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From Hi-Tech to Hi-Touch: Stories from Church Management Software

SERVANTKEEPER® and Camarillo UMC: Transforming Ministry and Saving Resources with Servant Keeper

Camarillo United Methodist Church serves in a community of over 66,000 people in California, midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. At the time of looking for a new system, Pam Dougherty had been the Office Director and Treasurer for six years, putting her in charge of both office administration and treasurer duties.

Pam began researching church management software solutions. She checked with other UMC churches first. But at the time, each church she checked with did not have a system in place they liked. Pam began her own research, and kept hearing about Servant Keeper. “I found information about Servant Keeper online – it just kept coming up!” said Pam. She quickly discovered that Servant Keeper was not only cost effective, but also scalable to meet the needs of CUMC. “We bought Servant Keeper outright for just a little more than what we were paying for our annual support with their previous software. The renewal for support will be much less, which was a necessity for this year’s budget.” Plus, the option to add the cloud at any time made the decision future-proof.

But it wasn’t just the cost savings that initially drew Pam to Servant Keeper. There was also the fact that it integrated well with QuickBooks. This meant the financial secretary and treasurer would no longer have to enter the same data twice. Instead, Servant Keeper would automatically upload their contributions into QuickBooks. Now the financial secretary and treasurer (who are required to be two different people) can work in their own systems (which is a best practice of accounting), and yet still pull reports and track each other’s work. “Both databases are much easier on data entry, error correction or making changes. We used to waste a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong in the old databases and how to reconcile errors and discrepancies.”

As far as ease of use, Pam shared, “I taught myself how to use Servant Keeper database. I am no rocket scientist. It’s very intuitive. It makes sense.” Not only could Pam teach herself, but she also was able to quickly transfer her responsibilities to the finance secretary. “She has found the program to be easy to learn and use.” Since switching to Servant Keeper, the church’s data tracking and reporting has been made simpler, and more accurate. They can now log total attendance by each class, group, and also for their worship services. Plus, they appreciate the ability to easily set up custom fields that provide specific information they need to report annually to their UMC conference. And, the reports they previously created by hand are a thing of the past. “The manual reports are no longer necessary. And we have discovered some very important reports in Servant Keeper that provide good information on the health of giving by members and friends of the church.”