Tracker Documentation
A complete guide to every feature of Shepherding Tracker, from logging your first visit to interpreting church-wide statistics and configuring your team.
Getting Started
New to Shepherding Tracker? This section walks you through the essentials in five minutes. For deeper explanations of every feature, see the sections below.
Step 1 — Log in
Go to your church’s Tracker URL and sign in with the email and password your administrator created for you. If you haven’t received credentials, ask your pastor or admin.
Step 2 — Find your way around
The bar across the top is how you move between screens. A fully switched-on church shows:
- Assistant:Your weekly shepherding plan. Appears once you turn the Pastoral Assistant on for yourself.
- People:Every active household in the church. This is the home screen.
- Reports:Statistics and the printable contact report, in one place.
- Activity:A church-wide feed of what the whole team has logged.
- Attendance:Sunday worship attendance. Appears only if your church has switched it on.
- Admin:Settings. The button reads Admin for administrators and Settings for everyone else.
- Help:This documentation.
- Support:Our support page.
Your bar may be shorter, and that is normal. Assistant, Reports, Activity and Attendance each depend on a setting or a permission. If one is missing, either your church has not switched it on or your account has not been granted it. Ask your administrator.
Step 3 — Find your households
The People page opens to a list of all active households, sorted with the most overdue at the top. Search by name at the top of the page. If you are an elder or a deacon with a district, click My District to narrow the list to your own families.
Step 4 — Log your first contact
Click + Logon any household row. Choose a type of contact, set the date, add any notes, and save. The household’s status turns green straight away.
Step 5 — Schedule your next visit
In the same window, click the Schedule tab to plan a future visit. Enter the date and an optional note. The visit sits in your My Todos & Reminders panel until you log the contact that happened.
Step 6 — Check your list each week
The My Todos & Reminders panel on the People page holds your scheduled visits, your to-dos, and any reminders that have come due. Reviewing it at the start of each week keeps your shepherding on track. If you use the Pastoral Assistant, start there instead: it builds the week for you.
Click a status tile in the Church Status panel to filter the list to those households. Combine it with My District to see the families in your own district that need attention first.
1. The Pastoral Assistant
The Pastoral Assistant turns the whole congregation into a weekly plan. You tell it how many families you can reach in a week; it hands you that many at a time, oldest contact first, and keeps the birthdays, anniversaries and follow-ups you have recorded from slipping past. Everything it shows comes from what is already in Tracker.
Turning it on
The Assistant is per person, not per church. Each officer switches on his own.
- Open Admin (or Settings), then My Settings.
- Find Pastoral Assistant and click Enable Pastoral Assistant.
- An Assistant button appears in the top bar. Open it.
- A short setup card asks how many families a week you want to reach, and which of them the queue should cover.
By default the Assistant covers your district if you have one. You can point it at one or more lists instead, or at both. With no district and no list selected, it covers the whole congregation. Those choices live in My Settings > Pastoral Assistant and can be changed at any time.
Tracker still opens on the People page unless you ask it not to. Tick Open Assistant by default in My Settings > Pastoral Assistant to make the Assistant your home screen.
This Week
The left-hand column is the week’s work. Above the cards you see two numbers:
- Pace:How many families a week you asked for, and how long a full round of your district or list takes at that rate.
- Weekly goal:How many new families you have reached this week out of your target, plus your total contacts for the week.
Each card carries a household name, when it was last contacted and by whom, and four buttons: Call, Visit, Text, Email. Click one and the contact is logged. Use + note first if you want to record what was said, or Full contact to open the complete contact form.
The × at the top right of a card offers two ways out. Skip this week puts the household back in line for a later week. Don’t suggest this household takes it out of your queue altogether. Anything you have set aside that way is listed under Not suggested in My Settings, with a Restore beside it.
Once you hit your goal the queue clears and offers a small extra batch if you are behind your rotation. It never shows you the whole backlog at once.
