Glad to hear that you have it running.
Margaret wrote:Neil,
On the issue of Membership and Contributions, our experience with PowerChurch has been less than pleaant. Maybe it is "operator or setup error." When someone new makes a donation, I have to "add a contributor." This automatically adds that information in the Membership database creating a family and personal profit. At the church, we do NOT want our membership database cluttered with these entries. The church office along with the Membership Chair when through the database for attendence tracking and deleted all of the unwanted entries. They have a criteria for when someone is entered into the database and what is tracked.
This is not an operator or setup error, this is the way the program was designed. Membership and Contributions work together using the envelope number to tie in the data entered in the membership area of the database, to the Contributions data. Otherwise you'd have two separate databases with address information which can be a nightmare to keep in sync.
The problem is that the church staff does not understand how the different Mailing List and Personal Profile statuses are used to differentiate the visitor who contributes a check, and the member who contributes. So your member family has a Mailing List status of
Member, and each personal profile is listed as
Member. A visitor would have a Mailing List and Personal Profile status of visitor.
Using this method you have the data you need to send any contributor an end-of-year statement. You also have a way of tracking visitors attending your services using the attendance module in Membership. That is how the system should be used.
We've found (the hardway) that if we attempt to input the Financial Secretary's data, it will overwrite the membership data kept by our Secretary. This is the reason that I intended to set up the contributions on a free-standing laptop. We can then enter the contribution without affecting the information on membership or visitors that we do want to keep. I have to be honest. I inherited this system. The prior Pastor selected it and I'm fairly sure that some of our problems probably relate to how the system was setup and lack of training. But at this point, I'm frankly "done." We intend to continue the software through at least the end of the year. But we're going to look at other systems. I'm not sure what we ultimately find or do. But I don't like having to have 2 separate "systems." Also, our new Pastor has her own ideas of what she expects. She's used to Shelby Church as she came from a mega-church but that system is really much more than we need. Anyway - please keep praying that the software continues to work! And if you've got any idea why Backup and Restore doesn't want to work every time - please let me know!
Thanks,
Margaret
About the backup, I'd make sure that you have the latest update to Powerchurch 10.4 installed on your system released this past July. Not knowing the version 10.4 date you have installed, I can only assume that some of the fixes have not been installed. Also, not knowing what type of media (CD, floppy, USB drive) you're trying to backup to makes any determination of why you're having a backup problem hard to make.
Now some personal thoughts of mine over your church 'chucking it all' and starting over:
Shelby is VERY expensive, and very hardware intensive. Its really more power than you need. However, it still uses the same type of database setup that Powerchurch does, one database that contains all the addresses of visitors and members. So if you have problems now, you'll have problems later.
Using Quickbooks for your accounting was probably done because the person who initially was Treasurer does not understand, or could not setup for double entry funds accounting. Buying Shelby is not going to change this either as Funds Accounting in most church systems, is a double entry accounting. I'm almost certain that Shelby is also a 'cash based' accountancy system.
My wife and I (both software engineers) went through every available church software package back in 1999. We found that Shelby (at that time) was overpriced, and required too much hardware to run. Today, Shelby won't even list their hardware requirements on their website, nor do they list pricing.
Powerchurch, over the past 11 years, has continued to be improved and to incorporate suggestions from its users, and the price has not gone up all that much (considering inflation) since 1999.
I believe that your church is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They have a integrated tool that will do everything they would like it to do, but have never set it up properly to give the types of reports and data that they need.
There is training available via the website, along with on-site training that is available, and probably more cost effective than having to relearn everything all over again.