Audra Nelson has been a First Northeast Baptist Church member in Columbia, SC, for 25 years and joined the staff in 2021. She was laid off from her previous job due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and a new church staff position was opening up as a financial administrative assistant. Audra says the rest is history.
First Northeast Baptist used ACS People and Financials since 2004 before upgrading to Realm in 2019. Since Audra has been in her current role, they have been expanding how they use Realm and at which level they use it. For example, they have begun utilizing many integration and import features from the other products they are using, like Bill.com and Constant Contact.
On the Accounting side of things, Audra loves the import feature into Realm Accounting from Bill.com. She says that is one of the coolest projects she has worked on and credits it as their biggest win in the last two years due to time saved. Plus, she has built-in checks and balances to ensure the import and reconciliation goes as smoothly as possible.
“It took them three days to reconcile all the credit card transactions and the bill pays, putting all that information into Realm Accounting. So, the first project I worked on was to take all that data, transform it, and create an import for Realm. I’ve got two imports built, and I reduced that time from three days to a couple of hours.” -Audra Nelson, Financial/Administrative Assistant
The Constant Contact integration is new to the church, and they look forward to seeing the benefits. Since the pandemic, the church doesn’t print bulletins anymore. Instead, they use Constant Contact as a general distribution tool to send publications, links to new registration events, and other announcements to members through emails.
Audra says that the feature everyone should be using in Realm is Check-In. They use badge printers and, on average, check in 40-50 children each Sunday. With that many children going in and out of the classrooms, the badges must be printed to help keep things flowing and organized. There was about a year break where they didn’t have a children’s church program because of the pandemic, and they used this time to implement the new kiosk and badge process for when their programs started to back up. First, Northeast Baptist had many new people post-pandemic, so the badges were essential to identifying parents and matching them to their children’s badges.
Realm has many benefits, and Audra is excited about all the available features. Using the imports, integrations, and native features in Realm saves them time and makes their jobs easier.
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About Stacey Smith
Stacey joined the ACST team in 1998 in the support department and joined the marketing team in 2021 as an Associate Marketing Coordinator. Today she runs the ACST Ministry Champions program, which involves all references, reviews, and testimonials for all of our products and services. When she isn’t at work, she is spending time with her husband, two teenage daughters and furbaby Copper.
