ChMS
Also known as: Church Management Software, Church Management System, ChMS software
Church Management Software — the system of record for people, giving, groups and check-ins. It stores your attendance number; it doesn't produce one.
ChMS stands for Church Management Software (you will also see it written CHMS, ChMS software, or church management system, and misspelled as chrms or chmes — they all mean the same category). It is the software a church uses as its system of record: member and household data, check-ins, giving, groups, volunteer scheduling, and communications. The major platforms include Planning Center, Ministry Platform, Church Community Builder (Pushpay), Breeze, Realm and ACS from ACS Technologies, and Church Metrics (Life.Church).
What a ChMS does not do is count the room. Every ChMS has an attendance field, and every one of them waits for a human to fill it in — from a check-in kiosk that only catches the people who checked in, a clicker, or someone's estimate typed in on Monday. The dashboard then reports that number with total confidence. A ChMS is a system of record, not a system of measurement: it is exactly as accurate as whatever was entered, and it has no way to tell you when that was wrong.
Kingdom Metrics fills that gap rather than replacing anything. A camera with a view of the sanctuary produces the count, your staff can open the photo and confirm it, and the verified number is pushed into the ChMS you already use — we run integrations for Planning Center, Ministry Platform and ChurchMetrics. Nobody types an attendance figure, and the number in the ChMS dashboard is one a person actually looked at and confirmed.
Why it matters for your church: your ChMS is where staff and pastors already look every Monday morning, so that is where the accurate number needs to appear — no new login, no second dashboard, no extra step in anyone's workflow. The difference is not which dashboard you read; it is whether the attendance number underneath it was measured or guessed.