ChMS Transition is almost finished
Since November, we have been working on transitioning to ACS as our Church Management Software. It has been an interesting journey. For the most part, it has been an excellent experience. ACS is a robust system and fulfills most of our needs. Also, it seems to be easy enough for the average minister to use.
I have never been so busy in my job at the church as I have in the last few months. First it was building consensus that a change was needed, then it was working with the data conversion team to convert our data properly, then it was organizing the cleanup effort on our data, then it was setting policies for database management, then it was staff training, and now it’s wrestling with ACS Support.
I have high praises for the executive staff at ACS who seem to value our ministry more than their profits. In the course of the conversion, they have:
- Created custom utilities to cleanup dirty data coming from Shelby. (Some of the dirty data was our fault and some was from problems from the Shelby v5 software.)
- Connected to run custom SQL statements on our database on a number of occasions
- Purchased overpriced third-party software for us to back up claims they had made in the sales process
- Allowed me to talk directly to product managers of three different products in order to maximize its effectiveness for our ministry
- Consistently taken the initiative to close open tickets by calling me (rather than me having to wait in the phone queue over and over again)
I am thoroughly impressed with the way they operate their company. Now, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream. I have already generated a number of enhancement requests for things that I just think are dumb not to include in the product. Also, there are two major things that aren’t working, haven’t worked, and don’t look promising to begin working soon. Our daily scheduled backups consistently fail, causing me to run a manual backup every night. Support has been very good in checking up with me, but it’s just not working and no one seems to be able to explain it.
Also, I am having major difficulties with the AccessACS Upload software. I have spent hours on the phone with Support, who seems just as baffled as I am with the problem.
We knew, going into this endeavor, that we weren’t going to like the fact that ACS doesn’t use an SQL back end. That has been frustrating on many levels. Namely, there are a number of processes that require that EVERYONE get out of the database in order for the process to run (even CASS’ing addresses - which drives me nuts).
Overall, I am so glad that we’ve made the switch. We’ve been nothing but impressed by the senior brass and the majority of the support techs that we’ve worked with. We’ve been excited because searching for records is SO much easier with ACS than in Shelby. We’ve been happy because our attendance reports are correct in ACS where Shelby often reported negative attendance numbers for classes. We’ve been excited with the ease of posting attendance from Checkpoint (though we HATE the user interface and customizability of Checkpoint - more on that later).
So, no transition is perfect, and no implementation is free from problems, and through it all I gladly say that ACS is the right Church Management Software for us.