Coming Up
The right-hand panel lists everything falling in the next fourteen days:
- Birthdays, taken from the birth dates on member records.
- Significant dates recorded on a household, such as a wedding anniversary or the anniversary of a death.
- Follow-ups, including every step of a sequence you have started.
- Your own to-dos and reminders that come due in the window.
Each row can be logged directly, or marked done with a short note such as Card, Text or Called. Crossing a row off clears it from your own list only. Another officer’s Coming Up is untouched, so two men can both remember the same birthday without one of them hiding it from the other.
Quick Capture
Capture sits in the top bar and on the Assistant page. It is the fast way to record something you have just heard, without opening a profile.
- Click Capture.
- Start typing a household name and pick it from the suggestions.
- Add a date if the thing has one, and a one-line note.
- Choose what it is: One-time event, Every year, Schedule a visit, Just a note, or Start a sequence.
- Click Capture.
With no date, only Just a note and Start a sequence are available. Every year asks which kind of date it is: Anniversary, Membership, Death, or Custom.
Follow-up sequences
A sequence is a set of follow-ups spread over months, started from one date. Choose Start a sequence in Quick Capture, pick the sequence and the start date, and every step is created at once. Each step is an ordinary follow-up afterwards, editable and removable on its own.
Five sequences come ready to use: Bereavement, New visitor, New baby, Hospitalization / surgery, and Inactive / lapsed. Bereavement runs from the day of the death out to the first anniversary. Edit the steps, rename them, or switch a sequence off entirely under My Settings > Pastoral Assistant.
When you archive someone with the reason Deceased, Tracker offers to start the bereavement sequence for that household. It only offers. If you have switched that sequence off, nothing appears.
Sequence steps are visible to All officers or to Pastors only, chosen when you start the sequence. Use pastors-only for a family whose situation is not general knowledge.
The weekly review and the daily digest
Two emails come out of the Assistant, both under My Settings > Pastoral Assistant.
Weekly review email
Saturday afternoon, in your own timezone. Looks back at the week and forward to the next. On by default.
Daily digest email
A short morning list of the dates and follow-ups due. Off by default. Pick the hour it arrives, and send it to a different address if you prefer. There is no Sunday edition, and a day with nothing to send sends nothing.
Both have a link beneath them that sends you a copy on the spot, so you can see what they look like before deciding.
Time off
Going away? Open My Settings and find Time Off under Away & Pauses. Set the dates and the Assistant stops emailing you until you are back. Your queue is waiting when you return.
2. The People Page
People is the home screen. It lists every active household in the church, colour-coded by how recently it was contacted, with the most overdue at the top.
Status colours
Each row carries a coloured strip and a status dot showing the time since the most recent logged contact, measured against your church's own cycle thresholds. Every church starts with these defaults:
An admin can change these day ranges for the whole church under Admin > Church Info, in the Contact Cycle Thresholds section. A church that hasn't touched that setting keeps the defaults above.
The Church Status panel
Church Status sits at the top of the side panel and holds four tiles, one per status. Each shows a count, the share of the congregation it represents, and the day range behind it. Click a tile to filter the list to those households; click it again to clear.
The percentages follow whatever else you have filtered on, so narrowing to a district or a list re-scores the panel for that group. Households marked exempt are left out of both the counts and the total. Click the panel header to collapse it.
Filtering the list
The controls are split across two rows. Above the list:
- Search:Matches a household or member name, an address, a phone number, or an email address. It does not search inside contact notes.
- All / My Last Contacts:Switches the status colour between the whole team’s most recent contact and your own. Contacts where you were named as joining the visit count as yours.
- My District:Appears for elders and deacons who have a district. Narrows the list to your own families.
- Clear:Appears once any filter is on, and resets all of them.
Directly above the rows:
- All Lists:One dropdown holding your lists and your districts. This is where you pick a district other than your own.
- Urgent first / A–Z:Sorts by how overdue a household is, or by last name.
