The best way to keep track of your parishioners
What do you like best?
The UI is very intuitive and easy to navigate. The search function allows for partial names, so you don't need to know everything. Having a single database for all of your parishioners means that when someone makes an update on a piece of data, it is available to everyone immediately.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes, the query tool doesn't bring back any values even though I know the query is set up right. They have two sides of the product, a diocesan view and a parish view. The diocesan view doesn't work very well, so we have to still use the old version of their product.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Whether you are a large church or a small one, ParishSoft will work for you. If you are considering migrating to ParishSoft's Connect Now product, I recommend that you do some clean up of your current data before migrating. It will make the end results a lot better.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We use ParishSoft to manage all of the parishioners that are in our diocese. We use it to manage, from a diocesan view, the Bishop's Annual Appeal and any parish's capital funds they request us to manage. The parishes use ParishSoft to register their parishioners, record any contributions or any ministry work that they may do.
The biggest benefit is that using a single database for all of our parishioners shows that anytime any information on a person is updated, everyone gets to see it right away, so we have cleaner data from which to pull mailing lists, etc..