Church Windows Reviews

It has all the features we need to do things from tracking giving, maintaining membership records, and organizing volunteers. It's great because we do not neeed a subscription.

We have never had any problems with using it. The only improvement it could use is a facelift as the user interface has dated graphics, but that's minor because we have volunteers in their 70s who use it comfortably.

We use church windows to track giving for tax purposes. Maintain membership records. We also use it to help in organizing church volunteers. It is much more efficient than using a spreadsheet or the old pen and paper route we used in the past.

Ease of use. Does everything I need in one package--accounting, contributions and membership.

All modules do not work exactly the same way. Updates are needed on the accounting module.

Tracking membership, preparing financial statements, recording contributions

I like the entire setup for entering new member information, donations, & accounting.

I don't dislike anything about Church Windows at this moment!

Donation Installations

How well outlined things are in Church Windows

Great software which can be used for both accounting software and directory. You can store names, addresses, as well as photos you can print detailed list of donations for parishner. Easy to set-up and provides excellent customer service. I also like the quick tasks option.

Always run into problems when updating to the newest version of church plus having to reconnect the links.

They should try the product

Started using church plus for accounting purposes and realize it was great storing addresses of our church members and photos.

It is a centralized place to store all information about parishioners

Its email software sends emails one at a time which can be cumbersome when emailing a large group of people.

I would think about a cloud based software.

Communications and Finance

This software does provide everything needed to track members attendance and donations. But it can be a little clunky on the back end and requires a lot of education for new staff. It is not intuitive.

I wish this were a more "user friendly" program so that we could authorize more staff to make edits and use the software. As it is now, we need to have one or two people who are designated to make edits because of the multitude of little database specifics involved.

I would recommend shopping around unless you are a very small church in need of cheap software. You will spend more time with this software as your organization grows, and their are more user-friendly programs out there.

This does track our members and donations just fine! I wish that it were easier to use

Once you understand the system it is easy to maneuver. There IT department is great with handling any questions you may have. You can also find many videos on their sight to help you do your own troubleshooting.

It takes time to learn the system and can be hard for people who are not computer savvy.

Has all the software a small church needs in one place.

the search feature for finding a member/visitor

Data mining processes are not intuitive. It's difficult to remember all the steps I took to achieve the report I was hoping for. And then when I try again next time, I can't remember. "how did I do that last time?" VERY frustrating. I've worked with IRL sales data, and while the information and analytics of that are more complicated, the process to get to the data was so simple. I also don't understand why things don't autopopulate. Examle: when a church member dies, I must mark them "dead" in three different places. It would be much easier to mark it in one place and the software do the rest. Another hitch in the success of Church Windows at our office is that it resides on our "cloud", VOS ... Virtual Office Systems. As a result, it is super slow. Although we were told they work together, Church Windows runs MUCH faster outside of VOS.

I'm not sure if there is anything better. I recommend using it from your harddrive rather than via cloud. At least, don't use it if you currently use VOS!

this is where we keep all of our membership data. Benefits--some reports aren't difficult to pull, so I guess that's a benefit.

I like the fact that Church Windows provides a place where all the church records and trends can be kept together, which makes it easy to search for specific things, like attendance within past year for the purposes of voting privledge.

I don't like how the interface is rather complicated. I have managed it but my staff have difficulties as they haven't grown up in the computer age. It's very difficult for them to navigate this software, which requires more work on my end.

I would recommend it, but only to people who know computers and understand basic operating systems. It's not a difficult system once you get the hang of it, but if you don't understand computer basics, it's not for you.

Organization. In churches, organization is a huge obstacle. Using this program has helped eliminate some of the frustrations surrounding the loss of information.

Phone support, as they call back promptly.

I am required to use this program. This is one of the most convoluted, non-user friendly, tiresome, irritating, program I have ever had t o use. I have worked both in the private industry and the US government using a lot of different software. Example, if you or a past employee enters a "visitor" to your church, it will stay in the system FOREVER; there is not way to ever delete a name and address. Our church is in a high tourist area..names added in 1998 for one summer can never be deleted. Next, different sections for Member and Visitors...if you are seeking information on one name you have to go in and out of two different screens and sections of the program to verify and/or to find them!. Okey, now let's go to donations. If a past employee went crazy entering different donation codes....good luck attempting to make it more usable. You will be required to wade thru outdated no longer used codes moving them around in order to record a $5.00 donation. At year end good luck with the donation letters. If you accidently use the wrong setup, one family may have a document a big as our town's phonebook! I use Church Windows because I have tol

With past experience choosing, purchasing, and creating a membership database, I would suggest there are several very good programs that are easier to use, both in membership and donations, a good software package for a non-profit does not have to have the word "church" in its name. Church Windows is attempting to update their program; I have great hopes it will be completed before my retirement!

Membership and donaiton entry