Wedding 7.7.07

Last Saturday was a very popular day for weddings. I know this from personal experience because my daughter's wedding was one of the many held that day. It was a very special event, and I had a great weekend spending time with family and friends. Now that I am back at work and things are settling back to normal (except for a few unpaid bills), I was reflecting on how ACS played a small part in my daughter's wedding.

First, the wedding service and surrounding events took place at my church (ACS user since 1985). ACS software was first utilized back in August of last year when we were looking for dates to schedule the event. The Ministry Scheduler module was used to check available dates; once 7/7/07 was deemed the best option, the sanctuary and other rooms needed were reserved. I am sure the last thing a church wants to do is to book two weddings at the same time, so this is an important task taken care of by ACS. As more detailed plans were made for the wedding, the Ministry Scheduler module was used again to record the room setup requirements and to reserve the equipment needed. As the wedding day approached, the Ministry Scheduler module was used once again to feed data to the church air conditioning system so that the sanctuary would be properly cooled for a July wedding in South Carolina.

ACS also took care of the financial aspects of having the wedding at the church. Accounts Receivable was used to create invoices for the wedding fees and took care of the payment transactions. Then the Payroll module was used to record the extra weekend hours worked by the church staff so they were all paid properly. Finally, the membership records would be updated with a wedding anniversary date for my daughter.

Now the actual wedding planning was not done with ACS. Instead, my wife and daughter used TheKnot.com as their database for the invitation list. Looking back on that choice I now wished I had set them up with an OnDemand version of ACS (accessible via the Internet) so I could have more easily answered their many "how do I" questions. I will keep that in mind for the next time. Did I mention I have two more daughters?