Planning Center vs MIP Fund Accounting: Which is a better fit?

Allen V.: Well, my name's Allen. I'm a pastor at Reach Church and my company size is just me and managing our church. However, I would give Planning Center five stars. Before Planning Center, we used a host of options from all over the place for music service purposes. We had printed sheet music that we would hand out each week in giant binders to keep them all there. After Planning Center, of course, they have a digital system and everyone's coordinated and synced up together on our music team as well as when it came to church database functionality. Planning centers, people, is free and anything else, the only other free options you would get for this is basically an Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet. And so the People software is quite powerful and the price is right and it helped us manage our entire system together. We also use our check-ins for youth and kids areas, and before that we also just had to have paper sign in sheets and keep them in a file folder, and now it's all stored digitally and it's much easier. I chose Planning Center, initially why I gravitated to it was simply that it's kind of an industry standard. It's really the default option that everyone uses, and I don't say that as a negative thing. It's that way for a reason. It's powerful. It's very easy to use. The entry level cost is zero. And for small church plants like ourself, we were able to get off the ground and use all of their plugins and different parts of their service for free until we grow more. And so I've used it at every church I've been at. We've had paid versions and free versions of things, and it is a powerful piece of software, easy to use, easy to train volunteers on. And again, price is right and it's the industry standard. Getting started with Planing Center is extremely easy. There's almost zero learning curve to it. The initial setup is simply putting people into a database to manage your attendance lists and things like that. From that point, you can just learn what you need as you need it, and it's quite simple and straightforward. They have a ton of knowledge base videos. They have easy to reach chat support, they have easy to reach phone support, so it's extremely easy. If you're considering getting Planning Center, I would just suggest you try. Start out with people. Like I said, it's free. There is no cost other than your time to be able to see if it's a good fit for you, and then if it is, you can add whatever fits in your budget. The sky is the limit. You can run pretty much your whole church off of Planning Center, including a customized church app, or you could just simply keep a free database to be able to email people easily in groups.