- Visitors / Exempt:Appears once your church has an exempt household. These chips replace the list rather than narrowing it, because an exempt household is outside the church’s numbers.
- Manage Lists:Opens the list editor. See Lists below.
Only administrators see every district in the All Lists dropdown by default. Anyone can add them by ticking Show all districts in filter at the bottom of Manage Lists.
My Todos & Reminders
The panel below Church Status holds your own queue: scheduled visits, to-dos assigned to or created by you, and reminders that have reached their date. Anything past its date is highlighted, and the header carries a count of them. Click an item to open the household. + Reminder/Todo creates a new one.
3. Logging Contacts
Logging a contact records that you reached a household. It updates the status colour and adds an entry to the contact history.
Opening the contact form
- Click + Log on any household row on the People page.
- Open a household profile and click + Log Contact.
- Click one of the four action buttons on an Assistant card, which logs it in one step.
The fields
Logged as
You, normally. With the Log Contacts for Others permission, Log for Another lets you record a contact on someone else’s behalf.
Others who joined this visit
Add the leaders who came with you. The contact then counts as theirs too under My Last Contacts.
Date
Defaults to today. Change it to backdate a contact you forgot to log.
Contact For
Appears when the household has more than one member. Whole household is the default; tap a name to log the contact against particular people instead. You can pick several.
Type of Contact
Visit, Phone Call, Card/Letter, Email, Text Message, or Other.
Tried, didn’t connect
See below.
Public Notes
Free text visible to all ministry leaders.
Private Notes
Sensitive pastoral notes, with a visibility setting of their own. See Privacy Levels below.
Notify Pastor & District Leaders
Sends a notification when you save. The names of everyone who will receive it are listed under the checkbox.
Prayer Requests from this visit
Add a prayer request without leaving the form. It is attached to the household and to this contact.
The Lists button in the header of the same window adds or removes this household from any list you can edit.
Tried, didn’t connect
Tick Tried, didn’t connectwhen the call went unanswered or nobody was home. The attempt is saved and shows in the history, greyed out and labelled. It does not change the household’s status colour, does not reset the clock, and does not clear a scheduled visit. The work you did is on the record; the family is still waiting to be reached.
Privacy levels for private notes
When you add a private note, you choose who can read it:
Logging emails by BCC
Every account has its own BCC address. Put it in the BCC field of a shepherding email and Tracker logs the email against the households you wrote to.
- Open Admin (or Settings), then My Settings.
- Copy the address under Your BCC Logging Address.
- BCC it on shepherding emails you send.
Three things have to line up for a log to be written. Send from the email address on your Tracker account. Address the message to an email that matches a household or a member. Make sure that household is not archived. If any of the three fails, nothing is logged and no error comes back to you.
The logged contact records the date, names the household, and keeps the body of your email as a private note visible to pastors and elders.
The BCC address is a key. Anyone who sends from your email address can write to your contact history with it. If yours has been shared or exposed, Regenerate address in My Settings issues a new one and stops the old one working.
Only a contact that connected changes the status colour.Scheduling a future visit, adding a to-do, or ticking Tried, didn’t connect will not move a household to green. Log the contact after it happens.
4. Household Profiles
Click any household row to open its profile. The top of the page holds the household name, its members, its district and district officers, and the contact details. Below that, six tabs hold everything on record.
The tabs
History
Every contact ever logged for this household, newest first, with dates, types, who logged them, who joined, and whichever notes your role permits.
Prayer
Prayer requests on record for this household. Add, edit, archive or delete them here. If your church uses Shepherding Prayer, these are the same requests.
Dates
The birthdays of everyone in the household, together with its significant dates: anniversaries, membership dates, deaths, and anything you choose to call your own.
Todos/Reminders
Scheduled visits at the top, then the to-dos and reminders linked to this household that you created, own, or are assigned to.
Notes
Pastoral notes attached to the household rather than to a single contact.
Lists
Every list this household belongs to. Add or remove membership here.
