A Great Product Overall with World-Class Customer Service

ACS is a church software product with several different suites to choose from. I found the People Suite, then Realm, extremely helpful in keeping member records, and the Financial Suite gives the church the reports and information needed for making budget decisions.

Pros

ACS Realm is a simpler version of ACS People Suite, and much more intuitive. The implementation was smooth and the transition fully backed by their wonderful customer service. I also love getting a live, knowledgeable person on the phone within a few seconds of calling. Payroll is also very easy in ACS Financial Suite.

Cons

The Financial Suite is not intuitive, but mistakes have gotten easier to fix due to upgrades. The church is still waiting to switch to ACS Realm Financials, as payroll cannot be done there, despite well over a year of promises that it is happening soon. It would be helpful for Realm input of donations to flow to the Financial Suite. Also, ACS People Suite gave options for certain reports that cannot be run in ACS Realm.

Exploring software for your church - consider ACS.

My experience with ACS has been very good. I started with them when we all had DOS computers and moved up to the windows platform. Now, we are able to have versions of the software on our phone. The system has the capability of being backed up to the cloud and does not need to be kept on your church's server. There is also an alternative for more contemporary churches called "Realm."

Pros

ACS gives you the total package in church software. It helps you efficiently mange both the "people" side of the job and the "accounting" and numbers side and will allow them to communicate with each other. There are several modules that will allow you to track different aspects of the member or prospect in the life of the church and this system does it very effectively. It has been around for a long time and they have perfected the software.

Cons

Because the software does so many functions and can be tailored to almost any church of any size or situation, it can be a little confusing. Therefore, training is vital. They excel in offering wonderful training through their company and through local trainers.

ACS is okay...

We can keep track of our members and visitors and keep good records for visitation.

Pros

The transition from Servant Keeper to ACS was smooth. The onboarding team and the customer service reps are easy to work with and try to be as helpful as possible. The Church Life app is great, and has been a blessing to our church members.

Cons

Working through a separate "portal" is a total pain. The software seems like it's not advancing with the times, and I would much prefer a true "cloud" based system. We are often "kicked off" the portal and have to log in again. We also have difficulty with AccessACS, because it can only be accessed by a Windows based browser (and we all use Mac computers). It's a bit of a hassle to access AccessACS through a separate browser to do the needed uploading tasks and helping our folks with their passwords and such. Finally, they really haven't updated much in the software. It's stagnant, and I see some areas where we may want to explore more modern technology.

ACS is a financial/membership workhorse for our church

ACS has been an invaluable tool for us to manage the finances and membership of our church. It handles details which allows us to focus on ministry.

Pros

The ability to sort individuals and groups within the larger congregation. We have set up numerous subgroups in our congregation and use ACS to generate our directories.

Cons

Some categories could not be customized as we would have liked. In the people arm, some fields were mandatory even if unnecessary for our purposes.

ACS is THE BEST!!

ACS cares about us. Cares about churches. Our business relationship with them helps us to do what we, the church, were intended to do in the first place, which is build the Kingdom of God.

Pros

We have been ACS clients since the beginning!! Currently we are using Realm for membership tracking, but still use ACS Financials for our book-keeping needs. It does everything we need, and our books are not as simple as one might think.

Cons

The only con I can think of is that I wish ACS Financials could integrate with Realm. We have ACS Financials down pat, and I wish we could port it over!!