PDS Ministry Scheduler is designed to lighten the task of coordinating and assigning ministers for the various functions at Sunday and weekly liturgies. The program allows a church to assign up to 15 liturgical ministers [Servers, Lectors, Eucharistic Ministers, Ushers, Head Ushers, Greeters or Others] in a chronological fashion, but still give full attention to an individual minister's time schedule and changing Service schedules.
Key Features and Benefits
- A minister can specify "Bad Days" of the week where he or she is unable to serve
- Specify up to three "Away Periods", giving both a beginning and ending date, that a minister is not available
- Even or odd weeks of the year can be flagged as periods when the minister can not be scheduled. This is for the benefit of people who work on alternate weeks not corresponding to specific weeks in a month
- Individual family members are never scheduled at different times on the same weekend, but it is also possible to prohibit people in the same family from serving together
- A minister can select up to three Preferred Services at which to serve. You can select if the preferred Services are always assigned in the order in which they were entered or are rotated among the preferences.
- A minister also can specify up to three "Don't Want" Services, for which he/she will NOT be assigned
- It is permissible for a minister to be commissioned in more than one ministry. In this case, he/she will be alternated among these ministries.
- It is possible to assign a particular person to a specific Service, bypassing the scheduling engine. (As an example, there might be a special wedding anniversary service that you want the couple's son to serve)
- You can group ministers so they will always serve together
- There are three types of Services defined, PERMANENT SERVICES that are celebrated the same time each weekend, DAILY SERVICES that are celebrated during the week, and SPECIAL SERVICES, such as the Easter Vigil service, that occur at a specific time and date. Since you might want different groups of people to be assigned to each of these services, you are able to indicate for each minister the type of service that they are permitted to be assigned.
- The output format includes spreadsheets, mailing labels, custom reports, and telephone contact sheets. These reports can be sent to the printer or exported as text or RTF documents for inclusion in your word processor for further formatting.
