ParishSOFT

ParishSOFT Family Suite is the best Software for Parishes

Kommentare: Our experience with ParishSOFT Family Suite has been extremely positive. ParishSOFT understands the true meaning of customer service. They are easy to work with. When you call, the service rep is very knowledgeable with the product and they are easy to hear and understand what they are saying. We love this program and will never switch back.

Vorteile:

The ease of using this software is one of the best features. It makes posting contributions fast and accurate. For us, posting Contributions before ParishSOFT took at the minimum a day but usually a day and a half. With ParishSOFT it take an hour.

Nachteile:

The only thing that I think is needed is the ability to add a new family from the detailed contributions posting page. It would be faster if we didn’t have to close out of Contributions and go into Family Directory and then back into Contributions to post.

ParishSOFT Family Suite

Kommentare: Our overall experience the last 7 years have been excellent, it makes our jobs easier and any questions ParishSOFT has an incredible team that will answer your questions or solve your issues in no time.

Vorteile:

I can have all the information of our Parish in one software that I can access from anywhere. Family information, Religious Education Program, Offering that merge so easy from ParishSOFT Online giving, Tuition, and Administration to give the staff different levels of access.

Nachteile:

Open different tabs at the same time, and a picture of the family.

Connect Now is absolutely awful!

Kommentare: I have used the desktop version for over 10 years. It wasn't perfect but it worked. We were forced to get the online Connect Now version and it is terrible: 1) The Religious Ed. section takes an average of 12-16 seconds to load a mouse click. A MOUSE CLICK! That means that entering a single piece of information in one persons record can take up to 4 minutes. 2) When you are actually able to open a class, record, or individual beside it taking 12-16 seconds to open, the user functions are not friendly at all. If I open a class and chose a student in the class do my thing and then close out it takes me to the main screen instead of back to that class. That's not helpful at all since I'm in need of going back to that class record for the next student. 3) We were blatantly lied to by the sales rep and the VP of Sales as well. We have a large parish (16,000 +) and the sales person said we would be fine with such a large number. After 2 months of speed issues (Still not resolved) and being told it was our servers that were slow the VP told us, "We cannot process the amount of data that your parish has. Our sales team should have told you this." When we asked the VP why he hand said this to us when we started dealing with him the VP had no answer. 4) It is abundantly clear that ParishSofts Connect Now servers are not the adequate size to process the type of data parishes have. We had our IT team look at our serves and after numerous test it was conclusive that the issue is on Parish Softs end. Conclusion:
If you have more than 200 people in your parish do not use the Connect Now program. Our parish has been incapable of processing registrations, sacramental records, attendance, etc because of how ridiculously slow the Connect Now program is. There are various parishes who have complained about the same issue to Parish Soft and nothing has been done.

Vorteile:

The online version is awful. Stick to the desktop version.

Nachteile:

Online version literally takes 12-16 seconds per mouse click, which makes it virtually impossible to get anything done.

Family Suite Implementatiion

Kommentare: We are tracking our parishioners easier now and have uploaded most of the Religious Education and Sacramental Records to the cloud.

Vorteile:

Initial integration was a breeze. Uploaded a copy of our database and P/S transferred it to the cloud in one day. Now employees can access database from anywhere, even home, especially useful during the Covid-19 pandemic when everyone was locked down.

Nachteile:

As administrator, when setting up a new employee, I like to test out the email function to make sure it works. In the beginning, P/S only supported a few mail sites and ours wasn't one of them. Tech support got it fixed but I want to test before turning over to employee. To do so, however requires me to put a dummy email address into the employee record so when the program generates the initial password, I can retrieve it, then reset the email address to the correct value. Too many steps just to retrieve a password for a test.

A Welcome Improvement

Vorteile:

ParishSoft is extremely user-friendly. The ease at which you can obtain a quick report as well as a detailed report was a welcome change after using our antiquated database. The IQ (Intelligent Query) module makes it extremely easy to customize a report (birthday report for a specific month for example) for downloading to excel.

Nachteile:

On the family information screen I had to get a bit creative as you are not able to customize what appears on that screen. For example, I wanted to note our school families, winter residents and volunteers but there was not an option to do so. By using the map code box, I manually type in school family, et al. Having an option to customize would be beneficial.