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.

ACS CAN DO BETTER

We no longer have problems managing the donations received and the registration of our members in a database.

Pros

The first remark is the customer service which is very reactive and quickly solves your problem. ACS is a very useful church management software, because we won't have the problem to manage the database of our members or the registration of the children, and even all the donations received. I like the way it stores information. Of course, it is not quick to master ACS, but once you have mastered it you have everything you want to know about reports, campaign follow-ups, etc. In conclusion, ACS is a very good software to store any kind of information.

Cons

Despite the fast customer service, we notice that during the months of February and March the wait is rather long. The ACS software often bugs or slows down when donor files increase. The lack of functional expense reporting is lacking given the current state of the art technology. ACS is also limited on the choice of administrators on who should access this or that. The ACS software needs to be upgraded, as the speed is poor when running large reports. The look needs to be redesigned not too aesthetically pleasing, but also the API access which is almost non-existent.

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.

Bulletproof, contains all the core functionality, but dated

Crucial information that aids in caring for our church family.

Pros

I love that this software has been refined and is extremely reliable and fast. Efficient data entry and keyboard functionality. Powerful reporting. Covers the basics of what a ChMS should offer with ease, speed and power.

Cons

This software is dated. It's "cloud" based, but lacks lots of modern communication tools such as text communication, easy email distribution and remote web-based functions like small group attendance, and volunteer management. In all honesty, ACS is so big and has so many add-on features, it can probably do all of these things, but it's hard to know all of the functionality because it's not easily explained anywhere (and I've been a user for 12 years). Also, it's reporting process is not difficult for someone with some background in reports, but it's far too complex for an average pastor or lay-leader to use - which requires a database person to run reports. Also, no customizable dashboards, etc. So, it will probably do most everything you want, but you'll need a ChMS expert to figure it all out and run the reports...

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.