IconCMO Blog

  • Free Trial
  • Finance
  • People
  • Tech
  • Updates
  • About
    • About Jay
    • About Josh
    • About Michelle
    • About Robert
    • Comment Policy

Free E-Book: Recording and Increasing Church Donations.

December 18, 2012 By Jay Leave a Comment

This e-book was designed to help staff and volunteers understand the importance of recording contributions of various different types (eg. non-cash vs. cash). Understanding the various methods of giving can help a church generate income when financial times are tough and provide donors the right documentation for their tax returns. Additionally, it helps the church and donors so neither face implications for accepting the donations incorrectly.

 

Recording and Increasing Church Donations

Click here for the Free E-Book on Recording and Increasing Church Donations.

Filed Under: Contributions Tagged With: church management software, contribution statements, donations, irs, web-based

IconCMO Custom Reporting Beta Is Here!

December 13, 2012 By Robert 11 Comments

A beta version of custom reporting has been released for IconCMO!

IconCMO Custom Reporting is designed to help you get the information you need from IconCMO as quickly as possible.

How to Access Custom Reports

You can find it in the menu under System→Utilities→Custom Reporting.

To give a user ID access to this window, go to System: Security: Membership and select a user ID. You can then assign ‘Read-Write’ access to the custom reports window and click the save button.

Current Features

  • Choosing a data set for display.
  • Choosing which columns to show, as well as what order those columns ought to appear in.
  • Minimal sorting functionality.

We have lots of ideas for improving IconCMO Custom Reports, including…

  • Saving custom reports for later use.
  • More data sets from IconCMO.
  • More sorting options.
  • Filtering or limiting the output by some criteria, such as name or date range.
  • Further performance improvements, especially for large data sets.
  • Formatting options.

    IconCMO Custom Reporting Beta is Here!
    Photo Credit: dantaylr

IconCMO Custom Reporting is still in its very earliest stages, and we will be continuing to improve it! It should be helpful as-is for some churches and it is definitely a good basis to provide some really great functionality moving forward. This is a completely new kind of program for us, so there’s a lot we will be learning over the next couple months.

Please leave a comment below and let us know what would make this tool more useful for you!

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, church technology, custom reports

CMO Goes HTML

November 15, 2012 By Robert Leave a Comment

IconCMO Reports Now Available in HTML Format

html tag italicized by Jesper Rønn-Jensen
“html tag italicized” by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Sometimes having an extra option can make life much easier. Some of you have suggested that we add a formatting option to IconCMO reports – HTML.

So we have. You can now generate almost any IconCMO report (membership, groups, contributions, finances and so on) in HTML.

Advantages

1. You now have another option for the appearance of your reports.

2. You can run IconCMO reports online from any computer without having Excel or Adobe Reader installed. The report just appears in a new window without any hassles on your end. You can print it straight from your browser and even adjust the overall size of the document before printing.

3. HTML files are easier to manipulate than the other formats. For instance, you could save one of your reports on your computer and open it with Microsoft Word. From there, you could delete words, delete lines, delete entire columns, change fonts, change font sizes or colors, include your church’s logo… You get the idea.

So really, to be precise, we didn’t add an extra option; we added many. Just one more step in our tireless efforts to give you outstanding service and ease your church management experience.

Selecting HTML Format

HTML Option for IconCMO Reports

 

Sample HTML-Formatted Report

Sample HTML Report from IconCMO

 

Try out our new reports and tell us what you think!

 

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, church membership, communication

Do You Take Advantage of Bulk Mail Discounts? Read This.

November 1, 2012 By Robert 4 Comments

Did you recently receive a letter from the USPS?

Every so often, we get a question from one of our customers regarding the use of barcodes for bulk mailing. The question typically comes up when a church receives a letter from the post office saying something like this:

Effective January 28, 2013, mailings of letter-size and flat-size mailpieces, as well as postcards, will need to have an Intelligent Mail R barcode to be eligible for automation prices.

