Absolutely love it - very easy to use and learn.

Love the reports and bank reconciliations and the On Demand program.

Sometimes it freezes up - not sure if it is the internet or the program since I use On Demand

I felt like the easiest thing to do, to be really honest was logging into the system.

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.

We are not happy with this software and are currently looking to change. It seems to have been a solution in at one time, but is built on an older platform that doesn't upgrade well. It needs a major overhaul. There are many other church management systems out that does so much more these days.

PDS holds parishioner data and donation contributions. It is uniquely Catholic in design, and holds Sacramental information. It is organized by family, rather than individual (like Catholic churches organize records). If you have questions, someone is available by phone to help solve issues.

PDS isn't reliable. We lost cell phones data once and had to use a backup to restore. Another time the user levels permissions just changed, so all employees could see financial giving, and not just the accountant. It is not user friendly and buttons are in odd places. Data is not organized well and not all data can be pulled in reports like we would like them. When we run reports of the whole parish, the report often crashes and takes forever to run.

Helps manage a Catholic parish

PDS is designed for Catholic parishes and has everything you would possibly need to track from sacraments to attendence to religious education programs, etc.

The software is starting to get outdated.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

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.

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.

Do the people who made PDS use PDS? It sure doesn't seem that way. This is the most outdated program I have ever had the displeasure of using. If there was any competition these guys would be out of business.

it does function. I don't have 100 characters of positive feedback for this program, I am just writing this to fill space.

Painfully slow. I almost never work on it exclusively, the wait is just too long. You need another task to fill the wait time. From the moment you logon you are brought back to a time where dial up was your only option for internet. The program Unintuitive and full of glitches, its all around the opposite of user friendly.

Hard to use.

Easy to enter information, had many fields to enter info into.

Other than a data base this software does not do much more. Pulling a report is hard and sending emails is not easy.

There are much better Church/Registration Software Systems out there. We are certainly looking to move to a different system.

PDS Church Office efficiently collects and organizes data. Other than that, I can't recommend it.

The reports are terrible. There are literally hundred of fields to choose from, many of which are the same field worded differently (i.e. Father name, Father full name, Head name, Member 1 name...). All adults input into the system are either "Mother" or "Father" regardless of marital status or actually having children.

It works, but it's slow.

It does compile all of our members' data and make it searchable. It syncs up via the cloud.

It takes forever to start up. It is clunky to navigate and feels like old, dated software.

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.

It "gets the job done"....with the basic functionality to save all sorts of data used in a parish context.

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.

Great experience with recording information but the reports were not easy to use.

PDS Software was very reliable. We did not have much down time at all.

It wasn't geared toward a Catholic Church. Its excellent software for protestant churches, but it falls short for what we need to record our Sacraments etc.

It has built in accounting and I can schedule liturgical ministers. It helps us to organize members and donations.

It is slow, out dated, does not optimize with updated versions of Windows, it is difficult to use and the systems do not collaborate with each other. The customer service is rarely helpful, if ever. Most issues I have had to just figure out on my own.

I do not recommend PDS for the reasons above. It can get the job done only if you have a very low bar set for what you want the software to accomplish.

PDS is most likely one of the worst software programs I have used. I was able to use it for basic (but clumsy) reports, but that is the best thing I can say about it.

The data input is clumsy and not intuitive. The reports are absolutely the worst. There is the capability to run reports, but the process of selecting fields, building, and running a report is terrible.

In the last several months we have been able to gather more data and make it more useful for the parish since we utilize more features.

The easy process of weekly donations and parishioner data is very important to our church. Overall this is a good software for a small to medium size parish.

Notes tracking is lacking. There is no way to insert a note that will stay without it having the potential of it being deleted.

nothing office pro is better

it takes to long to do what you want. there is nothing I like about this item. I only use I once a month to hard to figure what reports to print and what I want to print