Jeff at Powerchurch has asked that as I go through this experience, to jot down some of my experiences and any lessons learned, so here goes.
1. Do try to collect as many of the 'membership lists' floating around the various ministry committees, if they're in 'soft copy' it will make it much easier.
This will allow you to go through them, find the names/addresses that are the same across lists, mark those that are different on the lists, and highlight those that may appear on only one list for further research.
2. Once you're satisfied that you have a good set of collected names & addresses (hopefully grouped into the correct family groupings) start entering them into Membership using the Add Member wizard. The new wizard in v11.x is a great help when doing this over the older version in 10.4.
3. Once done, and if your church has an 'official' church register (in the PC(USA) its called the "red book") use that and go through the data in Powerchurch to see how they match. You're going to find out that there are names listed on the paper lists as members that are not officially members in the register, and names in the register that are not on any of the lists you gathered.
This happened quite a few times today as I went through the official source document. I had to remove the member profile status from a few people, add it to a few, and just enter names from the official register without addresses to the system in order to have them in sync.
Turns out that the church has more people on the 'official' list then they thought, but of those about 30 have no addresses and the long time church secretary has no memory of the last time they were seen.
The last thing I did with Membership as of right now, was add the envelope numbers as are currently listed on the paper tally sheets the secretary uses for each giving unit.
Of course that only covered about 2/3rds of the names in the system, so I added envelope numbers to those members that did not have them. They may not get a box of envelopes, but we'll be able to track if they give anything. These numbers are outside the currently used range of 1 to 150, I started them at 200.
I've developed my envelope ranges with a method to the madness:
1 thru 998 - normal membership range with subranges:
1 thru 150 - currently giving members
200 thru 998 - those that are listed as members but who have not given to the point where the secretary thought about sending a box of envelopes.
Obviously, if the church grows beyond the 150 number, the last range can be adjusted.
999 - is for Lucy Cash .. that loose plate offerings you get from the visitors, or the member who forgot to write a check, and doesn't realize what the pew envelope is for.
1000 thru 1999 - visitors and friends of the congregation. You want to track their giving for a number of reasons.
Obviously, the 1st thing is that if they give over a certain amount (I believe its $100) you want to send them a statement so they can claim a deduction if they can. The other reason is that if they are turning out to be regular attendees and givers as a visitor, you can then have the ladies of the membership committee talk to them about becoming a regular member.
2000 thru 2999 - archives. This is the number range where you move the contribution records of members who have moved or have passed on. The IRS says you have to maintain this data for at least 4 years, moving this stuff here allows you to have it readily available without having to search for a backup you may no longer have.
Next week ... designing a Chart of Accounts from scratch.