A tab carries a count when it holds anything. The profile opens on History.
Editing a household
Click Edit beside the household name. You can change the shared last name, phone, email and address, and add, edit or remove individual members, each with a first and last name, a role, a personal phone and email, a birthday, and notes. You need the Edit Household Info permission, which administrators have already.
The contact history
History shows every contact in order, whoever logged it, so you always have the full picture rather than only your own part in it. Each entry carries the date, the type, the leader who logged it, anyone who joined, and the notes your role permits. An attempt that did not connect appears greyed out and marked didn’t connect. Where a contact was logged for particular people rather than the whole household, their names ride on the entry.
Significant dates
The Dates tab holds the birthdays of everyone in the household alongside its anniversaries, membership dates, deaths and custom dates, in calendar order rather than the order they were entered, so you can see at a glance whether one is already recorded. Every recorded entry says who added it and when. Birthdays are shown here but edited on the member himself, not on this tab. + Addopens Quick Capture with the date type already chosen. Dates come round on the Assistant’s Coming Up list two weeks ahead of the day — except membership dates, which record the day someone joined rather than an occasion to mark, and are deliberately left off it.
Sharing a link to a profile
Every household has a short address built from your church’s handle and the household’s number, in the form /tracker/p/your-church/214. Click Copy link beside the household name to put it on your clipboard.
Individual contacts have their own links too. The small link button on a history entry copies an address that opens the profile scrolled to that entry, which is the quickest way to point a colleague at one visit rather than a whole family. The link opens Tracker and still asks for a login, so it is a shortcut for your team, not a public page. If your church handle ever changes, old links keep working.
5. Scheduling & To-Dos
Three kinds of item keep you ahead of your shepherding: scheduled visits, to-dos, and reminders. All of them land in your My Todos & Reminders panel on the People page.
Scheduling a future visit
There are three ways in:
- Open the contact window for a household and click the Schedule tab.
- Open the household profile and use the Todos/Reminders tab, where scheduled visits sit at the top.
- Click + Reminder/Todoin the My Todos & Reminders panel and choose Visit.
Set a planned date and an optional note. The visit appears as a badge on the household row and in your panel. It clears itself once you log a contact that connected on or after the planned date. An attempt that did not connect leaves it standing.
To-dos
A to-do appears in your panel immediately and stays until you check it off. It can carry:
- A task description
- An optional due date
- An optional related household
- One or more ministry leaders it is assigned to
Once the due date passes, the to-do is highlighted as overdue and counted in the badge on the panel header. Edit it and set a later due date to clear the highlight.
Reminders
A reminder is a personal note that is invisible until the date you set. Before that day it appears nowhere in the app, which is the point: set one for “follow up with the Smiths in three weeks” and forget it until the day arrives. From then it stays in your panel until you dismiss it. To push it further out, edit it and set a new date, which hides it again. You can also ask to be notified at a particular hour on the day.
Reminders never go overdue. They simply become visible on their date. Only to-dos and scheduled visits carry an overdue highlight.
Creating one
Click + Reminder/Todoat the top of the My Todos & Reminders panel. One window covers all three: choose Reminder, Todo or Visit along the top, fill in the fields, and save with Set Reminder, Add Todo or Schedule Visit.
You can also create a to-do or reminder from any household, using the Todo / Remind tab in the contact window or the Todos/Reminders tab on the profile.
6. Lists
Lists group households for any purpose: a follow-up list, a small group, a shut-in list, a particular ministry. Once a list exists you can filter the People page down to it.
Creating a list
Click Manage Lists above the household rows. The window has two places to create one, and which box you type in decides who can see it.
- Public Lists:Visible to every ministry leader. Only administrators can create these.
- My Private Lists:Yours alone until you share it. Anyone can create these.
Type a name in the relevant box and click Add or Add Private. A colour is chosen for you. To rename a list or change its colour afterwards, use the edit button on its row.
