Getting Started With Crimson

OVERVIEW

Welcome to Getting Started with Crimson Church Management Software (Crimson CMS)!

This “Getting Started Guide” is meant to highlight the initial administrative things the Church Administrator or Business Manager should do to prepare Crimson CMS for use by herself/himself and others. This guide does not cover everything that the Church Administrator needs to do – only the first steps that are necessary for effective and efficient functional use. These steps cover the fundamentals required to prepare the system to accept data related to processing members, their payments, donations, and dependent information. Moreover, the initial setup and configuration includes preparing the Crimson Mobile Outreach Tool for church members to use.

Use the built-in Search feature within Crimson CMS for details on how to perform other tasks and where to find functionalities.

STEP ONE – Setup Lookup Values

Lookup values are the values that appear in drop-down lists and permit you to restrict your users’ data input to pre-determined values to ensure data consistency and accuracy for analysis and reporting.

Go to Settings in Main Menu on the left of the screen:

  • Member Types – Types of members your church has (Eg. Regular, Associate, Visitor, Donors)

  • Member Status – The status of a person’s membership (Eg. Active, Dormant, Pending)

  • Marital Status – A person’s marital status (Eg. Married, Single, Divorced)

  • Member Payment Types – The purpose of money given to the church (Eg. Tithes, Offering, Building Fund)

  • Member Payment Methods– The methods of payment the church accepts (Eg. Cash, Checks, CashApp)

  • Currencies – The currencies your church accepts or expects to accept (Eg. US Dollars)

  • Ministries – The individual ministries/departments in your church (Eg. Women, Men, Music, Youth)

STEP TWO – Setup Activity Types

Crimson CMS allows you to track the number of persons who attended a specific event/program. This configuration allows you to decide which events can be tracked.

Go to Activities in the Main Menu on the left of the screen:

  • Select Types of Activities

STEP THREE – Perform Custom Configuration

These settings allow you to customize your CMS for reporting purposes, details for donations and End-of-Year Tax letters, donation receipts, and some information used in the Crimson Mobile Outreach Tool.

Go to Settings -> Custom Configuration:

  • Church logo

  • Names & signatures of 2 signatories used on donation receipts and letters

  • Contact information

    • Address

    • Phone Number

    • Website Address

    • Office email address

  • Durations - the # of days’ worth of data to display on the Home dashboard

    • Attendance

    • Payments

    • Donations

STEP FOUR - Perform Outreach Management

Crimson CMS provides content management capabilities for its companion Mobile Outreach Tool. The settings here control or determine the content that your members see when using the Crimson Mobile Outreach Tool. For a sample or to see how this can be used, use this Client Key DCDC-2062-145 to view our Crimson Mobile Outreach Tool Church Demo.

Go to Members -> Outreach:

  • Dashboard - View outreach analytics, QR-Code, Client Key

  • Pastor (Message from the Pastor)

  • News - News articles to share with members

  • Scriptures - Scripture passage and references

  • Themes - Biblical themes for each month of the year

  • Prayer Requests - Members submit prayer requests

  • Schedules - Regularly Scheduled Events

  • Events - Schedule of Special Events

  • Contact Us - Managing contacts for user interactions

  • Customization (& Geo-location using Google-based map and directions):

    • Page labels

    • Latitude

    • Longitude

STEP FIVE - Add Members & Dependents

Go to Members -> Add/Edit:

  • Add Members

  • Edit Members

  • Add Members’ Dependents

  • Import Member data (coming soon)

NEXT STEPS

  1. Using the Built-In Help Feature (Search)

  2. Learning About Crimson CMS (About)

  3. Getting Help (My Profile icon -> Get Support)

  4. Adding Users (Settings -> Create/Edit User Accounts)

    1. Administrator role - unrestricted access

    2. Finance Admin - access restricted to financial functionalities

    3. Member Admin - access restricted to member functionalities

    4. Auditor - access restricted to viewing only - cannot make changes

  5. Recording Payments, Donations, and Pledges (Financial)

  6. Importing Payment data (coming soon)

  7. Generating Reports (Reports)

  8. Query - for Pastors to query Members, Dependents, Payments, Donations

  9. Facility Management with Rental Application Forms (coming soon)

  10. Suggesting New Features (My Profile icon -> Get Support -> Incident Type: New Feature)