Parish Data System 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews

Overview

Parish Data System

2.7

(15)

Pricing

Pricing available upon request

About 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, contributions and fundraising and a diocesan communications solution, which synchronizes databases across parishes, schools and dioceses.

Additionally, PDS supports integration with other ACS Technologies products, including The City which is a social platform where church members and leaders can connect and collaborate.

Support is offered via phone and email.

Parish Data System Screenshots

Parish Data System Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $72.00

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

$72.00

No plan information available

Parish Data System Features

Popular features found in Church Management
Attendance Tracking
Event Management
Member Communication
Member Directory
Online Calendar
Online Giving
Pledge Management
Small Group Management
Volunteer Management
Worship Planning
More features of Parish Data System
Built-in Accounting
Child Check-in
Donation Management
Member Portal
Membership Management
Mobile Access
Multi-Location
Website Management

Parish Data System User Reviews

Overall Rating

2.7

Ratings Breakdown

13%

27%

20%

27%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

2.3

Value for money

2.2

Customer support

3.2

Functionality

2.6

Maxine M.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed January 2024

Bookkeepers Dream

Absolutely love it - very easy to use and learn.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Vicki M.

Verified reviewer

Non-Profit Organization Management

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed September 2020

PDS Church Office

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

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Reasons for choosing Parish Data System

We now use ParishSoft. It is a Catholic Based software. Reporting is easier for our church.

Matthew D.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed October 2020

Parish Data Systems needs major overhaul

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.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Mari G.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed September 2020

Disatisfactory

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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.

Dan P.

Verified reviewer

Marketing and Advertising

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed July 2021

I like PDS and would recommend it.

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.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Dominic R.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2018

Good for Catholic parishes, but needs some work to stay relevant

Helps manage a Catholic parish

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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

Verified

Reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed May 2019

Update Parish Data Systems

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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.

Angela H.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

51-200 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2019

Good to record name & phone and make reports.

Hard to use.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

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.

Elizabeth N.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2019

Clunky, Poor Reporting

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

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Alexander S.

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2018

PDS Church Office: There's probably something better