Other projects in the works
Another big project I’ve been working on that we wanted launched with the new worship center is a children’s check-in system. I actually started research months ago, looking to replace our entire church database to something more usable, and find a good children’s check-in system along with it, but after months of research I was told there wasn’t $$ in the budget to get something before the new worship center opened, so we had to make do with what we have. And I should say what we have as far as a children’s check-in system is woefully inadequate by itself, but after lots of brainstorming we came up with something that I hope works alright, but is still mostly manual. The core of our new check-in system are photo id cards with barcodes on the back. We took a picture of every family and collected some information. Then we made their id cards. The front has the family photo and the names of those who are allowed to pick up the children. The picture should also include the children, plus whoever is allowed to pick them up. The back has a barcode for every child. Our church management system then allows us to use barcode scanners and label printers with their attendance software. A parent walks up to our homemade kiosks and scans each barcode on the back of their id cards, and in return get a name badge for each child.
Some of the problems with this system. It doesn’t accurately track attendance. Yeah, that’s right. We use their attendance software, but we can’t use it to accurately track attendance. The reason is the way we’re using it we can’t choose what class a child is attending. So we can’t tell if they’re here for the 9:15 Sunday School, or the 11:00 children’s church, or if they’re here at 8:00 with the early crowd. So attendance is still done manually.
The other problem with the system is that it times out if it’s not used after a short amount of time. In other words the system has to be restarted between services.
There’s a few other nuisances, but nothing I can’t work around. Overall, I’m not satisfied with what we have, but it’s what we have for now so I’m doing my best to make it work.
