Parish Data System Software
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.
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Accounting and ledgers -
Contribution reports -
Member giving history -
Individual and family profiles -
Online donation form -
Facility scheduling
Supported Operating System(s):
Mac OS, Web browser (OS agnostic), Windows 8, Windows 10
2 Reviews of Parish Data System
john from Joan of Arc
Specialty: Christian, Catholic
Employees number: 11-50 employees
January 2018
January 2018
Want a program that was cutting edge for Windows 97... your found it!
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 This is the most outdated program I have ever had the displeasure of using.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.
Pros
it does function. I don't have 100 characters of positive feedback for this program, I am just writing this to fill space.
Cons
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.
Zach from St. Jude Parish
Specialty: Christian, Catholic
Employees number: 2-10 employees
May 2017
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.
