New to PowerChurch need help with Activities & Skills

[Suzi Davis]

Hi, my name is Suzi. I am using PowerChurch 10.4 with Windows XP. Everything was going fine until I got to the part about Activities and Skills, and also the codes for Personal Profiles. If someone could please help me make sense of these and give me some tips I would be greatly appreciative. I have worked with several accounting programs, but I have never had to set one up on my own. All I am accomplishing right now is getting very frustrated. Can someone please help?

[Zorak]

We may be able to give a better and more thorough response if you can include some information as to what it is you need to accomplish.

What groups do you need to set up, what do you want to use this functionality in the program for, etc.

[NeilZ]

This thread may help you out with activity and skills:

http://www.powerchurch.com/forum/viewto ... f=2&t=2903

Also, what questions do you have about personal profiles?

[Suzi Davis]

First, We are a small church, but growing, in the western part of Oklahoma. We have 28 actual members, and have been running from 35 - 50 in attendance each Sunday. We don't send out any mailings, or form letters; I might need a list of members once in a while. I will also need to track tithing, donations, offerings and such. Tell me how important the Activities & Skills is to a small church. The threads that you gave me before have been helpful. Right now we only have an Adult Sunday School class, 2 childrens SS classes ages 2-4 and 5-7; and a youth group, ages 10 - 14. We have several committees ( Building maintance, Lawn care, Door greeters, Flowers and Cards, etc) and I'm sure will see the need for more groups as we continue growing. Do I need to have a role, dept., and type assigned to each Activity and each person? I truly hope I'm not making this harder than it actually is. I usually grasp things very quickly, but for some reason this part seems to be eluding me. If there was any way I could see one already set up I could take it and run. Again thanks for all your help

Suzi Davis

[Zorak]

The Activities & Skills module has the ability to be very complicated *if you need it to be*.

You can probably count on skipping the Department and Type codes. For a small handful of activities, you wouldn't need them. If you will be recording attendance in the program, you would want to at least set up the worship services as activities. For a little more detail, you can track attendance or do correspondence for each of the Sunday School classes.

For the most part, things that you won't be recording attendance for, would not need activities defined, unless you want to be able to refer to the group of people at a later time, for sending e-mail or printing labels.

Recording Contributions will not have any interaction with the Activities & Skills at all.

I think it's best to start simple. It will be much easier to find what features you need after using it for a while, rather than trying to take it all in at once before getting started.

[Suzi Davis]

Thank you very much. You just made my life easier. Hopefully I can get this set up now. I really like this software. It's one of the best ones I've seen. Thanks again.