Sharing a private list
Click the people icon on one of your private lists and tick the leaders you want to share it with. Each one gets a level:
- Can view:Sees the list and who is on it.
- Can edit:Can add and remove households, rename it, recolour it, and share it further.
Lists shared with you appear under Shared With Me.
Adding households to a list
- Open the contact window for a household and click Lists in the header. Tick a list to add, untick to remove.
- Open the household profile and use the Lists tab.
- Open Manage Lists, expand a list, and add households by name.
Filtering by list
Pick a list from the All Lists dropdown above the household rows. The list narrows immediately, and you can combine it with the status tiles, the sort order and the search box. Private lists are marked [Private]in the dropdown so you can tell them apart from the church’s own.
A Tracker list can drive a prayer plan in Shepherding Prayer, so the families you group here are the families your church prays for, without a second list to maintain.
7. Worship Attendance
Attendance lets your officers check off who was at worship each Sunday, and tells you who has stopped coming. It is switched off until a church asks for it.
Turning it on
- Open Admin > Church Info.
- Under Worship Attendance, tick Take attendance for Sunday worship.
- Set Flag after this many missed Sundays. Three is the default.
- Click Save Settings.
An Attendance button then appears in the top bar for pastors, elders, deacons and administrators. Other ministry leaders do not see it.
Taking attendance
Open Attendance. The service date starts on the most recent Sunday; change it to record a different week. Search by name if you need to, then tick everyone who came. Each tick saves on its own, and a running count sits above the roster.
The roster is grouped by household rather than run alphabetically by first name, so a family of five is five taps together.
Missed Sundays
The Missed Sundays panel lists anyone absent for the last few Sundays you took attendance, using the threshold you set. Each row says how many in a row and when he was last there. Click a row to open his household. Weeks you skipped do not count against anybody, so a Sunday nobody recorded breaks no streaks.
Attendance is a shepherding signal, not a scoreboard. It never affects a household’s contact status, and it does not appear in the printed report.
8. Reports & Statistics
Statistics and reports live on one screen. Click Reports in the top bar.
Pastors, elders, deacons and administrators have access already. Any other ministry leader can be granted it by ticking View Reports on his account under Admin > Users.
Ministry Leader Activity
The first block on the page is a table of every leader with contacts logged this quarter and this month, and, for a leader with a district, the share of that district he has reached. It always covers the current quarter and month, whatever date range you set below it, and it is left off the printed report.
Congregational Health Snapshot
The report opens with a snapshot of the whole church: a bar showing the proportions, one tile per status with a count and a percentage, the total number of households, and a district-by-district table with the same four columns. It is dated as of the day you generate it, and it can be left out with the Include church-wide health section switch.
Building and printing a report
- Pick a Report Period. Quarter to Date, Last Quarter, Month to Date, Last Month and Year to Date are one click; or set From and To yourself.
- Choose the Leaders to Include. Tick them individually, or use the role buttons, All, or None.
- Decide whether to include the health snapshot, and whether to use Export in concise format for a tighter printout.
- Click Print / Save as PDF and choose Save as PDF in your browser.
For a quarterly session meeting, set the period to the last quarter and print one report per leader. The controls disappear from the printout, so what comes out of the printer is the report alone.
9. Activity Feed
Activity is a church-wide, day-by-day feed of what the team has been doing, newest first. Each entry names the household, the type of contact, the leader who logged it and anyone who joined him. Prayer requests and changes to the roll appear here too, so a household archived last Tuesday is on the record with the rest.
Access to the Activity feed is not automatic, and administrators are no exception. A pastor must tick View Activity Feedon the person’s account under Admin > Users.
Narrowing the feed
Four controls sit above the feed:
- Search by Name:Matches a household, the leader who logged the entry, or anyone who joined him. It filters as you type.
- From / To:Limits the feed to a stretch of dates.
- Activity Type:One dropdown grouped in three: contact types, prayer requests, and changes to the roll such as Household Added or Member Archived.
- Clear Filters:Resets all of them.
