About bvcms
Welcome to bvcms, an open source, web-based application for managing your church: its members, visitors, organizations, attendance, contacts, and contributions. Since bvcms is open source it is both free (in monetary cost) and open in its source code (you can edit, expand, revise, or entirely rewrite the software from the source code).
Features
- Web access from home and mobile devices
- Quick Search for an individual
- Task system for assigning and tracking Ministry Contacts
- HTML reports for drilldown, PDF reports for paper based output
- Scanning interface for volunteer applications and enrollments
- Online Applications for VBS, Groups etc.
- Superfast, efficient wand scanning for attendance records
- Rules based church membership status tracking
- Attendance tracking consideration for In-Service, Visiting Members, Mission Trips etc.
- QueryBuilder for advanced searches
- Excel interface to Contributions
- Contributions export to Shelby Systems General Ledger
- Export to Contribution Statements provider
Project History
Bellevue Baptist Church experienced a dilemma in 2007. Bellevue found that the commercial and proprietary church management system they had been utilizing to manage the church was no longer fitting their needs. In November of 2007 Bellevue initiated the bvcms project - an endeavor to write a new ChMS from the ground up. In May of 2008 bvcms was introduced to the Bellevue staff for read-only access. The legacy system continued to be utilized for all data entry but bvcms became the option of choice for search and reporting. In August Bellevue extended access to bvcms to the Bible fellowship teachers and lay leaders so that they could better manage and track their groups. Before a year had passed the legacy system had been entirely retired and by April of 2009 five hundred active users were working with bvcms.
bvcms was such a success (including rave reviews from Bellevue's in-house user base) that it made sense to share this innovation with other churches. Bellevue didn't want to add yet another commercial and proprietary solution to the marketplace, so instead Bellevue launched bvcms as a free and open source software project. On April 19, 2009 the first public release of bvcms was made available on CodePlex and now bvcms is utilized by churches around the world.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you have questions about the bvcms open source project? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions document for answers to common questions such as: How does Bellevue benefit from open sourcing bvcms? How do other churches benefit from bvcms? How does an open source project work?
Blog
We figure there are two types of people in the audience. Some are just church folks: pastors, assistant pastors, administrators, leaders and staff. Hopefully we'll answer all your questions on this site and if we don't, just use the contact page to get in touch. You'll be able to watch videos (most no longer than five to ten minutes) showing the system in use. And there is a live Demo system you can register for (see the sign in link in the upper right corner of this page).
Other folks are technical: information technology admins at church, software developers, database admins, etc. Some of you are just curious about the technology we are using. Others are investigating the feasibility of the system for your church. Some may want to get involved in the project and contribute patches and source code to the system. Potential contributors who develop software will want to investigate the Docs on the wiki site (see menu) where guidelines for contributing to the open source project will be published.
Because we want to keep you looking and interested, there is a blog which you can subscribe to keeping you apprised of what's going on with the project. There will be both user-related and developer-related posts to the blog. You'll be able to subcribe to all blog posts or to a specific category of posts.
Hosting
Large churches may want to house bvcms on their own in-house servers. Smaller churches will want to have someone else manage the system for them. At some point, we'll start a line of business to host the application for a reasonable fee but in the meantime, Bellevue has graciously offered to host a vew virtual machines running on a separate server to get us started on offering a hosting site for churches that want to get started.
Future
We hope to grow bvcms by enlisting other churches to sponsor and participate in the continued development of the system. There are many opportunities for adding new features to the system. We'll keep a list of things we want to do and where we want to go with bvcms. You'll find the current list on the Road Map page accessible via the menu.