Communications

1. E-mail:  You can send an e-mail message to one person or a whole group with one click no matter where you are in Daylight Explorer™. Each person or family can have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses, phone numbers and addresses.

2. Phone books:  You can create an electronic phone book for any group of people or families in your database just by clicking the Phone Book menu.

Data Access

3. Custom SQL queries:  If you purchase a license for the Desktop or Network edition, your product will ship with a generous assortment of pre-built SQL queries.

4. File management:  Your copy of Daylight Explorer™ comes with a powerful file management system to help you organize your important files such as service bulletins, video files, sermons, meeting minutes, newsletters and the like.

5. Filtering:  You get a powerful Filter dialog that enables you to search your database and bring up only the data that you are interested in.

Data Display

6. Aliases:  You can easily associate phone numbers and e-mail addresses with their owners by assigning them an alias such as work phone, mobile phone, or home phone.

7. Aspect ratios:  Daylight Explorer™ lets you match the aspect ratio by which your pictures are displayed to the aspect ratio of your digital camera so your pictures will not appear too fat or too thin.

8. Calendars:  All of your scheduling information such as activities, church services and the like can be viewed both in tabular and calendar format.

9. Colors:  There are 20 color codes in Daylight Explorer™ each of which can be customized.

10. Data Visibility:  Because Daylight Explorer™ displays your data in an explorer window, you see all of your data at once rather than having to open a data entry window for each item.

11. Microsoft Excel:  If you have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer, you can export your data and display it in an Excel worksheet.

12. Video files:  Our file management system enables you to organize video files of your sermons and church services. You even get a field to locate your videos on an internet file sharing site.

Data Entry

13. Countries and states:  You can easily configure Daylight Explorer™ to show the state and country where your church is located so that when you create a new address, you don't have to waste time picking states and countries out from a list.

14. Custom fields:  You can create up to 16 custom fields each for your church, sunday school classes, church groups, families and people for a total of 80 custom fields.

15. Custom formatting:  You can easily create a custom format for fields such as phone numbers and zip codes that will ensure that they are all entered the same way.

16. Dynamic data validation:  If you miss a required field or inadvertantly enter invalid data, Daylight Explorer™ provides a non-interrupting message explaining the problem instead of a popup message after you try to finalize your work.

17. Drag n drop convenience:  Once you create a record for a person, you never have to do it again. If a person joins a group or sunday school class, you just drag his or her record and drop it into the appropriate position with no typing.

18. Required fields:  For easier data entry, Daylight Explorer™ highlights fields that must have data such as a person's first and last name.

19. Undo button:  All data entry windows have an Undo button which lets you undo all the changes that you have made and start over.

20. Unlimited phone numbers:  You can enter unlimited phone numbers for each person and family in your church.

Financial

21. Daylight Explorer™ remembers contributions:  Daylight Explorer™ can remember the last contribution amount, including split amounts, for each church member. This way, if the current amount is the same as the last, you don't have to do any typing.

22. Pledging:  The Pledge module comes with a handy calculator which lets you accurately calculate payment amounts or lump-sums based on many possible variables.

23. Split contributions:  When your member makes a contribution that is split among more than one fund, you do not have to use a split wizard. All available funds are shown in the Contribution dialog and you just enter the amount for each fund.

24. Sunday school contributions:  You can record pledges and contributions to sunday school classes as well as to your church.

Help

25. Dynamic Help:  The help system that comes with Daylight Explorer™ includes a special dynamic help menu that offers help topics based on your current task.

26. How To help topics:  The help system that ships with Daylight Explorer™ contains over 100 How To help topics.

27. Menu Help:  Every menu in Daylight Explorer™ has a help topic that explains its purpose and how to use it.

28. Step-by-Step help:  The guiding principal of our help system is to keep it simple. With very few exceptions, each help topic consists of a series of deliberate, numbered steps.

29. Tutorials:  For each of the advanced feature in Daylight Explorer™, our help system provides you with a series of carefully designed tutorials that walk you through several levels of difficulty step by step.

30. Window help:  There is a help topic for every window in Daylight Explorer™ which includes an annotated image of the window and an explaination of how everything works.

Miscellaneous

31. Archiving:  Before deleting, you can archive data to a file on your computer or removeable disk. Then, should you later find that you need to retrieve that data, you can import it back into Daylight Explorer™ as an archive and work with the data. This feature is available only with the Desktop and Network editions.

32. Baskets™:  Daylight Explorer™ comes with a unique feature which we named the Basket™. Baskets™ allow you to create new ways to use your database to meet your changing needs. There are three basket™ tutorials to help you get started.

33. Exporting:  You can export your data in several popular file formats including XML, CSV, MS Excel, PDF, RTF and HTML.

34. Importing:  You can import data from an XML or CSV file directly into your database without having to enter the data manually with your computer keyboard.

35. Menus:  In addition to the standard menu bar and our fully customizable tool bar, you get a powerful context menu system which comes up when you right-click on an item.

36. My Preferences:  The My Preferences dialog lets you customize 21 different settings that determine the look and feel of Daylight Explorer™ when you are logged in.

37. Overdue library items:  When a library item is overdue, with just two clicks and no typing you can send a customized e-mail message to the borrower reminding him or her that the item is due back in the library.

38. Recurring dates:  Our powerful Filter dialog has a versitile Recurring Date feature that lets you retrieve records based a date that recurrs each year such as a birthday or anniversary.

39. Reservations:  You can easily reserve library items for your members. You can stack reservations as far out as one year and when the reserved item is ready to be picked up you can send a customized e-mail message to your patron with no typing.

Printing and Reports

40. Attendance rosters:  You can easily create attendance rosters for your church activities, meetings and services as well as your sunday school sessions.

41. Collection reports:  You can create a report on each contribution collection batch which breaks down the contributions of each individual and family member including fund allocations.

42. Contact Info:  With Daylight Explorer™, you have the ability to add personal or family contact information to each of the over 1,000 reports you can produce in the Report Maker.

43. Custom forms:  If you purchase a license for the Desktop or Network edition, your product will ship with a custom form maker so you can create professional looking PDF format data entry forms for your church members. You can print them and make them available in your church office or you can send them out on request via e-mail.

44. Directories:  If you purchase a license for the Desktop or Network edition, with a mouse click, you can create a picture directory for your church and/or your sunday school class. Picture directories include an index and can include church groups if you like. You can also create more compact, paper-saving short directories without pictures. All directories can be exported in PDF format for efficient distribution to your members over the internet. Although the free Daylight Express edition does not include picture directories, it does enable you to create a very attractive standard directory (the short directory) for your church and/or your sunday school classes.

45. Labels:  Its easy to create address labels and name tags in Daylight Explorer™. You can also create data files that let you make customized form letters with your word processing software.

46. Tables:  You can create a table of any data in Daylight Explorer™. In addition to printing your table, you can export it to a file in several popular file formats.

Security

47. Backing up:  Daylight Explorer™ ships with built-in database backup and restore utilities.

48. Data security:  Daylight Explorer™ protects the confidentiality of your data by letting you assign permissions to your users. Users lacking the necessary permission are not allowed access to modules that contain financial or pastoral information. In addition, database fields that contain confidential information are flagged as restricted if inadvertantly accessed by a user lacking the necessary permission.

49. Event Viewer:  Daylight Explorer™ comes with a full-featured Event Viewer which records signficant events in your program when it is running. You can customize which types of events are recorded.

50. Login:  To provide an audit trail, you can optionally require a separate user login whenever a collection counting batch is started.