10. Admin & Settings
The last button on the top bar reads Admin if you are an administrator and Settings if you are not. Administrators get the full panel; everyone else gets My Settings alone.
The administrator’s panel holds ten sections down the left: Users, Districts, Role Labels, Church Info, Billing, Households, Import, Lists, Danger Zone, and My Settings.
Users
Headed Ministry Leaders. Add, edit or deactivate accounts, and see how many of your plan’s seats are in use. A new account starts from a congregation member you search for by name, so a leader and his household record stay one person.
For each leader you set:
- Role. Pastor, Elder, Deacon, Ministry Leader or Secretary, plus any custom role your church has named.
- District, for elders and deacons.
- Individual permissions, App Access, and alert preferences, described below.
Permissions
Seven permissions can be granted to any account, on top of what his role already gives him:
Add / Remove Users
Create accounts, edit them, deactivate and reactivate them, and remove somebody’s login. It cannot set a role, tick these permissions, or make anybody a full administrator. On somebody who already has admin access, it cannot change the login email or set a new password.
Edit Household Info
Add, edit and permanently delete households and members.
Manage Admin Settings
Edit church info, districts, role labels and public lists.
View Reports
Open Reports and print them. Elders and deacons have this already.
View Activity Feed
See the church-wide activity feed.
Log Contacts for Others
Record a contact on another leader’s behalf.
Approve Prayer Requests
Review and release requests submitted by members and through the church’s public prayer form. It grants no extra sight of anything, which is what makes it safe to give a secretary who runs the prayer chain.
If you untick Approve Prayer Requests on the last person who holds it while requests are waiting, Tracker says so before you save. Nobody can release those requests until someone is granted the permission again.
App Access
Below the permissions, App Access decides which Shepherding Tools products this person can open: Tracker, Connections, Prayer and Discipleship. Tick a product to give him access, untick to take it away. The list appears once the account exists, so create the person first and set his access on a second pass. You cannot remove your own Tracker access.
Districts
Districts group households and give each group its officers. Open Admin > Districts and click + Add District. Give it a name, name its elders and its deacon, and choose an Assignment Method. There are two:
- Alphabetical (last name range). Enter a range such as A-C and every household whose last name starts inside it belongs to the district. New households join automatically.
- Manual (assign households individually). A tick list of your households appears; tick the ones that belong. Nothing is assigned unless you assign it, which is usually what a small church wants.
A district can carry more than one elder, and a household can belong to more than one district. To move a single household later, anyone with Edit Household Infocan do it from that household’s own profile.
If your church syncs with a church management system, districts can be filled from a tag or a profile field there instead. That is set up in the ChMS card, not here. See Import below.
Households
Add households, edit them, move a member from one household to another, split a household in two, and mark a household exempt or inactive. Each household has a shared last name, phone, email and address, plus its member records. Archiving lives here too, and has its own section below.
Role Labels
Two editors share this section.
Role & Terminology Labelsrenames the offices to match your church’s language: Pastor, Elder, Deacon and Ministry Leader, each in singular and plural, plus what you call a district. Five custom roles are available if your church has offices ours does not name. These labels appear throughout the app.
Member Roles edits the dropdown you see when adding someone to a household. It starts from our defaults, and you can rename, remove or add entries.
Church Info
Your church name, city, denomination, admin contact email, timezone and default country. The church name appears in the app header, in email notifications, and at the top of printed reports. The timezone decides when your Assistant emails go out.
The Worship Attendance switch is on this page as well. See Worship Attendance above.
Billing
Your plan, how many of its seats are in use, your renewal or expiry date, and the card on file. Below that is every payment, each with a Receipt (PDF) link. Manage Subscription is where you change plan, update your card, or cancel.
Import
Admin > Import has two tabs: Spreadsheet and ChMS Integration.
The spreadsheet import takes Excel, CSV or OpenDocument files in any column order.
- Drop your file on the page, or click Choose File.
