Terry Chapman is my Director of Technology at Fellowship Church. Terry has done such an amazing job, taking our Technology department much further than I could have ever had been able to take it. I asked Terry to write a “What’s Working” focused on what other churches ask him often. Here is one thing that is “Working”.
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God is doing so many amazing things at Fellowship Church, and has really blessed this ministry as well as my department, that it is difficult to pick just one thing. God has his hand on our church and as a result there are many things that He has working for us. It has been my experience that the more that we reach up to God for direction and guidance, the more things tend to “work”. It has nothing to do with me or our staff, but more of just a God thing. That said, an area that we have really turned around is how we handle Point of Sale for our Source Bookstore and Café.

Point of Sale
More and more churches across the country are implementing a church bookstore or resource center. We first opened our Source Bookstore and Café in December of 1998 and as many of the church bookstores around the country the product of choice to manage the store and sales was Bookstore Manager. It worked well for us for a time, but as we continued to grow, it became apparent that the product would not be able to grow with us. So, the search began.

In 2003 it we decided to leverage the non-profit pricing and expertise of the software giant Microsoft and purchased their Microsoft Retail Management System product. We began planning the data migration and soon we were up and running on the product using it for point of sale for the bookstore as well as for our Café. The product has really taken us to the next level. There is no comparison of the technology from where we came from to this product.

Recently, we moved to the Headquarters version of RMS enabling us to have multiple stores and being able to manage them from one central location. We currently have 5 stores and everything is going really well. Here are some of the key benefits that it provides us to centrally control and manage:

•    Inventory Control and Tracking
•    Purchase Orders
•    Account System Integration
•    Pricing, Sales, and Promotions
•    Customer Management and Marketing
•    Employee Management

There is so much to the product and the solution as a whole that I could go on and on. The product has been very successful for us and I would highly recommend it to those looking for a change. I receive a lot of questions about what and how we are using our POS solution and you can take a look at Q&A blog post on my blog for a little more detail.

tags: whats working | microsoft | point of sale
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