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The History of iChurch
SmartDox has been developing solutions for churches for over a decade.
SmartDox inherited a simple Microsoft Access-based church directory that had a couple of users that needed more functionality.
The user interface (or front-end) was replaced with a stand-alone program which offered a far better user experience.
Later, the database was replaced by Microsoft SQL Server (whilst retaining the same user interface).
This system now has
over 350 users, multiple campuses, over 40 services per weekend and tens of thousands of people in the database.
Over a weekend, 3500 children are checked into their Sunday school
groups via a check-in system that uses their parent's finger prints.
Over the years, other churches would ask this world leading church what they used to help manage their church and
if this program was available for them to use. For a number of reasons, this software has never been
available for sale.
However, the experience gained from all those years involved in creating a great custom church management system has now been invested into iChurch.
The most common complaint regarding church management systems is that they are difficult
to use.
The reason some software is difficult to use is because it is easier for the
programmer to solve problems by adding complexity rather than by simplification.
For this reason, the question asked throughout the iChurch design process was:
Is that as simple as we can make it?
Time and again, user interfaces were scrapped and systems re-designed as they drifted away from simplicity.
One example of the multitude of outcomes of this philosophy is the fact that a
single filtering module is used throughout iChurch. So if
you are searching for people in the people or giving modules, adding people to
teams or small groups, selecting people to assign tasks to or exporting data
from the reports module, you will use the same filtering module. This reduces the
learning curve and reinforces the filtering techniques.
Another small but important feature in iChurch is the user-selectable skins. Now
this may seem a trivial feature but users really do love it. It gives them
ownership over the product. No matter which computer they use, iChurch appears
in "their" skin. Now, if we could just get the girls to use a skin other than
"Valentine"!
We think we have created a church management system that is simple and fun to
use whilst still having all of the features of the systems offered by "big boys". We hope you agree.
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