Church management Essay

AbstractMy proposal is to provide you with an incorporate Parish perplexity base which will synchronize alone direction processes including attendance re ingredients, church service activities records , fiscal records, membership personal data and so on The need for a customized Integrated Parish do itment Solution for the Church croupenot be over emphasized because the contributeant will be tailored in solving your churchs unique needs. The Integrated Solution would deliver a single database containing data for the divergent softw are modules to be developed. The modules that would be developed are Financial Module-Manage Donations, Search immediate payment Expenses, Manage Offering Types, etc. Church Activity Module-Would provide the functionality of Searching Past Activities, recent Church Activity, Testimonies, New testimony, Manage Activity Types etc. social station and People solicitude Module Would provide the functionality of Searching for Parish members , new members, constituentship by Type, New Converts, Search for First-Timers, etc. Groups and Department Module Would Manage Groups, Manage Departments Activities, etc.Report Module-would give Attendance report, Financial Report, Membership Detail Report,etc. We are aware that your congregation members are your most worth(predicate) assets and aim to ensure that you are able to provide them with that personal and intimate interest required for deep commitment and loyalty on the part of the parishioners. Our solution aims to aid the church in the following areasMembership Personal Information ManagementChurch performance analysis and ReportingEasy Access to alone Information about Every IndividualReducing Membership OutflowBuilding Enduring Personal relationship with the Members Solve either Record safekeeping IssuesManage All Financial RecordsVisual and Graphical Illustration of the Church Performance Per Time High Security and Back Up Strategy efficacious Follow-up ashes for new Converts and First -timers We propose to deploy a robust Integrated Church management Solution.This solution will focus to begin with on integrating all key Church management processes and will result in ultimate member satisfaction with your services by providing a fast and efficient membership follow-up strategy. This is why our Integrated Parish Management Solution is designed to assist you to effectively harness information about your Members, Ministers, actors, all Department and Group in the church, and other resources which should translate to betterBackgroundToday, even with the digital transformation that the world is undergoing, numerous churches still use manual of arms record keeping systems. Every record starting with members details all the way to the very delicate financial details are unbroken manually. A case study conducted at Kingongo PCEA parish at Nyeri prove that churches are still in the analogue world despite the pursuit of the name to the digital hei ghts. The church is an ever growing entity. More multitude are converted and more children are born into Christian homes. Gone are the eld when pastors, shepherds, priests, bishops and the likes knew each and every member of his church personally.Churches are nolonger just fellowships, degrees are offered, accounts are kept, people are wedded and the welfare of members is attended to. Imagine what a professional football team would be like without a regimen of practice drills? Now arrest away their playbook and player statistics. What you nonplus in this extreme scenario are highly talented (and perhaps overpaid) individuals participating in organized chaos. They might actually win a game or two, but in the long run, this team is doomed. This illustration is to drive home the point of why every organization needs to examine the existence and effectiveness of its management systems. The world is becoming Information and technologically based.For this reason, Management carcasss subscribe to been introduced into variant industries ranging from the educational to the health sector and even into agriculture amongst other things. A management Information System is a system to convert data from internal and external sources into information, in an appropriate form, to management at all levels in all functions to enable them to make timely and effective decisions for planning, directing and controlling the activities for which they are response. The Church is not excluded from these industries.The Church Management and Information System is a system for churches to manage their operations efficiently and systematically (Wikipedia, 2012). It is also a specialized software that assists churches in organization and automation of daily operations. Current SystemKingongo PCEA uses a fully manual system of keeping all its records. Financial records, which need a lot of transparency and accountability, are kept in hand written documents. A lot of transactions involv ing money are carried out by the parish. For instance, managing donations from church members and well-wishers, managing offers and tithes by members, peeping and managing cash expenses by the church etc. All the financial details are kept manually which is cumbersome and prone to mistakes. Flaws whoremaster easily occur with this system making it not legitimate ad calling for a remedy. The church also needs to keep track of activities that take place in the church every day.For instance, searching past activities by the parish, newly integrated church activities, testimonies, new testimonies, managing activity types etc. Other things also need record keeping like managing people and the issue of membership to the church. In this case, records fornew members, new converts, First-timers etc. need to be kept. With the existing system, searching the records is cumbersome and time-consuming. Records of groups and part relating to the church ought to be maintained for the attain of the church.Department activities need to be properly recorded and up timed accordingly and retrieved as per the church management needs. Retrieval of these records is hard since they are kept in files in written documents. Retrieving a record involves perusing through with(predicate) a huge number of files. A lot of time is wasted retrieving manual records. Reports need to be kept and retrieved as per the needs of church managers. For instance, attendance reports for church members, financial reports after a certain amount of time, membership details report etc. Reports for the existing system involves going through relevant records manually and coming up with the required reports. This is cumbersome and time-wasting. Proposed systemA software system is proposed to transpose the manual system for keeping records. A financial module is used to automate financial record keeping and retrieval. A database is used to store financial details of the parish. An interface is provided for interacting with the database whereby a drug user tummy write into the database and they earth-closet query the database as per their needs. Financial data keeping is made easy through this software solution and also searching of financial details made even more easier through the proposed software.Through an Activity module, daily activities in the church are stored in a database which is updated to embrace new activities. A platform for communicating to the database is offered where the user(authorized) interacts with the database(writes into the database and queries the database).With the new system, activities in the church are recorded in database tables and can always be retrieved with their respective dates via queries. A lot of valuable time is saved through the new system. Departments are automated using a department module.This module offers an interface for entering details of interest into the database. Since departmental details are of prime importance in as far as t he church is concerned, proper details relating to the Parish ought to be kept and retrieved with ease. The user searches records relating to a department of interest with a lot of ease through the interface provided by the departments module.The ineptness with the manual system would thus be alleviated by the proposed software