Author Archives: peteshack

Tips for Successful Church Small Groups

Excellerate was originally designed in collaboration with one of the largest small group churches in the U.S. and, though we have since broaden our scope to become just as functional for churches that don’t use as many small groups, we have never lost our passion for helping churches run effective small groups. In fact, you can see our heart for small groups in the funny spelling of Excellerate. Continue reading →

Are Children Safe at Your Church? – Top Safety & Security Concerns

It feels like threats to our children’s safety are increasing all around us.  As a church, we’re trying to help overturn that, along with all other problems in our society, but we wouldn’t be good stewards if we didn’t do everything we can to protect the children in our church.  Here are some of the top safety and security concerns with ministering to children in church – Make sure you have a solution in place for these…

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Church Visitor Retention Tips

We at Excellerate have been working with churches for many years now, and in that time, we’ve seen how growing churches are finding success in retaining more visitors.  Read through these practices and think about how you could implement them in your church. Continue reading →

Visitor Follow-up with Excellerate

If you follow up with your first time guests within 24 hours, you’ll greatly increase your retention rate. That’s a small window, are you hitting it? Most churches don’t have a clue if they are.

What about the percentage of visitors not contacted? Everyone gets a busy signal occasionally. How often do your connectors manage to do the follow-up? How often do they forget? Again, many churches have no idea. But, people could easily be slipping right through the cracks, unnoticed, a hole unseen. Continue reading →

Church Tithes and Contributions Without the Stress

Are your tithe records in one place and your member records in another? Ever found yourself depressed at Christmas because it was almost January? Are your first weeks of the new year full of sleepless nights as you look up member information, print address labels, find the tithe totals, then do the whole thing over again with the spouse’s totals—all so you can send out tax receipts? Excellerate will eliminate these problems.

  • Excellerate stores all your member information together. Looking up someone’s tithes is as simple as double clicking.
  • You can generate year-end statements for your entire church in just a few minutes.
  • Each statement includes all the legally required disclaimers. The text is customizable in case laws change.
  • Use our extensive selection of reports to analyze tithing based on a variety of factors.
  • You have the option of reporting tithes by individual, or you can link family’s records together.
  • If people want to change how you report their tithes, you can make that change by simply checking a box.
  • If the post-tithe data entry frenzy leaves a member’s record spread among several records, you can easily condense these into one.
  • If you live in a country, like Canada, where each tithe requires a unique receipt number, Excellerate can automatically create these numbers.

Contribution data entry screen
The contribution entry screen is streamlined to minimize the number of keystrokes needed.
Security is Excellerate’s top priority.  Every user receives their own user name and password. When you create the username, you will also assign the level of clearance that user has.  The program has thirteen different areas where you can select the security level

For each area, you will select one of four levels of access:

  • None (the affected portion is blank)
  • Read only
  • Read and write
  • Read, write and delete

The financial portion has an additional security level, which only allows a user to see the last date a person made a tithe. The amount is hidden.

If you want to further increase security, you can enter tithes using ID numbers. Your members would just write the amount and their ID number on an envelope, then your team can do the data entry without seeing who gave what. This is also a good option if two members have the same name and you need to distinguish between them.

Excellerate can double check your totals. Simply count the total value of the day’s tithes and, as you enter each individual tithe, Excellerate will tell you how far your current total is from the grand total, alerting you of any discrepancies.

Excellerate includes nearly fifty default reports, plus a tool allowing you to build your own custom reports.

How To Improve Your Visitor Follow-up

An important component to any church management software is its ability to enhance your visitor retention. After all, if you aren’t reaching more people and growing, it doesn’t matter how great your church is managed.  To see the full benefits of the software, it helps to walk through a typical follow up process and see all the ways Excellerate improves it. Continue reading →