first, completely functioning church software that includes membership, contributions, fund accounting, payroll, small groups, attendance, and gifts on the Android Operating System for the tablet market. We felt it important to release the full system for the tablet market and not just a “lite” or “slimmed” down version that only shows only demographic information. Why did we decide to do this for our clients? The iPad with 15 million sold in 11 months is the fastest selling technology hardware device in history – EVER. We believe tablets (Androids, iPads, etc.) will eventually replace the laptop for majority of the population. Secondly, the mobile devices adheres to our motto of Anytime, Anywhere access.

Laptops only were able to get people partially the way to being completely mobile. The tablets will take the user the rest of the way. After we released the iPad version of IconCMO on Aug. 3rd, we received a call on Aug. 17th from Steve Hewitt of CCMag about doing a cover story on mobile computing.

At the time of this writing the Android version of the IconCMO is in Beta testing and getting ready to be put out to our clients! Many people will ask why did we decide to quickly turn and do this for the Android market? There are two reasons. First, Steve mentioned a survey where majority of church leaders and staff prefer the Android tablet over the iPad for its Flash capabilities instead of the iPad. This market trend is different than the rest of the population that uses the iPad. Secondly, companies say they are the leaders in church management software with innovations but most come up short because of the technology they use is outdated for the current technology era.

When technology that is used allows you to release a full Church Management Software (ChMS) solution on an Android tablet in weeks not months or years – this shows innovation, the right technology in the right era, speed of development, agility of management, and the true leaders of the church software industry – Icon Systems. Please read the full article about mobile computing that was published in CCMag. Tell us what you think.