November, 4 2010

Dear BVCMS Community,

You are receiving this newsletter because you have expressed an interest in BVCMS or you are a user of your church's web-based management system. You'll find instructions at the bottom of this email how you can opt-out of any future newsletters.

This newsletter will contain tips, information about new features, and announcments of upcoming events.

To keep you up-to-date, here are the latest news items and announcements from BVCMS.

Our new Web site!
The last year has been a whirlwind. BVCMS is now hosting 26 churches! And we are about to embark on a marketing campaign with the goal to increase that number to 200 churches by the end of 2011. Up till now, we have really done no marketing for BVCMS other than to respond to people who contact us through bvcms.com. Now is the time to step up activity and let the rest of the church world know about BVCMS. Our marketing campaign will involve conversations on social media sites, publishing articles, and some advertising. But the first step was to build a new Web site. Thanks to hard work and some really talented people, we are announcing our new Web site today. We think you are going to like it and you'll be proud to send your friends in the church community there to learn more about BVCMS.

Attention Admins: BVCMS now shows User info on the Person page
The Admin/Users page displays all users but it can be cumbersome to edit a user's account information. Now, to find a user, you go straight to their Person page using the same search tools you use to find anybody. Then, right there on their record, you can see a tab for System/User information. Click the username and you will be able to edit their roles, change their password or unlock their account. Easy. And system users that have Edit privleges can view the tab to see if a person has a user account.

Three New BVCMS Features
We are excited to inform you about three new features that will make BVCMS easier to use. We'll be writing a blog post and documentation for each of these features.

• Week at a glance BVCMS is a very flexible system consequently we don't have many hard-wired reports because each church organizes their ministries differently. However, we have finally come up with a way you can create your own custom week-at-a-glance attendance report. It allows you to group meetings and total the attendances for an entire week's activity into various views and sections. Each total becomes a hyperlink that allows you to drill down to the details. We are still in the process of documenting this new feature, but contact us and we'll help you get started with your own church.
• Automatic Duplicate check This feature makes it much easier for someone to manage and find duplicates in the system. For those users with Edit privleges, there is a System/Duplicates tab on the Person page. It computes the potential duplicates and displays the reason for the suspicion. So be sure to use this feature when you validate "Just Added" records. (You do have a policy/procedure for that, don't you?)
  
• Postbundle for contributions Finance admins are really enjoying the streamlined data entry process on the new PostBundle page. It helps you make short work of entering contributions and finding a giver's record. We even have a Postbundle/Batch process that interfaces with exported files from your online giving records or your bank's check scanning system.
  

Check out these developer resources to help you build and grow on BVCMS.

We now have a separate developer blog
Even though the developer community for BVCMS is small, we want to help build that group of people. I will be blogging from time to time topics that only a developer would care about. By having a separate blog just for developers, they can find pertinent information to help them better understand the architecture of BVCMS. This blog will contain articles to help you get started understanding how to code in BVCMS. Also BVCMS is full of interesting techiques and some that might be a bit difficult to get your mind wrapped around. I'll blog about some of those from time to time. Check out the developer's blog now.

Learn more about BVCMS by attending a webinar or virtual event. We would like to begin doing a webinar perhaps once every 4-6 weeks starting some time in January. Send us your ideas for these 90 minute webinars. Here's a sneak preview of the kinds of things Karen and I be presenting:

Learn how to set up online registrations
Coming soon
Did you know that BVCMS could handle all of your sign-ups for any kind of event? It does everything from sports team registration to camps, free and paid, discipleship classes, luncheons, and childcare.

What are the two most important things about BVCMS
Coming soon
Join this webinar and learn about people and organizations. You really need to get a good understanding of how you manage these two things. Everything else in BVCMS revolves around these.

Blessings,
David Carroll
BVCMS Developer

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BVCMS is a an open source, web-based, church management system. Usage Defined Software doing business as bvcms.com provides hosting, services, support, conversions and customizations for a fee.