What is Breeze?
Breeze ChMS is a cloud-based church management software that helps churches of all sizes manage their finances, members, events, and more. Among church leaders, Breeze is recognized for being user-friendly and simple to implement quickly and painlessly.
These various features include:
- Attendance tracking
- Church accounting
- Donations management
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Bank reconciliation
- Payroll management
- Event management
- Membership management
- Volunteer management
- Pledge management
- Worship planning
Breeze ChMS is a good choice for churches looking for a comprehensive church management software solution that’s both easy to use and affordable. When used properly, this helps your church to save time, maximize efficiency, and communicate better.
Pros and Cons of Breeze
Pros of Breeze
- Easy to use and affordable
- Comprehensive solution for managing all aspects of a church
- Includes features for managing members, events, finances, and more
- Customizable to fit the specific needs of each church
- Includes a mobile app (iPhone and Android) for easy management
- Customize your instance with your church name and logo
Cons of Breeze
- Some features may be more complex than others
- Might be expensive for smaller churches
Who Should Use Breeze?
Breeze ChMS is preferred by churches and ministries of all sizes looking for a comprehensive, easy-to-use, and affordable church management software solution. It’s primarily for churches in the United States and Canada since that’s where Breeze Giving currently works. The product is also optimal for English-speaking churches, since that’s the language it’s offered in.
Like most ChMS solutions, this is primarily applicable to church finance directors, accounting managers, database managers, communication coordinators, or operations pastors. If your church has multiple of these positions, Breeze aims to coordinate these to give your employees the opportunity at collaboration.
What is FlockBase?
Similar to Breeze, FlockBase is a digital church management software that centralizes several elements of church operations—from finances to membership—in a single database. The goal is to make these processes simple in a software solution that’s user-friendly and cost-effective. FlockBase’s primary features are church management, accounting integration, membership, and online giving.
Pros and Cons of FlockBase
Pros of FlockBase
- Affordable for most small and mid-sized churches
- Simple and user-friendly interface
- Wide range of features for church operations
Cons of FlockBase
- More limited features than other options
- Less customization options
- Challenges with customer support questions
Who Should Use FlockBase?
FlockBase promotes itself as “Church Management Software For Small to Mid-size Churches,” meaning that their emphasis is on simplicity and affordability. In fact, their website also calls FlockBase “the affordable church software solution” to firmly place the emphasis on appealing to small and mid-sized congregations.
FlockBase vs Breeze: Key Features Comparison
Attendance Tracking
Attendance tracking in Breeze and Flockbase are similar from a basic functionality standpoint, both allowing for attendance monitoring during events and services. Both products provide user-friendly interfaces that facilitates easily recording of attendance data.
Breeze’s simplicity and intuitive design make it accessible to users of varying technical proficiency. Customers can import event attendance manually, create attendance reports, filter users by attendance, and more within the database.
Flockbase software doesn’t offer as robust tracking capabilities because there is no child check-in feature or ability to export customized data or reporting. Customers don’t have access to custom forms or registration management within the Flockbase interface.
Church Accounting
Recognized for its user-friendly accounting tools, Breeze is designed for users with varying levels of financial expertise. It includes features such as donation tracking, fund management, and basic financial reporting. Breeze supports the ability to create a general ledger, view year-end reconciliation, and integrate with tools like Quickbooks.
Accounting is one of the major calling cards for Flockbase as outlined on their website. They offer the ability to compute payroll, manage direct deposits, create budgets, and print checks. There are also features for fund accounting and bank reconciliations.
Donations Management
Breeze comes standard with donation management features, including online contributions, donation tracking, and donor-giving statements. This simplifies the process for both church leaders and congregational supporters to see online donation reports. Breeze is tailored for managing mobile and text-giving and enables donors to cover transaction fees each time they donate.
Flockbase manages online donations and tracking through a third-party partnership with the Forte Payment System. This partnership integrates seamlessly with the Flockbase tool but does present with significant limitations with how users can give online.
This information is valuable as your church makes data-driven decisions about the future of your business. The key is making it easy for community members to contribute to your church and for your leaders to track those donations in a centralized platform.
Pledge Management
Increasing the online donations to your church requires planning. Knowing how much your congregation might give permits you to set annual goals for your expected income. This usually means asking your congregation to pledge a specific amount for a year or an upcoming season. This is a feature available on Breeze and Flockbase.
Breeze is set up for churches to create giving campaigns, request pledge amounts from users, and update these amounts as church families make donations. This makes it more manageable to monitor how much has been pledged across your entire community.
Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliation is the process of comparing the bank statement with the cash book to ensure that they agree. This is done to ensure there aren’t discrepancies between the records and all transactions have been recorded correctly. Reconciliations are imperative for ChMS systems like Breeze and Flockbase
Flockbase has the edge on Breeze when considering bank reconciliations because of Flockbase’s focus on accounting features. There are more options and flexibility to create reconciliations and compare financial reporting within Flockbase compared to Breeze.
