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Our church is doing a Capital Campaign, the fund raiser has keep track of everything on Microsoft Access software. Will any of this information be able to be merged with PC. or will have have to reenter all the pledges in PC as well as payments?

nlehrlich wrote:Our church is doing a Capital Campaign, the fund raiser has keep track of everything on Microsoft Access software. Will any of this information be able to be merged with PC. or will have have to reenter all the pledges in PC as well as payments?

One of the reasons we picked PC+ back in 2000 when we evaluated almost every package on the market, was the way you could track pledges.

We were going into a capital campaign and needed to be able to track the pledges and contributions over a three year period.

PC+ did the trick, and we didn't need any other system to monitor the data. You're going to be tracking all the contributions, printing statements, and probably use the accounting functions of PC+.

What I would do first is enter the data in PC+. If this outside fund raiser needs to keep the data for their use, fine, give them the printout of Active Pledges from the program and let them enter it themselves. After all, you're paying them to do this kind of stuff.

You could also enter everything into PowerChurch, and then allow that guy to link the tables in Access using ODBC (he'll need the FoxPro ODBC driver). The contributions tables are pretty straightforward, they all begin with "CO." The only problem he may have is linking to the membership information. The two tables you'd need for that are ME and MA.

MA is family mailing list data, and links to ME, Personal Profiles data, using the mail_no field. ME links to CO through the env_no field.

He can then view that data in Access and do whatever he wants to with it. However, don't allow him to WRITE to the PowerChurch database. That's asking for trouble.

If he's using some pre-built software, and he actually isn't using Access for some custom work, then NeilZ's solution is definitely the way to go.

nlehrlich wrote:Our church is doing a Capital Campaign, the fund raiser has keep track of everything on Microsoft Access software. Will any of this information be able to be merged with PC. or will have have to reenter all the pledges in PC as well as payments?

Guess I have to be the bad guy...who decided that M$ Access will be used?

Did that person volunteer to do the double work of entering everything twice??


Jeff

Everyone thank you for the advice.
The Fundraiser uses MS word as their program. The Campaign Secretary inputs data as the campaign is held. The answer I'm getting is I will be putting the data into PC when the Campaign is over.
I know there will be questions as I go along, so I really am glad that PC has such a great technical staff, and I will be using the forum.

nlehrlich wrote:Everyone thank you for the advice.
The Fundraiser uses MS word as their program. The Campaign Secretary inputs data as the campaign is held. The answer I'm getting is I will be putting the data into PC when the Campaign is over.
I know there will be questions as I go along, so I really am glad that PC has such a great technical staff, and I will be using the forum.

The question I would be asking is, does the Fundraiser software do anything that PC+ isn't setup to do ... if it doesn't, why do a double entry ... after all, who gets the Access database after the campaign is over ?? Is the database kept with the church ?? If not, I'd have privacy concerns.