These recent releases showcase the incredible responsiveness and creativity of our support and development teams. We've rolled out fantastic upgrades that make your experience smoother and more efficient.
Now, you can easily maintain a history of contributions while keeping your database clean. We've developed a faster, more up-front way to prevent duplicates when manually entering a new person. And now, making a registration payment is even more convenient—with just a click from an email or text, users can securely pay using a saved card.
These are just a few of the ongoing improvements we’ve recently released. Check them out!
- A new way to maintain contribution history yet archive donors
- We added a privacy policy disclaimer to Churchteams forms
- Greater flexibility for filtering reports on Note
- Avoid creating duplicates when entering data manually
- A small group overview of topic, attendance and meeting notes
- Know who has opted out of Text-to-Church
- Additional registration payments are easier with saved credit cards
- Add or edit childcare notes in the check-in detail report
1. The system now preserves contributions and registration payments for archived/deleted people.
The system does not allow anyone but financial admins to delete people, including the deceased, with contributions from the database in order to maintain the integrity of the giving history. This requires leaving people in the database that most pastors and staff might want to remove.
To help solve this problem, we released a feature that will build a pseudo-person record
named "System Contribution History" the first time the delete person report is run and includes people with contributions. This pseudo-person's first name, last name, and address1 fields are read-only and can not be changed. Contributions associated with people being deleted will be reassigned to this new "person" with the contributor's name in the notes section of the donation. This will allow giving history reports to remain accurate even though some of the donors are no longer in the database.
2. We added a privacy policy disclaimer to Churchteams forms
All of our Text-to-Church users know that we've had to implement a process to ask churches to add a privacy policy to their website to meet new Telecom requirements. They also require forms on websites to have a disclaimer associated with mobile phone numbers. Once a church provides its privacy policy page URL, the system automatically adds this disclaimer to every Churchteams form.
Note: You must add this language to any other non-Churchteams forms asking for mobile numbers on your website.
3. Greater flexibility for filtering reports on Notes
The Notes feature lets pastors and staff track and get reminders about guests, pastoral, prayer, recruiting, and other types of conversations and tasks. As the use of this feature has caught on, churches have needed greater flexibility for reporting on multiple types of notes at once and even for certain people without a certain note type.
To accommodate these needs under Filters > People > Notes, we added the ability to select multiple note types and counts of notes in the report filters. Using a range of 0 to 0 allows you to select people with no notes matching the other filter options.
4. Avoid creating duplicates when entering data manually
Searching for people before manually entering them into the database should be a standard best practice for all pastors and staff. But, we recognize this doesn't always happen and recently added a feature to search the database for potentially matching names right after manually entering first and last names. If a match (or multiple matches) is found, just click the name of the matching person who is already in the database.
A similar thing happens when adding a member from the Household section of a Person Profile, except it includes the name of current family members for comparison.
In other areas of the system where you can add a person, you will be presented with a much more obvious search option that should negate the need for this double-checking.
5. A small group overview of the topic, attendance, and meeting notes
We were asked about a quick way to review the history for a small group of their topic, attendance, and meeting notes. So, we added the meeting report Notes field to the list of Meetings page accessed by clicking the blue Reports button, then Meetings. This gives a small group leader, coach, or groups pastor a nice overview.
6. Know who has opted out of Text-to-Church
Want to know when and how many people have opted out of text messages? Use a People Listing Report type and apply this new report filter (Filters > People > Fixed Attributes) which is found under the filter that does the same thing for email. It does not apply to free texts sent by email.
7. Additional registration payments are easier with saved credit cards
When you send a payment reminder email or text for someone to make additional registration payments, their saved online giving card will now show up. Church members will appreciate this added convenience.
8. Add or edit childcare notes in the check-in detail report
The check-in view option A8 adds a flag to the family check-in page that parents can click to add a note that prints out on the child's tag.
Our Check-in Detail report is commonly used now as a dashboard to review all the classes and kids in Sunday School or childcare. Children's ministry leaders wanted to be able to edit the notes to include anything, such as a diaper change or snack that might have happened while the kids were in class. This is now possible simply by clicking the edit icon on the check-in detail report dashboard. Here is an example of an edited note.