The letter is full of jargon and somewhat confusing so we emailed Chad at our local post office to find out exactly what this meant for our customers.

To cut a long story short

If your church is not currently using barcodes, these changes will not affect you.

Bulk mail resources for churches | picture of vintage mail bag
Photo Credit: Marcin Wichary

Interested in the long story?

Below are some additional explanations and resources so you can learn more about bulk mailing.

Postage Pricing Calculator

http://dbcalc.usps.gov/

Note: When using the calculator, start by selecting ‘Standard’ from the drop-down list under ‘Letter’.

Nonprofit Postage Discount Calculator Standard Letter

Automation vs. Machinable

Nonprofits work on two levels: Automation and Machinable.

Automation mail is mail that is 100% barcoded and prepared for the Postal Service’s high-speed mail processing equipment.

In order for automation mail to be cost-effective, an organization would have to send thousands of mailings multiple times a month.

Machinable mail is presorted and does not require barcodes. This type of mail is divided into one of two levels, AADC and Mixed AADC. This will be determined by the post office when you drop off the actual pieces of mail.

Another good site to reference

http://savepostage.com/

This site lists and explains each of the different levels of discounts. An organization receives the biggest savings when mail is sorted by zip code.

Please note: IconCMO, our web-based church management and accounting software does offer the ability to sort mailings by zip code.

The next level of discounts requires that the mail pieces have a barcode and are address verified using a CASS or PAVE system. The report that is given once the address list is matched to the USPS zip code database is called USPS Form 3553. The additional cost of the permit and the software essentially wipes out any discounts that the church would have received. The cost savings also vary depending on if mail pieces are going to the same 5 digit zip code or different ones.

Another SavePostage page with additional information about CASS:

http://savepostage.com/bulkmail101/cass.html

Why does the post office send these letters?

This letter was intended to inform you that Intelligent Mail barcodes will be replacing the POSTNET barcodes as of January 2013. Again, you can just disregard this letter if your church is not currently using barcodes.

 

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, communication, non-profit

Church Software & Grocery Shopping!

October 11, 2012 By Jay 6 Comments

In today’s economy everyone is watching what they spend money on, including groceries.

Church software and grocery shopping
Photo Credit: ckforjc

Many factors can complicate our choices. For example, choosing the item with the lowest price on a grocery shelf doesn’t always mean a bargain. Why? Because the shelf has a price per unit (eg: ounce, liter, pound) for that particular brand.

In America we are fortunate that we have such a wide selection of food. But there’s a downside. It may take a little longer to determine what a good value is. Determining value transcends into everything we buy, including church management software (ChMS). Checking out ChMS feature charts, comparing prices or even using references are all prudent measures; however, they don’t answer the root question:

“Does the solution solve the true needs of the organization at the best value?”

I know many shoppers are loyal to one brand because it tastes better to them, and that’s okay. I coin this as the brand loyalist syndrome. I suffer from it with ketchup – I will only use Heinz :).  But we see this same loyalty with church software even when the software is a detriment to the church’s mission.

A Grocery Example:

Below are four jars of pickles listed below with varying prices and features.

  • Jar #1 ($4.19 8oz.)  – unit price is $0.052 (features:  easy to open lid, dill spears, and zesty)
  • Jar #2 ($4.99 12oz.) – unit price is $0.042 (features:  easy to open lid , dill slices, bread & butter)
  • Jar #3($5.49 8oz.) – unit price is $0.069 (features:  easy to open lid, dill slices, bread and butter)
  • Jar #4 ($4.79 12oz.) – unit price is $0.039 (features:  normal lid, dill slices, bread and butter)

Analyzing by price alone, Jar #1 would be the winner ($4.19 is the lowest price), yet it’s not the best bargain when comparing price per unit because Jar #4 is .039 per oz.

Analyzing price in its various forms is only one facet to determining what the best value is for the money. A consumer must also pick based on their needs. What if the consumer needed an easy to open lid? Jar #2 is the clear winner here whereas Jar #4 is not even in the running because this feature is not available.

