Chimes - Congregation Management System
A complete management platform for churches, temples, mosques and any institution that keeps a congregation. Directory, giving, calendar, pastoral care, public website and member portal — running on hardware you control, holding data nobody else can read.
Software for the community, not the vendor
Chimes is deployed once and owned outright. There is no seat count to watch and no subscription that can be revoked.
Surfaces: public site, member portal, staff console, API
Functional modules, from the directory to the audit log
Per-member fees, forever
Runs on your infrastructure
A single Elixir release and one PostgreSQL database. Deploy it on your own VPS, a parish server, or a cloud box you already pay for.
Your records stay yours
No shared multi-tenant database, no analytics pipeline, no third party reading your membership roll. The only data that leaves your server is what you choose to send.
No per-member pricing
Register five hundred people or five thousand — the licence does not change. Growth costs you nothing but disk.
One System for the Whole Life of a Congregation
Most congregations run on a pile of half-systems: a spreadsheet for the directory, a payment link for the offering, a shared calendar for the roster, a website nobody can edit, and a filing cabinet for everything else. Each one holds a fragment of the same community, and none of them talk.
Chimes replaces the pile. The person who gave last Sunday, the household they belong to, the baptism recorded in 2011, the hospital visit they asked for last week and the statement they will need in April are all the same record, in one database, on one server.
The domain model is deliberately religion-neutral. Gatherings are gatherings — a Sunday service, a Friday prayer, a puja, an Iftar dinner. Milestones and service request types are configurable vocabulary, not assumptions baked into the schema.
Eight Modules, Shipped Together
Not add-ons or tiers. Every deployment includes all of it from day one.
People & Households
A living directory, not a spreadsheet.
- check Person records with title, designation, marital status, contact details and dates of birth, baptism, confirmation and membership
- check Households anchored to an address, with people able to belong to more than one household
- check Person-to-person relationships and a per-member family view
- check Milestones — baptism, confirmation, first communion, membership, marriage, ordination, dedication, funeral
- check Birthday wishes sent automatically by a scheduled background job
- check Nothing is ever deleted; records archive so history stays intact
Giving & Funds
Every gift accounted for, down to the split.
- check Named funds — open-ended, capped at an amount, or bound to a date range — with running totals
- check One-time and recurring giving, with a single gift splittable across several funds
- check Card and bank payments through your own Stripe account, so money settles into your bank
- check Donors can choose to cover the processing fee at the point of giving
- check Recurring gifts can be paused or stopped, and past-due states are tracked automatically
- check Payment lifecycle handled end to end: succeeded, failed, refunded and disputed, with refund requests
Gatherings & Calendar
Weekly rhythm and one-off occasions.
- check Recurring gatherings defined by day of week and time — services, prayer meetings, study groups
- check Individual dated events materialised ahead of time by a background job, so the calendar is never empty
- check One-off events for potlucks, festivals, baptisms, Iftar dinners or pujas — the model is religion-neutral by design
- check Location, tag and blurb on every gathering, ready to publish straight to the public site
- check A month calendar in the staff console covering both recurring and one-off entries
Service Requests
Pastoral care with a paper trail.
- check Ten request types out of the box: baptism, marriage, prayer, counselling, hospital visit, funeral, membership transfer, record request, facility booking and giving statement
- check A clear status path from pending through processing to completed or cancelled
- check Requests can be offered to several staff or volunteers at once; each accepts or declines with a reason
- check A full event timeline on every request, so nothing gets lost between conversations
- check Members raise and follow their own requests from the member portal
Website & Content
Your public presence, managed from the same console.
- check A complete public site — home, about, events, children's ministry, news, contact and a public giving page
- check News posts with categories, slugs and an RSS feed
- check An upload library for images and documents used across the site
- check Publishing happens in the staff console; there is no second system to keep in sync
Roles & Permissions
Who can see what, decided by you.
- check Six membership roles — owner, admin, staff, volunteer, member and congregation
- check Granular permissions per resource and action, layered on top of the role defaults
- check Service periods and job titles on each membership, so the treasurer's access ends when their term does
- check Invitations with signed join links for onboarding new staff and members
- check Memberships deactivate and archive rather than disappear
Statements & Reporting
Giving statements without the spreadsheet weekend.
- check Per-member giving statements generated as PDF and CSV over any date range
- check A configurable financial year, so statements follow your reporting calendar rather than the software's
- check Statements produced in the background and made available to the member to download themselves
- check Fund balances and payment outcomes visible to staff at a glance
Audit, Webhooks & API
Built to be inspected and extended.
- check An append-only audit log recording every resource action taken in the system
- check Outbound webhook subscriptions filtered by resource type and action, with a full delivery log
- check Inbound signals stored durably, de-duplicated and processed asynchronously — nothing is lost to a dropped request
- check A JSON:API v1 interface with a published OpenAPI schema and token authentication
Everyone Gets the View They Need
Chimes serves four distinct surfaces from a single application and a single database. A visitor, a member, the treasurer and your accounting software each see a different face of the same records.
www.
Public site
Visitors and the wider community
The face of your institution — service times, upcoming events, news, and a giving page anyone can use without an account.
app.
Member portal
Your congregation
Members manage their own profile and household, review their giving and payment methods, download statements, and raise service requests.
admin.
Staff console
Clergy, office staff and volunteers
The working surface for the directory, funds and giving, the calendar, service request assignment, content publishing and the audit log.
api.
JSON:API
Your other systems
A documented, token-authenticated API with an OpenAPI schema, for the accounting package or the display screen in the foyer.
Boring Where It Counts
A congregation management system is a system of record. It should be dull, durable and easy for whoever inherits it to reason about. Chimes is built on well-worn technology with no exotic dependencies and no hosted services it cannot live without.
Elixir & Phoenix
One release, one database, low idle footprint. Comfortable on modest hardware and calm under a Sunday-morning spike.
Durable background work
Email, birthday wishes, calendar materialisation, statement generation and webhook delivery all run as retryable queued jobs.
Encrypted configuration
Credentials live encrypted alongside the code; the decryption key stays on your machines and never enters the repository.
Archive, never delete
Every schema archives instead of destroying. A mistaken click in the office does not cost you a family's twenty-year record.
account_balance Payments settle into your account
Giving runs through your institution's own payment processor account using credentials you hold. Contributions move from the donor to your bank without passing through a platform that takes a cut of the offering or holds your funds in escrow.
From Vision to Launch
Consultation
Understanding your structure, your vocabulary and where your records live today.
Deployment
Standing up the release, database and certificates on infrastructure you own.
Configuration
Roles, funds, gathering schedules, branding and migration of existing records.
Handover
Training your office team, documenting the runbook, and handing you the keys.
Buy It Once, Run It Forever
- check_circle Unlimited people, households, funds and gatherings
- check_circle All eight modules and all four surfaces included
- check_circle Deployed on your own server — no hosting lock-in
- check_circle No per-member, per-seat or per-transaction platform fee
You provide the server and the payment processor account. Hosting, domain and processing costs are paid directly to those providers at their rates, never marked up.
Base Software Package
One-time licensing fee for the standard Chimes deployment.
Customization: $50/hr
For bespoke features, custom integrations, data migration, or specialized training.
Interested in Chimes?
Tell me about your congregation — its size, how you currently keep records, and where you would like it hosted. I will come back with a deployment plan and a straight answer on what it will take.