Posted by Rick Chatham
When Fellowship One launched in January of 2004 there were two dozen reports included in the product. There were membership, roster, class assignment reports and the quintessential contribution statements. We knew that we were light on reports, so we quickly launched Report Central and began hiring report developers to field the many custom report requests that were pouring in from our new church partners. Consensus at the time concluded that we would peak somewhere around three hundred standard reports, give or take a hundred. Almost four years later there are over 1400 reports available in the Fellowship One Report Library.
Over this period of time we have learned a great deal from our churches about their reporting needs. We learned that most churches are very particular on how they want their contribution statements to be formatted. In response we created statement styles to ensure that your statements would look just as you wish. After a period of time we concluded that churches needed to generate significant numbers of mailing labels. So we created one-click labels from the majority of our people oriented reports. Overtime your reporting needs have become more sophisticated including an elevation of requests with trending and analytical elements. So our team is working diligently on
data warehouse and
OLAP solutions.
All in all these four years of reporting experience have enabled us to chart the future for Fellowship One reporting. 2008 will be an exciting time for us as we deliver several new products centered on custom reporting and analytics.
On
Church Dimensions we plan to share tips on current reporting solutions, announcements of new offerings and an occasional peek into the future. It goes without saying that we always welcome your feedback. The number one goal is to help you get the most from Fellowship One reporting.