Accounting and ledgers
Supported Operating System(s):
Mac OS, Web browser (OS agnostic), Windows 8, Windows 10About Parish Data System
Parish Data System (PDS) from ACS Technologies is a hybrid church management solution that caters to parishes, schools, dioceses and helps them to manage, automate and organize their day-to-day operations. The solution can either be deployed on-premise or hosted in the cloud.
PDS offers users various modules to manage finances, contributions, communications, events, reports, schools and childcare and more. In addition to church management features, PDS offers users tools to handle processes unique to Catholic institutions such as a sacramental register for recording, indexing and searching baptism, confirmation, communion, marriage and death records, 'Formation OfficeTM' module for tracking religious-education data and coordinating tuition, fees, contribution...
13 Reviews of Parish Data System
Average User Ratings
Overall
2.38 / 5 stars
Ease-of-use
2.0
Value for money
2.0
Customer support
3.0
Functionality
2.5
Likelihood to Recommend
Not likely
Very likely
May 2017
Zach from St. Jude Parish
Company Size: 2-10 employees
Industry: Religious Institutions
Time Used: Less than 12 months
Ease-of-use
1.0
Functionality
2.0
May 2017
Great software....for 1981
If you're looking for church management software (CHMS), skip this one in favor of something updated in the past several years. Planning Center Online is the top contender of all CHMS I have looked into - with far more functionality, customizability, and features of all kinds beyond what PDS can offer.
Pros
It "gets the job done"....with the basic functionality to save all sorts of data used in a parish context.
Cons
Feels like I stepped back several decades whenever I log in. Interface is outdated and unintuitive, slow to load, occasional hangups while it tries to remember what it's doing. I have worked at two parishes that use PDS... because "it's what we've always done." It is/was a chore at both places.
September 2020
Mari from St. Thomas Aquinas Center
Company Size: 11-50 employees
Industry: Religious Institutions
Time Used: Less than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
Ease-of-use
2.0
Value for money
3.0
Customer support
2.0
Functionality
3.0
September 2020
Disatisfactory
Pros
I felt like the easiest thing to do, to be really honest was logging into the system.
Cons
I don't even know where to begin with what types of issues I had with PDS Church Office. It seemed like I had an issue with something everyday.
March 2018
Dominic from Sentz Consulting
Company Size: 2-10 employees
Industry: Information Technology and Services
Time Used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
Ease-of-use
3.0
Value for money
3.0
Customer support
4.0
Functionality
3.0
March 2018
Good for Catholic parishes, but needs some work to stay relevant
Helps manage a Catholic parish
Pros
PDS is designed for Catholic parishes and has everything you would possibly need to track from sacraments to attendence to religious education programs, etc.
Cons
The software is starting to get outdated. Syncing data between multiple "users" (databases) is cumbersome and the interface looks straight out of 1998 (still). Unfortunately, after you've invested years of effort, it would be detrimental to attempt to move all of the data to any other "church" system without significant costs
May 2019
Anonymous
Verified Reviewer
Company Size: 11-50 employees
Time Used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
Ease-of-use
3.0
Value for money
2.0
Customer support
4.0
Functionality
3.0
May 2019
Update Parish Data Systems
Pros
So many features for census software for a catholic church, you can build keyword reports, financial record keeping is simple and customer service is so easy to use when you have on demand.
Cons
Update reporting so that you can build a pivot table, app does not offer an online directory and the overall look to the program is close to that of an out dated AS400 program. Would love Realm but product is not ready for a diocese.
November 2019
Angela from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church
Company Size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Religious Institutions
Time Used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
Ease-of-use
2.0
Functionality
2.0
November 2019
Good to record name & phone and make reports.
Hard to use.
Pros
Easy to enter information, had many fields to enter info into.
Cons
Other than a data base this software does not do much more. Pulling a report is hard and sending emails is not easy.
