No Comparison—Cy Sidun's Story

My name is Cy Sidun. I have a company called Sidun Management Group, and I do the bookkeeping services for Generations Foursquare Church in San Jose, California. Currently, with CDM+, we're only using the accounting portion, and that's one of the reasons I'm here at the conference—to learn more about the membership and other aspects.

The dynamics of the software . . . I find that it's extremely well put together. I'll speak mostly from the accounting side [of CDM+] because I haven't worked with the other aspects. But, the accounting side of it I really love—setting up the chart of accounts and being able to set up the fund accounts the way I want to set them up. I can use expense categories the same across all funds. Because of the way the fund numbers work, you can have a 3601 for a fund, you can have the income at 4601, and then 7200 might be office supplies. Then you go to the next designated fund, whatever that title might be, and you can go down the line, and 7200 shows up for office supplies again. So, what you have is a consistency in the expense category. In setting up for the various pastors and the ministries and the missions and how they're going to use it, there's consistency that is normally not there, and I want that. That's going to be really good for [the church].

I'm in the process of putting together the policies and procedures and looking at generating specific reports, and that's another aspect of why I came to the conference this year—to [learn] more on how to put together the reports better. . .

It's not just the chart of accounts, but if you look at the overall ease of posting and go to the ledgers, you have the pop-up screen that shows "all" and you can double check what your work is. Making journal entries is really, really easy . . . those type of postings and doing the deposits and being able to allocate them to the right funds . . . The basic mechanics [is there].

The church, Generations Foursquare, was using QuickBooks Fund Accounting which, from my perspective, is not a fund accounting software. When you compare CDM+ with QuickBooks, there's no comparison. [CDM+ is] way ahead, leaps and bounds. You compare it to Shelby . . . and you find CDM+ is equivalent in terms of dynamics of software, but it's user friendly. So, you have, in my estimation, the best of both worlds: you have software that's priced appropriately for churches so that they can afford it, yet it gives you the dynamics of a higher-priced software. There's a tremendous [reason] for churches to look seriously at what they're doing in terms of their software and look to CDM+.

The conference– Let's just say I've been in the business world over 40 years (to give you a little bit of an idea about my age) and I have been to many conferences over the years. I find that this has been one of the better, if not the best, conference from the standpoint of the professionalism and the knowledge base of the instructors and the people that are in attendance. There's a lot of fellowship going on, and there are questions and answers in the classrooms (there's encouragement of questions in the classroom by instructors). . . . The bottom line is (and I've got another day to go), this has been the best conference that I've attended in many years.

I want to thank all the staff of CDM+ for doing such a great and wonderful job of putting it together, and definitely, if I can see my way clear, I'll be back next year because I'm sure there's going to be more I can learn. I'm sure there will be more advances in the software, and anything I can do to help promote the software, I will definitely do that.