The 106-year old parish of St. Cecilia has come a long way since its inception. With over 4,500 members from nearly 1,400 different families, the need to keep track and manage members, finances, and the St. Cecilia K-6 schoolSchool has never been more important.

Choices Made. When Parish Finance Committee Chair & Technology Advisor Randy Dalhoff sat down in late 2000 to determine which church management software would best fit the church’s needs, he spent hours upon hours reviewing all the major competitors by going through product demos and doing full evaluations of each program on the market.

“Right from the start, I liked ACS. I liked its flexibility and familiarity. I used to write C programs and the fact that ACS had crystal reports, which I knew how to use, was one of the major selling features. I knew these reports would allow me to generate any kind of report information I needed,” notes Dalhoff.

St. Cecilia has about 15 full-time staff at the church and eight teachers at the school, creating a large need for organization and information flow.

“When we bought ACS, we went to the school and presented HeadMaster. It wasn’t until nine months later that the school adopted it . . . and loved its features. Now they’re extremely happy that we’re all on the same platform,” Dalhoff commented.

Success Achieved. St. Cecilia purchased the entire ACS People Suite in order to be prepared for future growth and track contributions, and attendance of families that attend the church. They’ve recently put the Schedule Manager program into place in order to efficiently schedule events and programs at the church and to avoid overlap in facilities usage.

Joan Jones, St. Cecilia’s parish secretary, notes, “Because our computers are networked, everyone can schedule events on their own computer and not overlap. This makes a huge difference. We used to use a notebook for booking rooms. Now it’s all networked and had made a huge difference in our efficiency. I can even print out the schedule on weekly basis and post and hand out to our janitorial staff to streamline everyone’s work.”

St. Cecilia greatly benefits from the use of ACS in order to search for member information, look up specific records, and keep information current and consistent.

“Before ACS, we had a difficult time tracking some of the kids in our Sunday School. With ACS, we can look up people by first names, which makes our jobs much easier,” Jones comments. “I like the fact that you can reconfigure the system for these lookups and can keep everything current all the time.”

Jones also notes that one of her favorite features is that she can “bring up the whole screen with files from any area of the software—like from within the contributions field—and access and update these files from anywhere inside the program,” making her daily tasks much easier.

She also uses an electronic check reader to enter info into the ACS Contributions module each Sunday, which speeds up things considerably. By storing funds codes in the software program, she can easily look up how much is in each fund. “Not only is it very easy to enter contributions now, it’s easy to edit as well—and very easy to fix if you make a mistake,” comments Jones.

St. Cecilia also purchased the General Ledger, Payroll, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable modules from the ACS Financial Suite in order to manage its overall financial operations at the church.

Educational Advancements. St. Cecilia Catholic School has been using HeadMaster since the 2001 school year and enjoys the flexibility of the management solutions that help run its administrative offices for the K-6 school. With 175 students, Lois Vidimos, the school’s secretary, finds that HeadMaster makes her job much easier and puts information right at her fingertips.

“When I joined St. Cecilia three years ago, I found I really needed a software solution to help me accomplish my daily tasks and organize the school’s operations. I needed a system for tracking attendance and tools to streamline different forms and reports—St. Cecilia didn’t have anything to do this,” remarks Vidimos.

When Vidimos talked with the church staff at St. Cecilia, she found that they were successfully using ACS software to manage the church operations and decided to go with their recommendation to use HeadMaster, the ACS software package for managing private schools. She quickly discovered that using the same software platform enabled her to import contacts from the church and maintain corresponding records that allowed for additional organization of information and tracking of students.

Because the 175 students at St. Cecilia come from 125 different families that mostly attend the church, Vidimos can easily import contact information for the families and students directly from the ACS program to the HeadMaster program at the school, making it much easier to manage every aspect of student and parent information.

“HeadMaster was very easy to learn—I’ve worked on several different database programs before and this program was by far the easiest to use,” states Vidimos. “Now, managing student emergency forms at registration, class roster information, student and staff directory info, attendance reports, and emergency reports are simple and uncomplicated. This information is all in one place.”

Vidimos notes, “We look forward to using additional areas of functionality of the software as we grow and add more student programs.”

About St. Cecilia Catholic Church & School
St. Cecilia Catholic Church has recently celebrated its 103rd 106th anniversary. Having span over a century, St. Cecilia has been a mainstay in the Ames, Iowa community to its 4,200 500 members from nearly 1,400 500 different families. Through the St. Cecilia Catholic K-6 school, the church is able to provide a Christian learning environment to minister to the community. Additionally, St. Cecilia provides youth ministry activities to children in grades 7-12. Starting the Fall 2005, the school will accommodate grades P-5 and Religious Education will be grades 6-12.