[CS-FSLUG] Church Management Software

[David Aikema]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Robert W. <robertwo at insightbb.com> wrote:
>  Sorry, my co-workers hate it when I start asking questions like that.
>  "Church management" paints different pictures for different people. For
>  example, I thought of these things...
>
>  * Track donations
>  * Track attendance
>  * Promotional mailings
>  * Worship service scheduling (bulletins, announcements, others?)
>  * Worship service execution (slides, recordings)
>  * Manage ministry/administrative teams
>  * Time tracking for employees
>  * Pay bills
>  * Payroll, taxes, and other accounting goodies

I agree that "church management" paints different pictures for
different people, but also wonder how much of this stuff should be
integrated into a single program.  How much of this is simple enough
to do as mail merging in an office suite?

How much of this really needs to have an application specifically
developed for it, and how much is reinventing the wheel?  eg. event
tracking - there are lots of calendar applications out there
(personally, I also don't care whether or not my pastor remembers my
birthday. -  I'd also prefer if it didn't keep an exact record of my
attendance as that seems a little creepy to me)

On another note: if you're ambiguous about maintaining on a local disk
versus a network server, why not just abstract the database away?
(take QT's database abstraction layer, and plugin SQLite -
http://www.sqlite.org/ -  if setting up the application to use local
storage, and otherwise something like a mysql or postgresql plugin for
network storage).  Incidentally, using QT should also leave you with a
cross-platform code-base (could get out linux, windows, mac builds
fairly readily).

Dave