Up to now, my posts about ACS have been focusing on the areas of the software that we love. This is not an effort to please the people of ACS; it’s an honest feeling that we are completely happy with most aspects of the software. Well last week, we found the first thing that I HATE about ACS. I know it’s a strong word, but it fits in this situation.

Last week, we finally got around to sending out our first quarter contribution statements. We had never performed this task through ACS. We didn’t anticipate any problems, but that is exactly what we found.

Our needs with contribution statements are pretty simple:

1. E-mail the statements to those who request it by e-mail
2. Do a bulk sort of the statements not sent via e-mail and mail via presorted standard bulk mail
3. Only include deductible gifts on the statements we send via either method

To us, those are simple needs and requests, but to the software you would think we were asking for the impossible. The problems that we ran into were:

• One report allows you to do a bulk sort but it includes non-deductible gifts a person makes, reflecting inaccurate giving for IRS purposes
• The other report allows you to eliminate non-deductible gifts but does not allow you to do a bulk sort, so mailing the statements costs an extra $100-$150 per quarter.
• The report that will allow for a bulk sort requires pre-printed stationary that ACS happily supplies.  This quarter, if we went with that option, the supplies would have eaten $80 of our $115 savings from doing a bulk mailout.
• E-mailed reports can only go to those people who have been uploaded to AccessACS.  There is no way to attach a PDF to an e-mail and send those statments out.

I will be elaborating on all of these items and why they ticked me off.  Mainly, I think it’s a combination of oversight and shady business.  Forcing people to buy forms when it could easily be printed in house through the reporting process is shady.  When I spoke to one ACS rep on the phone, she said “We have to make money some way.”  Excuse me?  I thought I was paying $300 per month for preferred support?  I thought I paid ten grand for the software in the first place.  Forgive me if that didn’t set right.

I’m piggybacking on Jason Lee’s recent post by the same name. We too use products from ACS Technologies as our ChMS. Like Jason, we consider ourselves ministry partners with ACS. We’re not just customers and they’re not just a vendor. We both seek to better the other, and we love the relationship that we’ve built with them. I’m especially thankful for Dean Lisenby and Rebekah Gibbs going the extra mile for us. I hope that I also can go the extra mile for you.

Facility Management - Jason spoke of their involvement with the Facility Scheduler product, and while it is so far from where I want it to be, I am seeing the great power and potential of the product. On a recent call with Darci Shelly, she said she would be happy to provide us a .NET API for the product as soon as they finish documentation on it. This will allow us to have the ultimate level of customization and integration. Bravo ACS - this is an enormous step in the right direction.

Outlook Integration - I hear good things about the Add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007 (I haven’t used it), but my understanding is that it is not possible to populate CC or BCC with a group of people from an individual Sunday School class through the add-in. That’s the kind of integration that would make users do what they should. I posted my frustration on Twitter yesterday about this: my users won’t use the ChMS to look up an address every time they send an e-mail, nor do they typically pass on new e-mails from congregants. So then, we end up with 50 different databases, all with different information and frustrated congregants who just want their information to be update with the church one time.

Web Services - I love the work (and documentation) that ACS has already done on Web Services for AccessACS. This lets you get at your data and use it how you want. You’re not restrained by the UI. However, I would really REALLY like to see some code examples from PHP or Perl. The truth of the matter is that most Web sites are hosted on Linux/Unix servers now. Most of the good open-source content management systems are written in PHP, and it’d be great to have a base to pull from. While that’s not really ACS’ job, it’d be great to have.

Check-in - There are a TON of changes that we have requested for Checkpoint. It’s good software, but it really is a square-peg to square-hole utility. You use it their way or you don’t use it. In other words, there aren’t a lot of configuration options. So, Rebekah has been way more than gracious to hear our needs and has promised to have a lot of those changes in the new version of the software. This will be good for all clients who use Checkpoint as the changes will allow for more control of the process.

I wouldn’t trade ACS for anything right now. They did make me quite grumpy last week when we discovered some things with contribution statements, but I’ll talk about that later. As always, I am so thankful that ACS cares about the Gospel more than they care about the bottom line, and I’m thankful they care about our ministry to Belton, Texas more than they care about our business.

I posted earlier about our ChMS transition to ACS and some of the joys and frustrations we have experienced in that transition. Today, I wanted to update everyone that all of our major problems have now been resolved, and they’ve escalated some of the lesser problems to Professional Services which should result in those being solved quickly as well.

When we were doing our research for transitioning to a new ChMS, it was difficult to weigh all of the variables. It is easy to be taken in by the sales pitches that Fellowship Technologies and ACS offered us. The Arena sales pitch was pretty pathetic, but they do seem to have a good product working for them.

After wading through issues of features offered, overall price, availability of support, and a proven track record, we selected ACS as our choice in ChMS.

If I had it to do all over again, I would still select ACS as our software provider.  I like their software, and it works well.  However, of so much greater importance, they view themselves as partners in ministry rather than simply a software vendor.  This paradigm goes deep into the fabric of the company, and they’ve proved it by putting their money where their mouth is.  I have no doubt that ACS cares more about empowering churches to fulfill the Great Commission than they do about the bottom line.

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.

As we’re moving forward in switching over to ACS, we’re learning a lot about our data entry disorganization.

1. Member, Prospect, and Misc. Names - Member, in my mind, means a member of the church. I’m pretty sure that’s the standard too. Not here though, it could be a member of choir, or a member of Sunday School, or a number of other things. I want to clean this mess up before we go to new software.
2. Inactive membership - We don’t have any “rule” on when someone is to become inactive. Further, the three people who inactivate people’s membership all do it to their own, very different standards. Hmmmmm.

Does anyone have good, firm guidelines for data entry in your ChMS? Are you willing to share?