It is often in the Fall of the year that our churches begin their stewardship campaigns to raise money to build, to purchase land, to pay off debt or some other fundraising need, but the planning for such campaigns must start early. As you are planning your stewardship campaign, ChurchTrac can help by providing the accounting support that you need to keep track of pledges and giving during the campaign.

On the Pledges screen (which can be accessed through the Utilities menu by clicking “Show Pledges instead of Contributions on the Main Toolbar”, if you have it hidden), you can enter names, pledge amounts, and amounts given toward the campaign. ChurchTrac will keep a running total of amounts pledged to the campaign, the amount received to date, and the pledge amount remaining for each individual and for the campaign as a whole.

ChurchTrac will also print pledge reports for each individual. The report contains their pledged amount, amount received to date, the remaining pledge amount as well as a calculation of weekly and monthly amounts needed to reach the pledged goal by the campaign deadline.

So let ChurchTrac work for you during your next stewardship campaign. Click here for more information on how to use the Pledge screen.

As soon as school lets out, we are all ready to get away for our summer vacations.  Many in our church congregations are off traveling during the summer as well and will miss church while they are gone. ChurchTrac has a great tool for helping you manage your Absentees and Follow Up with them when they return.

On the Attendance screen, click on the Attendance Labels and Absentee Reports option in the top toolbar. On this screen you can access the names of the people who have been absent from Sunday School, church service, or another group activity you have set up. Once you have selected your criteria, you can:

1. Print mailing labels and send the Absentees a letter or postcard
2. Generate an Absentee report with names, phone numbers, email, and addresses, OR
3. Show the matching names on the People Screen. From here you can email them or use our Automated Messaging Service to call or text them to let them know they were missed.

Summer is the time to travel, but with ChurchTrac you don’t have to lose contact with your congregation while they are gone.

ChurchTrac has so many great management features, that you may not have even had a chance to discover them all. The Group Involvement Tab located on the People screen may be one of those screens you haven’t explored yet.

This screen shows a list of all the groups that the person is a member of as well their group role and status within the group. You may want to consult this screen as you are evaluating a person’s availability to serve on a committee or teach a class.

You can also use this screen to add a person to existing groups. For example, as you are entering your new members you can go ahead assign them to a Sunday School class or other group right from this screen.

Finally, the Group Involvement tab also shows a person’s attendance in the groups they are assigned to as well as the last date attended.

This is a helpful screen, providing the pastor and staff an overview of a person’s group involvement, that can used for a variety of different reasons.

 

If you are using ChurchTrac’s data sharing plan, it is important that you synchronize all of the computers on your network regularly in order to keep your information as up to date as possible. But it is also important that you synchronize regularly so as not to go beyond your data retention period. This is typically not a problem for your regular office computers that you use daily or weekly. But what about a volunteer’s home computer or one that isn’t used as often?

For those less used computers on your network, you may want to consider setting up an automatic synchronization schedule. You can configure Windows Task Scheduler to run ChurchTrac for the purpose of synchronizing on a daily or weekly basis. This will eliminate any concern of your data retention period expiring.

To set up a Automatic or Scheduled Data Sync, click here.

A new update is available that adds the ability to use an individual or family photo on the custom reports. This update also corrects a few errors reported by users, including an issue when mailing labels or envelopes would sometimes not preview correctly with certain printer drivers.

A monthly newsletter is an important communication tool for churches big and small.  We count on them to bring news and information about what is going at church to our members, visitors and others associated with our churches.  ChurchTrac makes creating the newsletter mailing list easy.

There are two ways to create a newsletter mailing list in ChurchTrac.  First, you can create a default setting, which will add each new name on the People Screen to the Newsletter.  To do this go to the Utilities Menu and click on “People Screen Settings” in the white box.  At the bottom of the screen select “yes” to the statement “When adding a new person, set the Newsletter field to.”  This will automatically add each new name added on the People Screen to your newsletter mailing list.

A second way to create your list is to select the newsletter option for each family you want to receive the newsletter.  To do this, go to the People Screen and select the “Family Details” tab.  Then select “yes” to the question, “Is this family a newsletter recipient?”

Once you have created your newsletter mailing list, you can access it through the Filter/Search feature.  Click on Filter/Search on the top toolbar.  Then select “Newsletter Recipient” is equal to “yes” from the drop down menus.  These names will then appear on the People Screen.  Click on Output Options, and you are ready to print your newsletter mailing labels.

One of the first things you will do when you begin using ChurchTrac’s church management software is to enter names on the People screen. Just like all the other aspects of ChurchTrac, it is easy to do. You can do it directly on the People screen. Or you can import the names and other People screen information from a spreadsheet. Once the names are entered on this screen, they can then be accessed throughout the program on the Groups, Attendance and Contribution screens.

Click here to learn how to add, edit and delete names on the People Screen.

You can also import names, addresses, phone numbers, and other People screen information from a spreadsheet.  Click here for instruction on how to import your People screen information.

Once a name has been imported, it is not possible to import additional data for that name at a later date. You must import all the data for a name at the same time. If you import a name, and later need to make a change or add additional information, you can follow the instruction for adding and editing that information directly on the People screen.

As the pastor of a small church, you may feel so bogged down by the administrative responsibilities that come with running the church that you don’t have time to focus on the primary jobs God has called you to — preaching the word and ministering to your people. ChurchTrac is a great church software program that can help with the management part of the job. But here’s another great perk about ChurchTrac – it’s easy.

It doesn’t take a computer programmer or software engineer to learn to use ChurchTrac. You can recruit a couple of church volunteers and teach them to use the program in no time. Then they can help you enter names, attendance, contributions, etc. saving you an enormous amount of time each week. They can even enter the data from home with ChurchTrac’s data sharing program.

We change our clothes, we change our hair color, we redecorate our homes. With ChurchTrac, you can change the color of your program screens as well. Tired of blue? Try purple or red or green. It’s easy.

Go to the Utilities menu and click on “Color Scheme” in the white box. Then pick your new ChurchTrac color scheme. With one click your church software program has a new look! And unlike a new wardrobe or a new hairdo, it didn’t cost you a cent.

In light of the recent tornadoes throughout the Southeastern United States, churches all over the country are rallying to help the victims of these devastating storms.  As your church takes up a special offering for this and other worthy causes, ChurchTrac can help you manage these contributions.

To set up a category for your special offering, go to the Contributions Screen and click on “Add or Edit Categories” in the top toolbar.  Here you can create a new income category (or fund) entitled “Tornado Relief” or “Disaster Relief” or even “Love Offering.” Then when you are entering the contributions on the Contributions screen, you select “Tornado Relief” as the category.

ChurchTrac will then keep track of the total amount given toward the special offering as well as keep a record of the donation to be included on each donor’s Contribution report.