Introduction
CHADDB is the CHurch ADministration DataBase, designed from the ground up to be modular, flexible, and platform independent. The main focus of CHADDB is managing church members according to their relationships within their families and church auxiliaries. CHADDB also seeks to help churches keep members from "slipping through the cracks". Churches can use CHADDB to schedule activities, record attendance, and even obtain reports from small group leaders via the web. Contribution management and a single-entry accounting function make it ideal for many churches.
CHADDB is pronounced like "chaddy bee". From the beginning the goal has been to create a platform independent application. No commercial church management software exists for churches using GNU/Linux. The choices in the free and open source software arena are limited. So we have set out to produce a high-quality church management application that will work well, whether your church uses GNU/Linux, Mac, Windows, or all three.
The team behind CHADDB is thoroughly committed to providing free software to the universal Church, in order that God's kingdom will be advanced. We believe it is poor stewardship of the church to fork out hundreds, even thousands of dollars to manage data, when we need to be feeding and clothing the needy. What's more, churches in impoverished regions would no doubt benefit immensely from an application like CHADDB. Such churches lack the financial resources to aquire proprietary applications. Churches can download and pass along to other churches a copy of CHADDB in order to help each other out.
CHADDB's Release Status
CHADDB is currently under development, and as yet we have not released anything. We will, of course, provide an update as soon as we release any usable packages. You can also check out our SourceForge page. There you will find a couple of forums, Trackers for support and bugs, as well as any downloadable files.
CHADDB's Sufficiency
CHADDB will serve any church, regardless of size, organizational structure or operating system platform. While developed with an eye to the cell church structure, CHADDB's design is flexible enough to be used by traditional churches as well. An auxiliary, for example may be defined as a cell group in one church, or a Sunday School class in another church. Indeed, both may exist.
Because CHADDB uses MySQL on the back-end, churches with a dozen members or several thousand can use it. Simply put, if a crowd of 3000 shows up at your new church plant on Sunday morning, You might need a new church building, and we hope you have more than 5 loaves and seven fish. But CHADDB will be more than sufficient to manage your data.