Bringing Real Analytics to Every Church

I spent thirteen years as a data and business analyst, most of it at a consulting firm working inside S&P 500 and S&P 100 companies. That put me inside hundreds of organizations — every department, every level of leadership — and I watched, over and over, what happened when a company could finally see itself clearly. It changes things. Then that lens followed me to church.

I joined my own church's board expecting to help with decisions. What I found instead was our staff rebuilding the same reports from scratch every week — copying numbers between spreadsheets late into the evening, losing hours to questions that should have taken seconds. And the thing that stopped me cold: there was no database. No place where the church's own history lived. Every “how are we doing on…” conversation started from nothing.

These weren't disorganized people. They were faithful, capable, and buried — doing by hand what software should have been doing for them. And when I looked at what was actually available for churches, the gap was plain: the few tools that existed were either missing the metrics that actually matter to a pastor, or so complicated you needed a specialist to run them. The kind of clarity I'd watched transform businesses simply wasn't within reach for the churches that needed it most.

The principle behind it

There's a principle called Pearson's Law: when performance is measured, it improves; and when it's measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates. I've watched it hold true in every organization I've ever worked with, and I've come to believe it's just as true in ministry, and in our own walk with Christ. What we pay honest, regular attention to tends to grow.

That's the whole idea behind Sunday Tally. Not numbers for their own sake, but attention for the sake of the people those numbers represent: the family quietly drifting, the volunteer carrying too much, the ministry flourishing in a corner where no one was looking.

Built to be affordable, on purpose

So I built Sunday Tally to do the hard part for any church, regardless of size or budget. The affordability isn't a discount or a promotion. It's the point. A church of sixty should be able to see itself as clearly as a church of six thousand.

And affordable was never meant to mean less. I wanted the opposite: to wildly over-deliver — more clarity and care than the price would suggest — because this isn't really about software. It's for churches, and for the kingdom of God. That conviction is why this exists. The dashboards, the charts, the weekly entry that takes a few minutes — those are just how we keep that promise.

An older idea than software

Long before anyone called it Pearson's Law, Jesus taught the deeper version of it. In the parable of the talents, the servant who tended what he was entrusted with saw it multiply; the one who buried his out of fear lost even that. What we give honest attention to — in a church, and in our own walk with God — is what grows. I wrote more about that here: What a Church Tends, Grows.