What if the consumer wanted bread and butter pickles that are found in jars #2, #3 and #4? In this case, Jar #4 is the best value out of the three.

Still, that’s not the whole story. What if the production facility is filling the jars with mostly water and giving you fewer pickles? The consumer may find out that Jar #3 is the best value because it has the most pickles.

Analyzing a jar of pickles is daunting when there are many things to consider like price per unit, types of pickles, net weight (removing the water), and easy to open lids for users. Imagine how much harder it is analyzing church software when each solution has thousands of features that have to satisfy multiple users across various ministries.

The task is made harder yet when you look at each feature from various angles as we did with the pickles: bottom line price vs. price per unit, easy to open lids verses normal lids, net weight of product….

An Example of a Church Software Feature:

Let’s use an example of entering in donations. I think it is safe to say every ChMS company has this capability; however, how would you rate them when one has more keystrokes to enter a weekly transaction than another? Would you rate them the same if the one that takes more keystrokes can give you 10X better reporting and graphing than the one that takes fewer strokes?

This small example points to a very real fact that churches must do an in depth analysis of…

  • their needs
  • their wants
  • the importance of each need and want
  • user feedback on each feature within each package
  • price
  • having the correct feature set for the church

These are just some of the items to review, and unfortunately none of them can be answered looking at a feature charts or gathering referrals.

Final Thoughts:

It’s prudent for churches to get a demo of the actual product and see it performing the task they want.

Requesting a webinar, which shows the product and its ability to prospective clients, is another great way to match the organization’s goals to the software’s capabilities.  Don’t rely on a PowerPoint slide and a promise that the software can accomplish everything you need.

To get the biggest bang for your buck, analyze each need the church has, match that to the software, analyze how that feature is deployed, and then determine which one the users like the best.

There are some features that may be worth more to the church than others and those needs should be weighted appropriately.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: church management software, church technology, non-profit, saas, web-based

Is your web browser out of date? Read this.

October 9, 2012 By Robert Leave a Comment

How to upgrade your church software experience
Photo Credit: Joybot

What is on your list of things to do today? Take out the trash, stop at the drycleaners, run to the grocery store, update your web browser?

When you use IconCMO, you view the website in a browser. Your browser needs to be maintained, which includes updating it each time new features are added or bugs are fixed.

We design IconCMO to work best on the newest versions of browsers (even though it will still work on older ones sometimes). If you do not update your browser, content may not display correctly and your overall internet experience could slow down.

Browser makers have made the updating process easy–it generally only takes about five minutes to complete.

How to upgrade your web experience:

  • Check what version you currently have on your computer.  Open the browser program, on the toolbar click ‘Help’ and then click on ‘About [the name of the program.]’
  • Click on the links below to go to the sites where you can safely download the latest browser versions.

Mozilla FireFox

Internet Explorer

Google Chrome (Updates automatically. Click to read more.)

Safari

Sea Monkey

  • The website you download from usually has detailed instructions. Just click ‘download’ on the latest version of the browser, and follow the step-by-step instructions.

Optimize your browser for IconCMO:

Once you are finished updating your browser, log into IconCMO and go to the ‘! getting started’ menu in the upper right corner of your screen. Click on the ‘Browser Settings Document’ to download a copy; you can either save it to your computer or print it out. Follow the instructions for your specific web browser to ensure it works correctly with IconCMO pop-up messages and reports.

Sometimes it’s a pain to keep downloading updates; we get it. But it’s really worth doing to make sure everything continues to run smoothly and securely. You can feel good about checking one more thing off your “to-do list” for today, and don’t forget to take out the trash!

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: church management software, church technology, online security

Announcement: New IconCMO Integration!

September 26, 2012 By Robert 2 Comments

Icon Systems is excited to announce our partnership with SecureSearch. Our church management software, IconCMO, is now directly integrated with SecureSearch so you can easily obtain background information when recruiting staff and volunteers for the church.

