April 26, 2006

Icon Systems, Inc.
3704 Westmoor Drive
Moorhead, MN 56560-6909

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing as the System Administrator for my church in order to express our appreciation for IconCMO and the extraordinary service we have received from your staff.

Even before began our subscription to IconCMO on March 15, 2006, your sales staff was very helpful in our decision making.  They set up a trial period in which we could examine and use IconCMO with sample data.  When the trial period was near to expiring, not all my leadership team had been able to examine your product, so your sales staff extended our trial period for an additional 15 days without any hesitation.  That cooperative and supportive spirit was just the beginning of our exceedingly positive experience with your company.

IconCMO has been a great blessing to our entire church staff and lay ministry leaders even in the short time we have used it.  The user interface is so intuitive that as Systems Administrator all I have had to do is give each user a brief walk-through the program over the telephone and every user has been able to begin to use the program.  Even those who are not particularly computer savvy have found it easy to use.

The program’s features have covered all our church management software needs and then some.  Of particular importance to our church is the fact that the database can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet.  Given the wide geographical dispersion of our ministry leaders, this feature alone makes it worth the money.  Yet it is so much more than merely convenient.  It’s capabilities easy multiply our effectiveness in handling all our membership, contributions, and accounting data.  Some software carries with it an inherent burden of complexity, but IconCMO has none of those drawbacks.  We have also been impressed with how easy it is to adjust to changes in the program as you provide online upgrades.  The most recent upgrade to version 3.5 was as close to seamless and I have ever seen, and we did not have to invest any additional time in loading new software and in training our users, as would have been the case with a PC-based product.

Once we decided to subscribe to IconCMO, your staff was very helpful in setting up for the conversion of our existing data and at no additional cost.  The conversion of our membership and contribution data went reasonably well.  However, in the conversion process some contribution data was grouped together from a period of three years into the current year.  Bill in Tech Support immediately acted on my concern by writing a program that would split the contributions into their respective fiscal years.  The result was a general fund and at least one supplemental general fund in each year.  At our request, he then merged the various funds in each fiscal year into a single general fund for that year.  This saved up untold amounts of data entry time that would have been required to set the situation aright on our own.

On another occasion, I needed to print out a report that would list all the members that we had in our archive.  When I discovered that such a report did not exist among the preformatted reports in IconCMO, I called Tech Support.  They offered to create a preformatted report for me and even ensured that it would contain all the types of data that I required.  They were so responsive that the new report was completed and available online that same day.  This helpful support not only solved my problem but also was proactive in helping all your other subscribers who may need such a report in the future.

Just this week, in the course of handling contributions, we ran into a problem that I brought to the attention of Bill in Tech Support.  He immediately investigated the problem and identified a bug in the IconCMO program while I was still on the phone with him.  He not only initiated a bug report to your programmers, but he also worked with our data to correct the effects of the bug on our database, all within a few hours.  His can-do spirit is most impressive and his zeal to address our concerns immediately has given our entire church leadership a very positive outlook on what for us is a very new product and way of doing church management.

The bottom line is that our experience with IconCMO and your staff has been nothing short of outstanding.  In fact, I can say without reservation that your customer service is the best I have seen from any software vendor in my twenty years of working with information systems and software.  You guys are the tops and I would enthusiastically recommend IconCMO and your company to any church.

Thank you for all your exemplary service and support.  You have an exceptional product that has provided us with many new efficiencies, and you make it a pleasure to work with both the software and your company.

Sincerely,
Chris Bennett
Assistant Pastor

As the parish secretary of a smaller Catholic community my duties are widespread, including bookkeeping.  IconCMO definitely makes my job easier by combining the membership and accounting systems together.  I have to admit that when we first converted over, it took a while to get used to the fund accounting.  It certainly was not the same as our prior program; however, the support I got from IconCMO was incredible.  I would simply call and the problems that I encountered would be addressed immediately.  There is no one in the industry, in my opinion, with a better support staff.  They took the time to answer any and all questions, no matter how simple or complex.  Also, they were always striving to satisfy us in any way they could.  If we needed a report to read something that it did not currently do, they tried to accommodate us in any way that they could.  Again, I cannot say enough about the support we receive!

The program itself also streamlined my work significantly.  First and foremost, no more skipping around from program to program.  With the accounting and membership sides available to you on one screen, you have access to everything at once.  All the contributions, accounts receivables and donations are automatically posted each time they are entered under a individual member or vendor.  No more double entries, meaning in my case, a decrease in accounting errors!  Also, both the accounting and membership sides are very easy to navigate.  Everything is put in pretty simplistic terms and very easy to understand.

With all that said, my favorite part of the whole program is how easy it is to make labels!  This may not seem very important in the whole scheme of things, but they have made it so easy.  You can print labels for the entire parish, a single group, a whole category, or select members in just a few simple steps.  Also, no more wasting labels.  With this program, you can select with the push of a button, where you want the labels to begin printing.  With the amount of labels that we print, this has helped a great deal.

After having the opportunity to use IconCMO in our parish I would highly recommend anyone to use it.  With all the features discussed above and many additional ones including the ability to e-mail parishioners right from the membership program and the ability to work online at home or anywhere else, it is a hard system to beat.  I truly believe it is a superior product with the best support anyone could ask for.

Julie Grubb
Parish Secretary, St. Elizabeth’s Church