Labor day weekend marks the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year.  For churches it is also the start of a new ministry season. 

Our team is excited about kids going back to everything from preschool to college.  We are excited about college football. We are excited about what God is doing at our churches and in our small groups.  But, there is a special excitement in the air for our team as we start September this year.

Most of us would prefer to take a shortcut than to have to walk the long way around.  It conserves both time and energy while taking us directly to our desired destination.  At its best, church software is a shortcut for staff and church members. 

Just as landscape professionals consider traffic patterns when designing sidewalks, software professionals analyze usage patterns when creating action walkways.

These five recent upgrades are the result of patterns we've seen and been alerted to in recent months.  Three of them are based on staff usage.  Two of them are based on member usage.

1. Mass update group role from within a group (Staff) 
2. Mass update group info from the browse groups page (Staff)
3. Require recurring payments (Staff)
4. Spouses can see and manage family volunteer schedules (Members)
5. Edit recurring contribution designation and amounts (Members)
   

I recently gave a talk to a group of community and business people on values.  I chose this topic because our values for service and innovation are so important to our company being what the Lord wants it to be.  Behind each one of the upgrades below is a commitment on the part of our team to listen to our clients, really hear their needs, and innovate solutions that serve them well.

Data clarity and confidence is a real problem for churches.  We've implemented lots of checks and balances through the years to help with this.  Upgrades 1-3 mentioned below are just the latest ones.

The last two focus more directly on people.  One on making payments due and recurring payments more visible in the App for things like camp and school tuition.  The other provides a bit more clarity for those responsible for creating volunteer schedules.

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to use All Check to capture worship attendance.  Having everyone in the family check in to everything at once including worship is really helpful.  That article answers the questions: why take individual attendance, how to do it, and how to motivate people to respond.  Check it out if you're interested.

Another one of our creative churches uses their digital connection card to take individual worship attendance for their multiple services.  On their connection card they have a "Service I'm attending" dropdown question with all their services listed including online.

There are many things that make Churchteams unique in the church management software space.  One is our choice to build out all the data related parts of our communication tools.  Text-to-Church and NED (email editor) are best-in-class level texting and email solutions that work hand-in-glove with our form, registration, notes, workflow, and process tracking features.

The HUGE advantage of building out all the features ourselves is that when a customer has a problem, or an idea; we have the ability to fix or upgrade it.  This agility helps us improve the customer experience as we improve the software.

Here are the release notes for four recent examples of how we've done exactly that.  

Churchteams has so many solutions for common church problems that it's hard for us to keep them in front of people.  We've recently done some upgrades to nine of these, so I'll use the opportunity to give you some extra insight into two of them.  Below that is a list and then an explanation of each upgrade.

Problem:  Registration and check-in don't work together.  We solved this by building best-in-class level features for both.  They are not modular in design, so there is no exchange of information between the systems.  They are completely integrated.  However, check-in for events is different than weekly check-in.  Churches requested the ability to pre-print name tags to help with relationship building and minimize check-in.  We released that feature in 2022.  Upgrade #1 takes that functionality to an even more convenient level!  

Problem:  We want to use check-in for our school or pre-school.  From the very beginning our check-in system had the ability to do daily check-ins including capturing attendance.  The tricky part a couple of years after the launch was creating new options to report attendance daily rather than weekly.  We added that a few years ago.  Upgrade #7 below adds the weekday name to the report. Pretty nice!

For me, Christmas sheds a great light on the previous year.  Does it you?  I have been a journaler for decades.  During the month of December I review my entries for the year and narrow them down to a few highlights that the Lord has said to me and is working out in my life.  These become my objectives to review and work on the next year.

I just did a similar thing by reviewing the New Release blog posts and reflecting on our business process improvements.  I looked over them and narrowed them down to these five bright spots for 2023.