Special Church Management Software Issue of Christian Computing Magazine!

Icon Systems recently had the honor of contributing to another Christian Computing Magazine cover story – you can read the full article here. The 2011 Church Management Software (ChMS) Overview is put together by the magazine’s various ChMS company sponsors. It is an excellent resource for organizations on the market – whether they are purchasing church management software for the first time or simply looking for a better fit.

Make sure to check it out for sure if you participated in our customer feedback survey last month – we included many of your comments! (In case you were wondering – yes, getting quoted in a magazine cover story gives you bragging rights for at least a year so by all means feel free to shamelessly forward the article to everyone in your contact list!)

Unfortunately due to word count restrictions, we could not include all of your fabulous testimonials, but we would sincerely like to thank each person who responded to the survey; every single one of the numerous endorsements and suggestions we received help us continue to deliver affordable, complete church management software solutions to churches everywhere.

Using IconCMO+ as Denominational Software

Many denominations require individual churches to report specific information to a regional or national office.

The head offices need the ability to generate member, contribution, and accounting reports for each individual church as well as the entire organization. The headquarters for the denomination are interested in the statistical tracking of the membership and financial health of the organization. Compiling information across the entire denomination can be tricky. For example, each church may have its own set of contribution funds or campaigns. The reporting for the district office itself is also different from that of a regular church; since the main office does not typically hold worship services, it has no need to track attendance.

IconCMO+ includes denomination-specific features for congregational reporting. Denominations can pull data from their churches like membership status and special date totals (e.g. births, baptisms, marriages). Using IconCMO under the IconCMO+ platform, each church can send a more detailed report to the denominational office that lists ethnic origin, member transfers, lost members, and attendance totals.

The IconCMO+ platform was developed by Icon Systems in 2006 to meet the unique needs of regional and national denominational church offices.

Using a cloud-based church management system gives denominational offices the ability to instantly communicate across the organization. All of the information is updated in real time so church leaders always have access to up-to-date figures. This denominational software package includes a fund accounting system to ensure each church complies with guidelines set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

The easy-to-understand reports, graphs, and charts offered by IconCMO+ help denominational offices make informed decisions, ensuring the district is run as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Here are just a few ways you can put this denominational software solution to use:

• Track and forecast revenues and expenses
• View a snapshot of the organization’s overall financial health
• Create a visual representation of weekly giving averages
• Monitor attendance for individual churches as well as the entire district
• Assess statistical information for both active members and visitors
• Find out the number of new marriages, baptisms, confirmations, etc.
• How well are certain mission campaigns doing

IconCMO+ also accommodates the specific needs of multi-site organizations, church plants, sister churches, and even mergers.

Hardware Update for IconCMO

As many of our clients know it has been a busy time for IconCMO in the recent weeks with the software enhancements like Excel exporting for reports, accounts receivables, calendar enhancements, payroll checks, email history and contribution statements.

Now it is time for a hardware update. A few months ago we placed a new database server into the hardware architecture as a secondary server to the primary database server to ensure it would work properly for our clients. The new hardware has shown great reliability and speed.  This week the new server will become the primary database server to the benefit of all of our IconCMO clientele. This change will help with an increase of certain operations on the system. For example saving records, pulling data for reports, etc should be faster and limited only by the user’s Internet speed.

When a church elects to use IconCMO over the typical desktop system these hardware improvements are costs that are covered in the price of IconCMO. The non-profit organization does not have to bear this hardware cost in their yearly budget for replacement or the maintenance. Rest assured that Icon Systems uses top quality servers  and replaces them frequently to provide our clients with the best possible church software experience available today with IconCMO!

SaaS Software for Church Management

First we should start with a definition of SaaS which was given by Wikipedia. ” is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.” Please see our updated definition!