Read the full press release: Icon Systems and SecureSearch Partnership.

Lauren Hunter also posted about the integration on Church Tech Today. Read her article: 3 Simple Steps to Ensure Every Volunteer is Background Checked.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the integration!

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, church technology, iconcmo partners

Fine Tuning: Some Recent Improvements to IconCMO

September 12, 2012 By Robert 4 Comments

Fine Tuning: Some Recent Improvements to IconCMO

Changes to IconCMO End Road Work Sign

I’ve listed some of our latest improvements under the windows to which they apply.

 

Banking: Checkbook: Checkbook Activity

1. Fiscal Year
This window now displays transactions by fiscal year instead of calendar year, which should make transactions less confusing for anyone whose fiscal year doesn’t match the calendar year.

2. Checkbook Drop Down
The Checkbook drop-down list in the upper left no longer says ‘Select-a-Checkbook’. Now when you open the window, this list automatically shows the first checkbook in the list.

3. Enter Key
You can now enter the check number at the bottom of the screen and press enter instead of clicking ‘Find Check’.

change to checkbook activity in iconcmo church management software

Question: So how do you make the account you use most often appear at the top of the list?

Answer: Go to the chart of accounts (General-Ledger: GL: Chart of Accounts) and click on the desired checking account. Under ‘Account Name’ near the bottom of the window, change the name. By adding an a or a 1 to the beginning of a checking account’s name, you can make it appear first in the drop-down list in ‘Checkbook Activity’.

 chart of accounts in iconcmo church management software

 

Banking: Credit Cards: Credit Card Activity

Like the ‘Checkbook Activity’ window, this window now shows the fiscal year and automatically starts with the first credit card account in your list.

change to credit card activity in iconcmo church management software

 

People: Groups: Grp-Households or Grp-Members

The groups windows now link households or members in the group lists to the actual household or member data. Now, you can click on the last name of someone in a group list to pull up their information.

So, if I’m looking at the group below and want to get Maritsa Ashton’s contact info, I can just click on her last name.

change to member groups in iconcmo church management software

Up will come her membership form with her contact info.

This will come in very handy for group leaders. If they go to a list of their group members and click on someone’s name, they can make calls, update records, make notes, and send individual emails, all in one spot. However, group leaders won’t be able to do any of this unless administrators give them security access (‘Read Only’ or ‘Read – Write’) to the membership list.

 

Contributions: Batches: Enter

Some changes have been made here that will alleviate some of the confusion that users have had.

Create Batch & Enter Contributions
The ‘Add Batch’ button is now called ‘Create Batch & Enter Contributions’. This button now creates a batch and opens the ‘Enter Contributions’ window. In the ‘Enter Contributions’ window, note that when you type an envelope number in the search box near the top, you can simply tap your enter key instead of clicking on ‘Find’.

 change to entering donations in iconcmo church management software

Modify Batch Info
If you click on a batch, you’ll find that ‘Change Batch Date’ and ‘Change Batch Name’ have given way to one new button for all your batch changing needs—‘Modify Batch Info’.

 

Duplicate Batches
From now on, duplicate batches are not allowed (with the exception of EFT batches). When you add or modify a batch, the system will check to see if a batch with the same name and date already exists. This feature should help to avoid accidental double entries and confusion about your records.

 

AP: AP Activities: AP Reports

We added the city, state and zip code to the address in the ‘Vendor Contact List’ report.

 

Organization: Preferences: Church Membership

The ‘Save New or Modified’ button and the ‘Delete Selected Option’ button have caused confusion, so we removed them. Now, there’s one button that says ‘Save New’, ‘Modify Drop Down’ or ‘Delete Selected Option’ depending on what you’re trying to do.

Let’s take one of our drop downs—‘Status’—to see how this button of many faces works.