solution. Report generation with the proposed system is automated (made alarmingly easy)through the Report module .This is make through integrating database SQL capabilities into the software. Financial reports, activity reports etc. can be generated through simply pressing a button which will give prompts to the user on the reports they want.The tire and the boredom associated with perusing through records to draw a report are completely eradicated through the proposed software solution. The various modules defined with different functionalities are integrated to form a harmoniously and effectively working software to attend the manual problem of keeping Pa rish records.Problem statement memory records manually is utterly cumbersome since it involves handwriting or typing every detail of interest. Handling physical records is cumbersome since fund space is necessitate and they can be affected by natural circumstances such as pests and unfavorable environment. Additionally, compiling reports for physical(manual)records is not an easy task since it involves walking through all records and drawing information of interest.A lot of personnel is needed to keep records for the different church departments and maintain them and this comes with higher(prenominal) costs due to wages for the record keepers. Kingongo PCEA Parish is one of the victims of the above mentioned problems which the proposed system wishes to provide a remedy for.ScopeThe resulting Integrated Parish Management Solution will be in English and will include subsystems and functionality to support the following FINANCIAL MODULEThe Financial Module comes with the right tools to aid in the church in management of the following Contributions and DonationsOfferings and tithesCash Expense and lotsDonations management is a key area in this module as individual donations by members and linked to the major donations which help to answer questionslike (How much has being released from a particular donation announcement)The offering management allows the church to record any kind of offering type, thus not restricting you to any form of predefined structure. GROUPS AND DEPARTMENT MANAGEMENT MODULEGrouping system encourages the participation of members in the church, church+ takes special care in the implementation of grouping, the system comes with a flexible system for any form of group to be created by the users and members added to groups. Members of a given group can be managed from this module.CHURCH ACTIVITY MANAGEMENT MODULEActivities in the church provide a building block to almost all the other parts of the church and as such should be well structured and data emerging from it effectively managed. The church activity module provides you with the tools to enable you to manage the various diverse data about church activities, it is built in such a way as to be flexible to accommodate different needed of different churches. MEMBERSHIP MANAGEMENT MODULEThis module helps to manage the various information of member of the church. This feature is so flexible and you can work on it according to your specific needs and requirement. Under this module, we have all the personal data of each member. You can search for PeopleAdd new Member/First-Timer. When you add new member, all the data about that particular member is captured View Members by Types it helps to sort members by types e.g. are they full member? Worker? Minister? Etc. New converts all new converts are captured here.SECURITYIntegrated parish Management Solution will be well integrated, meaning that changes in a module would automatically update another related module. High level authentication will be needed to log into the Integrated Parish Management Solution. Passwords are encrypted, such that it is practically impossible to gain admission fee to someones password. Role Management is alsoimplemented making your church users have different access levels, hence making users see only what they are supposed to see.BACK-UPSThe importance of creating a backup can never be emphasized enough. The parishs IT department will be responsible for implementing routines for regular backup of organizations data. In the event of a possible system crash, it will be time -consuming and difficult to reconstruct the database. For frequent program use I thus root on that backups are taken daily.Storing backupsBackups can be taken to the hard-drive, a shared folder in the network or to external media such as USB pen drives, Zip drives or similar. I recommend that you store at least one complete backup separate from the computer in case of disaster. Provision for external ha rd drive storage has been integrated in the financials.JustificationA software solution for the named problem would be very appropriate compared to the existing system. The following reasons justify the need for the software solution The tire associated with making records manually and maintaining them would be alleviated. The Integrated Parish Management Solution would offer a lot of ease in recording any details of interest. The software would offer an excellent interface to interact with the Parish database (entering new details and updating existing details to ensure integrity). As a result of the ease of recording and updating data, the problem of tire associated with data maintenance would be eradicated by the proposed Integrated Parish Management solution.Parish personnel cost would go mound as a result of implementation of the Proposed Integrated Parish Management Software. With the old system, a lot of personnel is required to keep and maintain Parish records which culmina tes in higher Parish running costs. The Proposed system would call for reduced personnel due to the resulting ease in keeping and maintain Parish records and consequently, the running costs of the parish would significantly reduce.Accurate and reliable financial records would be kept using the proposed system through the financial module which would provide security to financial details and only allow access only by authorized individuals. This would promote some level of transparency and accountability in the handling of Parish finances compared to the existing manual system which can be easily tampered with. For instance, with the manual system documents reflecting financial details of the Parish can be distorted by water or pests. Malicious individuals can take advantage of such a situation to commit fraud.With the proposed system, departmental management is easy. All Parish departments and the activities that revolve around the departments are well recorded and updated according ly. Groups in the Parish are as well better managed through the propose Integrated Parish Management solution. This is unlike the old system where a manager or Parish head has to physically interact with departmental heads to get the required information. The proposed solution offers a remedy for the mentioned departmental and group-related issues. Reports, which are of prime importance in as far as running of any organization is concerned, are automatically generated by the Proposed Integrated Parish management Software.For instance, financial transactions by the Parish according to the respective dates, Parish activities according to the date of occurrence etc. can be automatically generated with the proposed Solution. This eradicates the fatigue associated with going for long times through documents and files trying to compile a report that would differently be generated within a blink of an eye with the proposed system. Keeping track of members of the Parish would fairly easy w ith the proposed system. Records of old and new members would kept and made easy to retrieve.New converts would also be part of the data that would be maintained and made easy to access and modify in case of secession of a member from the church. This way, the Parish would manage its members better than using the manual register system.Literature reviewTime scheduleAll the components and work packages of this project will take triad weeksto accomplish. Following the approval of this proposal, the table below summarizes the different phases and timelines of the various aspects of the project to be executed within time and on budget Methodology