[CS-FSLUG] Church Management Software

[EnzoAeneas]

ChurchInfo seems to lack some extensibility and also requires a web 
server which we have, but remotely hosted. We do not currently have 
broadband access at the church, and while I could setup a local web 
server, all of our machines are not networked (yet).
I also believe that a more desktop oriented solution would assuage many 
of the fears and concerns our pastor, secretary, and trustees have about 
moving away from their spreadsheets and quicken.

That being said, ChurchInfo does present some goods ideas. Possibly a 
browser-based application run on the local system with the option for 
remote synchronization of specific data to the web. That can be 
generically formatted, or specific to a web -application. Maybe an open 
source reporting framework could be employed to generate the web pages & 
data and then FTP/SFTP/WebDAV could be utilized to deploy to your web 
server.

Let me know what you guys think?

Kevin James

Frank Bax wrote:
> pastor.george at nehemiah-center.org wrote:
>   
>> This is so cool and may the L-rd bless you for your faithfulness to his call!
>>
>> I think it needs to be some type of differential database structure
>> allowing for the inputing of vital information like name, address, phone
>> etc I would probably have several fields that would be user defineable if
>> not all of them since some information may be important to some
>> denominations but not others (Date of baptism comes right to mind but I am
>> sure there are others)
>>
>> Probably you want a spot to put a photograph too
>>
>> We also need a way to track ongoing variables such as tithes, offerings,
>> gifts and attendance.  With an ability to generate a report on an annual
>> basis for tax purposes.
>>
>> An ability to have some kind of pop up reminder to alert over worked
>> pastors and staff to things like Birthdays, anniversaries etc.
>>
>> Probably thats a good place to start I think
>>     
>
>
> InfoCentral does all that except attendance and birthday popups; looks 
> like ChurchInfo (which started from InfoCentral code base) has added a 
> birthday report and an events module which tracks attendance.
>
> http://www.churchdb.org/dokuwiki-2006-03-09/doku.php#using_churchinfo
>
> A birthday popup would require the overworked paster to logon everyday 
> which is not likely to happen.  If you can write a perl script; you can 
> use a cron job to run birthday report and email it to the pastor on 
> predetermined schedule.
>
> Frank
>
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