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.

Best Church Software - REALM

Great company and very helpful. They want us to succeed.

Pros

The ease of use. The versatility. They update and upgrade every week to stay relevant. Very helpful to make sure we are happy especially during Covid.

Cons

The ability to get a photo attached to your profile for an older person. That our church database is everyone - not just a database for members and one for donors/visitors.

There are better options

To be fair, it's been a few years since I have spoken to ACS customer support and they were friendly and tried to be very helpful at the time, but it wasn't a good experience. We had issues with updating older versions of the software and trying to make it work within our own bylaws and Canadian law, which wasn't on ACS as a software manufacturer, but it didn't help the overall experience. There seemed to be a disconnect between how we were (poorly) implementing the software and struggling with teaching staff and the way in which the ACS team communicated to us and told us to get excited about functionality that never worked in our context because of difficulty of implementation. Thankfully, there are better software options out there today - including Realm, which we transferred to from ACS and have had better luck.

Pros

If you spent a lot of time setting things up and were using it daily, ACS seems to have the capability to have good functionality. I've been in two different organizations where that wasn't the case, and heard similar things from other users, which meant ACS was something that I used only when I really couldn't get someone else to do the thing I needed, or I really needed to find a piece of information. It seems to be a great place to store all kinds of information.

Cons

The user interface was difficult, making learning it (and teaching it to church staff who are often technically slower) very difficult. Because people never learned it, it was used poorly and data was sometimes out of date, making the whole database only really functional for the financial side of things and we never managed to get the use out of it that we often hoped and tried for. Overall it was a frustrating piece of software when we had to engage with it and people would create their own systems and spreadsheets as work arounds.

It does everything

ACS is dependable, strong and has always delivered. They have been in the game for awhile and show no signs of slowing down.

Pros

ACS does everything we need in church management software! Aside from service planning it does EVERYTHING needed!

Cons

I would love to see ACS step into the service planning side of things too and truly become an "all in one" stop shop! Interaction with CCLI, ect... The software does take a bit to get used to, it could be more user friendly.

ACS for First Church

Pledgers who are not attending.

Pros

Reports, tracking a stewardship campaign over several years, customer service is tops.

Cons

Uses a software that doesn't convert excel spreadsheets into a functional spreadsheet. The columns do not keep the formulas. Therefore you have to make the formulas in a new column. Multiply steps for reports. Should have more reports that are already set up in the software.