Managing enrollment, especially payments, for events like preschools, camps, or Christian School tuitions is a time-consuming challenge for many churches. These programs require registrations, forms, initial payment, accounting, payment reminders, attendance, email or text communication, and syncing at least some of the information in the church database.
Usually these are executed using different software applications, paper, and/or good ole'spreadsheets. The process is challenging for churches because their tools and data aren't working together as well as they could and should.
Churches began asking us for help many years ago. As their database, they wanted to be able to use our registration, tracking, and communication features. Later on we expanded our online giving feature so that it could be used to take payments.
One of the problems I most vividly remember when I was a pastor was ministry staff responsible for an event having to either go to or respond to financial staff to know who still owed money and how much. Then, it was their responsibility to communicate and collect what was due. That was clunky at best.
We resolved this several years ago by putting payments into the registration group view essentially making the group a spreadsheet. This makes is easy for ministry and financial staff to see exactly where everyone is with their payments and what needs done.
To this, we added a feature to make it easy for ministry staff to select who needs to make a payment and then email them with the exact amount they owed and a link to make the payment. Church staff have loved this functionality.
The last piece of the puzzle for us was to create the ability for people to set up recurring payments. We released this capability about a year ago (blog article) and just recently added an option to make setting up a recurring payment required.
This Knowledge Base article outlines all the details for Churchteams clients to make your entire daycare, camp, or school payment process flow smoothly. Take the time to set it up right and you will discover a new freedom and confidence that this task is being done with excellence.