Event Management
Handling and scheduling church events is a common practice using ChMS tools, and both Breeze and Flockbase accommodate that need. These events can be everything from holidays, worship services, or committee meetings. Breeze allows churches to generate sharable interactive calendars for use by the congregation, but this is not currently available to Flockbase software users.
Managing volunteers and generating attendance reports also come standard with both tools. Breeze takes event management a step further by also integrating event check-in and worship service planning into the mix.
Membership Management
Membership management helps you to organize people and contact records—this is what all ChMS tools are built around. This includes easily adding or editing people's records, communicating with users, and allowing members to view their personal profile. Ultimately, this serves as a database—a single place for your church leadership to manage any information about your people.
Both Flockbase and Breeze make it easy for churches to group people in a family or in volunteer groups. Breeze adds the ability to include a business designation on a person’s record. Otherwise, both tools manage people similarly.
Volunteer Management
Volunteer management is similar to membership management since these are based on people's records. The key is organizing people into various volunteer groups, tracking who signs up when, and allowing them to register as a volunteer for events within the calendar.
In Breeze, volunteers can be assigned specific roles and invited to events by a paltform admin. Volunteers can block out dates when they’re unavailable to serve. Flockbase does not have the ability to manage volunteers within its existing database.
Worship Planning
Handling the various elements of a weekly Sunday worship service is a valuable tool for any church leader. This involves setting the worship order, worship songs, and personnel needed at services. Unlike Breeze, Flockbase does not currently have a feature to manage worship planning.
Breeze improves worship planning by creating editable drag-and-drop templates that can be used for different styles of worship. Relevant files can also be attached from external sources like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Technical Support
Any ChMS tool is going to have issues or cause confusion regardless of how user-friendly it is. Therefore, customer support is valuable to using the system effectively. To this end, Breeze and Flockbase have various ways for communication with their customer team.
Breeze offers a robust knowledge base for users to read FAQ documentation. The company also offers a wide range of educational resources, including a helpful blog about church management.
Flockbase has a library of tutorial videos on their website, example screenshots, and a help desk to ask for technical support, report a bug, or suggest feature improvements.
Users can call either help desk during working hours. Breeze additionally allows users to schedule a future support call or use an automated chat bot to address common questions. These technical support staff help with the initial setup and implementation of the software for your church. From there, it’s good to coordinate and collaborate with their team at each relevant touchpoint.
FlockBase vs Breeze: Pricing Comparison
Price is a major decision when choosing with ChMS is right for your church. Both Breeze and ### offer a flat, one-tier monthly price for all of their features. This includes unlimited people records, customer support, and online donation processing.
Breeze costs $72 per month, or can be combined with the Tithe.ly All Access membership for $119 per month. FlockBase has three different tired options for their cloud solution—starting at $24/month and extending up to $59/month based on the features. FlockBase also has a one-time desktop solution for churches that ranges from $139 for a single solution or $269 for two.
Breeze offers a 14-day free trial for churches looking to test out the product. Similarly, churches can enroll in a two-week free trial with Flockbase’s cloud-based option.
Final Verdict: Which One is Right For You?
There’s never one right answer for which ChMS is right for your church. That’s a decision you must consider for yourself based on which details are a higher priority. Ultimately, your church needs to find the right value for your money.
Breeze offers more features and integrates with the Tithely family of Saas tools. Flockbase costs less and can be more user-friendly because of the simpler interface. Review both and determine for yourself which is right for your circumstances.
Talk to other organizations for recommendations and read online reviews for impartial input. Brainstorm questions to ask the support team. Invite the right people to the discussion to share their perspectives and ideas.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do FlockBase and Breeze Differ in Terms of User-friendliness?
All church management software like to think of themselves as user-friendly—that’s certainly their goal. But what does this practically look like when considering Flockbase and Breeze? It honestly depends on the user and their familiarity with other ChMS options.
Flockbase is intentionally simple in its features and navigation. There’s fewer integrations which means less things for your church staff and volunteers to learn. Breeze is still fairly simple, but adds more features to organize. Breeze is integrated with the rest of the Tithe.ly system, which includes a website builder, custom app, worship planning tool, and more.
How to Choose the Right Church Accounting Software?
Just as different churches are right for different people, different accounting software is right for different churches. The key is to find a platform that is compatible with your other tools to make administrative processes easier for your employees and vendors. Your accounting software needs to also be a place your accounting staff can easily record assets and expenses.
The best accounting solution focuses on ease of use, accurate reporting, and compatibility. Your church is a business and paying people on time and with minimal issues is a requirement to be an effective company.
How Does Breeze Compare to Other ChMS Options?
Breeze and FlockBase are far from the only ChMS options available to your church. Read our other comparison articles to see how Breeze stacks up:
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