- On Map Columns, tell Tracker what each column is. It shows sample values from your own file so you can see what you are matching. Map at least Household Last Name and First Name.
- Click Preview Import and check how the rows have been grouped into households. Split any group that has been joined wrongly.
- Import, and read the results summary.
No file yet? Download a starter template gives you the right columns. If what you have is a PDF, a Word document or a photo directory, use Request staff import and we will do it for you.
Church management system sync
Tracker syncs with Breeze and Planning Center. Open Admin > Import and pick the ChMS Integration tab. Connect one of them with the credentials it asks for, and Tracker imports your congregation, then keeps names and contact details up to date on a daily sync you can also run by hand.
With Breeze you also choose which people come across, by tag or by a profile field value, and you can map tags or profile fields onto districts so households are assigned on every sync. One system connects at a time.
When someone is removed at the other end, Tracker does not delete him silently. He appears in a pending removals banner on the People page, and an administrator decides whether to archive or delete each one.
Danger Zone
Two things live here, both for administrators only.
Download data exportgives you a complete copy of your church’s data as a file: households, members, contacts, notes, prayer requests and the rest. This is your right to data portability under GDPR and CCPA, and you do not have to ask us for it.
Delete church account erases everything permanently and cancels any subscription. It asks for your password and for your church name typed out in full. There is no undo and no backup we can restore from.
My Settings
Everyone has this section, administrator or not. It holds your display name, your personal contact details, your BCC logging address, your alert preferences, and which of our occasional emails you want.
It is also where you turn the Pastoral Assistant on, set your time off, change your password, and manage your own private lists.
11. Archiving Households and Members
When someone dies, transfers to another church, or is removed from the rolls, you do not have to choose between leaving them in your active lists and deleting years of pastoral history. Archiving takes a household or an individual out of your working views while keeping every contact, note and scheduled visit attached to the record.
Archiving a household
Open Admin > Households. Each household is a row, and the Archive button sits at the right-hand end of it.
Clicking it opens a short confirmation panel below the row with two choices. The first is a dropdown for the reason:
- Transferred membership, the default, for a family that has moved to another church.
- Deceased.
- Dropped from rolls, for members removed by session action.
The second is a date box, which starts on today’s date. Change it to the date the archive should reflect: for a member who has died, the date of death. Then click Archive to confirm, or Cancel to back out.
You can also archive a household from its own profile page: open it from People and click Archive in the row of buttons at the top. This route is available to pastors and administrators.
Archiving one person instead of the whole household
A widow should not disappear because her husband has died. To archive a single member, open the household’s profile page and click that person’s name chip in the members row. An Archive [name]… button appears beneath it, with the same reason dropdown and date box. The household stays active and its contact history stays where it is.
The same thing can be done from Admin > Households by clicking Edit on a household and using the Archive button beside an individual member.
There is a third way in, and it is the one most people look for first. On the household profile, click Edit and then Record a death or departure…beside the member’s name. It takes you straight to the same panel described above. It is a shortcut to that one control, not a separate way of doing it.
Archiving a household does not archive the individual members inside it, and archiving a member does not archive the household. They are separate actions, so you can retire one without touching the other.
Recording that someone is widowed, divorced or separated
Archiving describes someone leaving your roll. It cannot say what has changed for the person who remains— and that is usually the person your officers most need to know about. A widow has not left the church; she is exactly who someone should be visiting.
So each person carries a separate Family Status, with an optional date. Open the household’s profile, click Edit, and it sits beneath that person’s other details. There are four values and no others:
- Deceased
- Widowed
- Divorced
- Separated
Once set, it shows beside that person’s name in the members row of the household, so you can see who a family is now without opening anyone. Leaving it blank is the normal state, and clearing a wrong entry is one action — choose — none — and the date clears with it.
This is a fact recorded about a person who is still on your roll, and it is deliberately separate from archiving. Marking a woman widowed does not archive her, and archiving her late husband does not set it for her — you record it yourself, because only you know it.