Save New
With the ‘Current Values’ field on ‘Add New Entry’, we can type in a new status (maybe ‘New Member’) and click ‘Save New’. ‘New Member’ is now part of your status list.

change one to membership status in iconcmo church management software

Modify Drop Down
If we select something from ‘Current Values’, like ‘New Member’, and leave the dot by ‘Modify’ selected, we can type in our modified status name (maybe ‘Recent Member’) and click ‘Modify Drop Down’. Once we click ‘OK’ in the popup, the status has been successfully changed. Like the popup says, any people whose statuses we had changed to ‘New Member’ will be switched to ‘Recent Member’.

change two to membership status in iconcmo church management software

Delete Selected Option
But what if we decide we didn’t really need a new status after all, be it ‘New Member’, ‘Recent Member’ or otherwise? We can delete the status by choosing ‘Recent Member’ for ‘Current Values’ and clicking the dot next to ‘Delete’. In the ‘New / Modified Value’ field we then need to ‘Select a Replacement Value’ like ‘Active’ and click ‘Delete Selected Option’. If we click ‘OK’ in the popup, the status will be deleted and all ‘Recent Member’ people will be turned to an ‘Active’ status.

change three to membership status in iconcmo church management software

System Defaults in Drop Downs
You may notice that the system defaults no longer appear in the ‘Current Values’ drop down. We took them out of the list because, after all, they can’t be changed anyway.

 

Thank You!

We’d like to thank our customers for the valuable feedback and suggestions that lead to such improvements, and we hope these changes will ease your IconCMO experience.

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, church membership, fund accounting

More Updates to IconCMO!

August 10, 2012 By Robert 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we had made some awesome new changes to IconCMO. This week, we have even more exciting changes to add to the list!

Changes to Check Writing and Credit Card windows:

After a vendor is selected from the drop-down, the focus moves to the check amount field (this is only done on the check writing window since we fill in check number and date automatically.)

The debit field fills in automatically when you enter the check or credit card amount.

screenshot of changes to IconCMO check writing window
Click image to enlarge

Changes to Grp-Households and Grp-Members windows:

Most of the options (e.g. Instant Message, Group Email, Add All) are disabled when you open either of the groups windows.

Members or Households in a group display automatically when a group is selected and instructions on how to add Members or Households to that group are displayed.

The ‘Add All’ button on the Grp-Members window has been renamed ‘Add All Members’ and moved underneath the ‘Remove All Members’ button to match the Grp-Households window.

Members or Households are automatically displayed in the list when the Status is changed; you no longer need to click the ‘Display Members’ or ‘Display Households’ button.

Screenshot of changes to IconCMO group members window
Click to enlarge image

And last, but certainly not least:

You can print a single mailing envelope for a household, but many customers have mentioned it would be extremely helpful to have the option to print a single label for a household instead. So we added the option to print single label from the household form!

Screenshot of IconCMO household form single label button
Click to enlarge image

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: church management software, church membership, church technology, groups

The Busy Person’s Guide to Formatting Dates in IconCMO

August 2, 2012 By Robert 4 Comments

Did you know there’s a nifty little shortcut that can be used when entering dates in IconCMO? It’s not new, but a lot of people don’t know about it.

Today’s date gets filled in by default. But when you are using a date other than the current one, it can sometimes be tedious to type the date in a MM/DD/YYYY format every single time.

Use this shortcut to enter dates into the correct format quickly and without difficulty:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: church management software, church technology, fund accounting

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • …
  • 12
  • Next Page »

Looking for something?

Subscribe to email updates!

Sign Up Now
We respect your privacy and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Popular Posts

  • What are pass-through accounts?
    What are pass-through accounts?
  • Set Up IconCMO Mobile Apps
    Set Up IconCMO Mobile Apps
  • Fund Transfers and Account Transfers, part 1 of 2
    Fund Transfers and Account Transfers, part 1 of 2

Follow us on Twitter

My Tweets

Copyright © 2018 Icon Systems, Inc. · The Innovator in Church Software and Non-Profit Accounting Solutions!