About ChurchMouse Development for Church Accounting

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At ChurchMouse Development, we're a small company, incorporated in 1992. Our mission is the development of easy-to-use church accounting software and software for church record keeping and church management. We feel that financial controls start with church accounting; church management starts with church accounting; and church recordkeeping starts with church accounting. Our only products are the ChurchBook programs:

	ChurchBook/DataBase (including ChurchBook/DataBase Runtime Environment) and
	ChurchBook for Windows + Funds (withdrawn from marketing 7/9/05).
	You can click here to start an overview of our product family on our home page.

What:
In the execution of our mission, we want to provide churches with software tools to assist in processing and controlling their accounting functions, and assisting in the use of those records in the operation of the church office ― at the lowest possible cost.

Although we're not a non-profit company, we have only two financial goals:

	We want to take in sufficient moneys for support to cover our operating expenses. We take no salary from the business.
	We want to make it easy for volunteers (and salaried people) to keep track of their church's finances..

History I:
Our first public product was the DOS version of ChurchBook, in 1992. In 1995 we upgraded to ChurchBook for Windows (CBW 4.0), and in 1996 we expanded that to include accounting for multiple funds (CBW 4.1). At that time we used Borland's Object Windows as our development base in order to

	eliminate the need for costly prerequisite programs such as data bases, and
	restrict the disk requirements for the program and data storage.

CBW41 met those objectives very well, but it suffers from the concomitant restriction of 386 architecture: it must work within a maximum of 64 kb for a data segment. This in turn made it difficult to force many improvements into the program.

CBW41 was withdrawn from marketing on 7/9/05 because of the proliferation of Windows XP compatible printers which don't support old style fixed-format printing, as well as the availability of powerful, large capacity PCs at a reasonable price.

History II:
In 1999 we started development of a database version of ChurchBook, using Borland's "Delphi" product, along with their InterBase data base product. For a number of technical reasons, we abandoned that project when it was almost completed.

In 2001, we started over, using Microsoft's Access program as the development tool and data base. The program was completed in December of 2001 and tested using All Saints' 2001 data in parallel to CBW41. CB/DB was rolled out in January, 2002 to a limited number of Beta Test users, where most of the problems we encountered were because of trying to allow the users to use Access 2000 instead of Access 2002. Within a few weeks, the program settled down and the users have been enthusiastic about the advances in this version.

We have subsequently discovered that use of CB/DB in the "Access Runtime" environment is a better solution for users with newer machines than the CBW41 solution, even though it is not as spiffy as the pure Access environment.

Our goal for the future is to have both of the CB/DB environments available via the internet, and to provide support to all users via e-mail. Telephone support will be used in call-back mode for situations that can't be handled efficiently via the internet.