What archiving actually changes
An archived household drops out of the views you work from every day:
- The People page, so it no longer shows as overdue for contact.
- Reports and statistics, so your contact-health numbers reflect your actual roll.
- Attendance, and the household counts on each district.
- The Assistant’s queue, its Coming Up list and its emails.
- Search. Archived records are reached through the archived list described below, not by searching for the name.
- BCC email logging, which refuses to file a contact against an archived household.
Nothing is deleted. Contacts, notes and scheduled visits stay attached, the profile page remains viewable, and the archive itself is recorded in the Activity feed as Household Archived or Member Archived. If you choose Deceased and you have the bereavement sequence switched on, Tracker offers to start it for that family, so they are not simply filed away.
Finding and restoring an archived record
Under Admin > Households, a button reading Archived (n) appears once you have archived anything. Click it to open the Archived Households list, which has its own search box. Each row offers View to read the history and Restore to return the household to active status.
An archived household’s profile page also carries a banner showing the reason and date, with a Restorebutton for pastors and administrators; everyone else sees “History is read-only”. To restore an archived member, go to Admin > Households, click Edit on the household, and use Restore beside that person.
Exempt households and visitors
An exempt household stays on your books and stays searchable, but sits outside your coverage numbers. Use it for someone who has started attending but has not joined, and for logins like “Administrator” that were never a family at all. An exempt household can never reach full coverage, so counting it holds your whole church’s percentage down.
- Open Admin > Households and find the household.
- Click Mark Exempt.
- Pick a reason: Visitor, Office or role account, or Other.
- Add a First visit date if you have one.
- Click Mark Exempt to confirm.
Exempt households are hidden from the ordinary list. The Visitors and Exempt chips above the household rows show them, replacing the list rather than adding to it. Remove Exemption puts a household back into your numbers.
If your church uses Connections, a visitor you add there arrives here on his own, already marked exempt with the reason Visitor, so you can see him alongside your members without him counting against your coverage. Anyone you list beside him in Connections, a wife or children, arrives in the same household, and a name you fix in Connections is fixed here too. When he joins the church, remove the exemption: there is no second record to merge and nothing to re-type. If you remove his contact from Connections instead, his household here is archived rather than deleted, and Restore brings it back. How this looks from the Connections side.
Archive, inactive, exempt, or delete?
- Archive. The record leaves your active views but keeps its history, its reason and its date. This is what you want for deaths, transfers, and members removed from the rolls.
- Inactive. A checkbox on the household edit form reading “Mark household as inactive”. The household leaves your coverage numbers and the People page, without a reason or a date, but stays searchable and stays in the Assistant’s queue, so an officer is still prompted to visit. Useful for a family that has stopped attending but has not left.
- Exempt. On the books and searchable, outside your coverage numbers, and not queued by the Assistant. For visitors and for accounts that were never a family. See above.
- Delete. Permanent, and it takes the contact history with it. Use it for a duplicate or a record entered by mistake, never for a member who has died or moved on.
If your church syncs with Breeze or Planning Center, people removed at that end appear in a pending removals banner where you can archive or delete them in one step. Archiving there records the reason as “Dropped from rolls” and today’s date.
Tips & Best Practices
- Log contacts right after a visit while the details are fresh. Even a brief note is better than none.
- Turn on the Pastoral Assistant and set an honest weekly number. A small number you keep beats a large one you abandon.
- Use Tried, didn’t connect for the calls nobody answered. The family stays in line and your work is still on the record.
- Record birthdays and anniversaries as you learn them. They come back to you two weeks ahead on Coming Up.
- Check My Todos & Reminders at the start of each week.
- Set a reminder for a household that needs following up in a few weeks. It stays hidden until the date arrives.
- Use private notes for sensitive pastoral matters. They are protected by role, and “Only me” means only you.
- Print the report for quarterly leadership meetings: set the period, pick the leaders, save as PDF.