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1-844-PUSHPAY Should your parish switch from ParishSoft?
Your parish staff knows ParishSoft. They know where to click, what to export, and which workarounds to use when the system gets stubborn on a Friday afternoon.
So when the conversation comes up about switching platforms, the first instinct that triggers is: don’t change the status quo. Parish offices don’t have the luxury of a six-month “transition period” where everyone patiently learns a new system while the phone keeps ringing and sacramental prep deadlines keep coming. You’ve got OCIA candidates who need certificates. You’ve got a finance council meeting next Tuesday. And your volunteer who manages ministry scheduling only comes in on Wednesdays.
All of that context matters. But what if the system you’ve been trained on is costing you time, visibility, and giving revenue that you’ve never measured because the tools to measure it weren’t there?
It’s the question that a growing number of parishes have asked themselves in the past few years.
“We already know ParishSoft”
Staff fluency with a system has real operational value. Nobody wants to be the person who pushed for a platform change and then spends three months apologizing for it.
But it’s worth considering that, “We know ParishSoft,” sometimes means “we’ve built workarounds for ParishSoft’s limitations, and those workarounds feel like okay.” The admin who exports to Excel every week to build a report the system can’t generate natively. The business manager who keeps a separate spreadsheet for tracking which families have completed which sacraments because the records view doesn’t connect them. The pastor who can’t access parish data from his phone when he’s making a hospital visit.
At St. Brigid, the staff had built those same kinds of habits around their previous software. When their old provider decided to sunset the product, they didn’t have the luxury of a slow evaluation. They had to move. And what they found surprised them: ParishStaq’s LEAD App gave their pastor mobile access to the information he used to have to call the office for. The finance administrator started hitting goals she’d been chasing for years. Ministry scheduling, which had been a weekly headache, got significantly easier.
The migration question
If you’ve been on ParishSoft for five years, ten years, maybe longer, you’re sitting on thousands of family records, sacramental histories, giving data, ministry assignments. The idea of moving all of that to a new system sounds like a project that could swallow your entire summer.
Two things are true at the same time. Migration is a real project that requires planning. And Pushpay has migrated enough parishes and dioceses (including Seattle, Springfield, and Nashville) to have a tested process for it. The onboarding isn’t a PDF and a “good luck.” It’s a coached implementation with a team that understands Catholic parish workflows, from OCIA process queues to cemetery records to multi-campus Mass scheduling.
St. Brigid’s business manager, Debbie Hedley, described her experience with sacramental record migration specifically. Her words are worth hearing directly:
“We track the sacraments through the Pushpay system. Much more robust than it was before (using ParishSoft). In the other systems, we’re able to upload documents that are mailed to us, so now it’s with the person as they journey through their faith and sacramental life. It just makes it much easier, especially, we get calls almost daily for people looking for their records and now that we’re implementing them into the system rather than just the books, we’re able to have a one touch or just a double touch once through the books to confirm that it’s in proper, but it’s with the uploads and the dates being entered, it makes it much more efficient for us.”
Debbie Hedley, Business Manager, Saint Brigid Parish, San Diego, CA
That phrase, “one touch or just a double touch,” is the kind of thing only someone who spent years digging through filing cabinets and cross-referencing sacramental books would say. Daily calls for records. Think about what that workflow looked like before: pull the binder, find the entry, photocopy it, mail it. Now the record lives with the person’s profile. The upload is attached. The dates are entered. When someone calls asking for their baptismal certificate, the response time drops from days to minutes.
What about sacramental records?
ParishStaq was built with the importance of sacramental records in mind. Over 5 million sacraments have been recorded in Pushpay’s systems, tracking baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages, with fields for godparents, sponsors, witnesses, and the supporting documentation. You can upload scanned copies of original certificates and attach them directly to the parishioner’s profile.
What Debbie described at St. Brigid isn’t simply a convenience improvement. When a parishioner moves to a new diocese and needs their confirmation record for marriage prep, your office can pull it up and verify it without pulling a single binder off the shelf. When a family calls asking about their child’s first communion date from eight years ago, it’s there. Connected to the family profile, not buried in a filing cabinet that only one person in the office knows how to navigate.
No system will eliminate the need to maintain your physical sacramental registers. Canon law requires them. But a system that mirrors those records digitally, with document uploads and proper dating, turns your office from a bottleneck into a resource.
The cost of staying put
Here’s where the conversation usually gets quiet. Because the cost of switching is visible (staff time, training, implementation fees), but the cost of staying is mostly invisible.
The conversation often stalls here. That’s because the costs associated with switching are obvious (staff time, training, and implementation fees), whereas the cost of staying put is largely hidden.
Pushpay processes payments directly, which means a 95.1% transaction success rate compared to the industry average of around 92%. That gap sounds small until you do the math on your annual offertory. For a parish processing $500,000 in digital giving annually, the difference between 92% and 95% success rates is roughly $15,000 in donations that either reach your parish or don’t. Pushpay’s Everygift™ features recover an average of $19,000 per church per year in failed payments that would otherwise disappear.
Then there’s the visibility question. Can your current system show you which families are disengaging before they stop coming entirely? Can it connect Mass attendance to Faith Formation enrollment to giving patterns in a single view? Can your pastor pull up a family’s complete profile, sacramental history included, from his phone before walking into a hospital room?
If the answer to those questions is “not really” or “we use a separate spreadsheet for that,” the cost of staying isn’t zero. It’s just harder to see.
Retraining the team
Pushpay’s implementation approach includes coached onboarding, which means your team isn’t watching tutorial videos alone. There’s a person who understands the specific workflows of Catholic parish offices, not generic church software workflows, but the actual day-to-day of how sacramental prep, ministry scheduling, facilities management, and offertory tracking work in a Catholic context.
St. Brigid’s team found that the new system actually reduced their daily workload once the learning curve passed. The pastor has parish information on his phone through the LEAD App. The finance administrator has better tools for tracking against giving goals. Ministry scheduling went from a weekly coordination headache to something their volunteers could largely manage themselves.
That’s not to minimize the transition. It’s to say that the discomfort of learning a new system lasts weeks. The benefits of a better system last years.
What a real switch looks like
If you’re genuinely evaluating whether to move from ParishSoft to ParishStaq, here’s what the process looks like in practice. Pushpay assigns an implementation team that works with your staff to map your current data, identify what migrates directly and what needs cleaning, and build a timeline that accounts for your parish’s calendar. (Nobody is going to ask you to migrate your database during Holy Week.)
Your sacramental records, family data, giving history, and ministry assignments transfer into a unified system where everything connects. A parishioner’s giving record, sacramental history, ministry involvement, and Faith Formation enrollment all live in one profile. When your data is connected like that, your parish staff stops being data clerks and starts being pastoral support.
Want to see what St. Brigid’s experience looked like from the inside? Check out their story:
Switching parish software is a decision that affects every person who walks into your office, calls your front desk, or gives to your parish online. It shouldn’t be made lightly. But it also shouldn’t be avoided just because the current system is familiar. Familiar and effective aren’t always the same thing.
If you’re curious whether ParishStaq would be a fit for your parish, Pushpay offers a demo that’s specific to Catholic parish workflows. No generic church software walkthrough. Request one and see whether what St. Brigid found holds true for your community too.
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