Church360° Members has always prioritized showing the right information in the right place at the right time. One way to accomplish this is to filter out people who are no longer active in your church, and while this is often accomplished by utilizing smart groups, a more permanent solution has been requested. We have now added a way to hide people for good with the Archive People function.
Most churches have people in their database who are no longer and will never be active again. It may be that those people have moved to a different state, have transferred to a different church, or have passed away. These people still have valuable past attendance and offering data, so deleting them is not a good idea. That’s where archiving comes in.
Archiving people allows you to remove people from every view without deleting their corresponding attendance and offering records. It’s like a “soft” delete, allowing you to clean up your database without being unnecessarily destructive.
Archiving a Person
Here is how to archive a person:
- Log in to Church360° Members as an administrator.
- Go the People view.
- Click on a person’s name to access their profile.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the “Archive this person” button on the left.
- A warning message will appear explaining the impact of the action. Click “Archive Person” to complete the action.
What Does Archiving a Person Change?
Archiving a person works in almost the same way as deleting a person, with a few exceptions. Once a person is archived, you will no longer see them listed in Church360° Members anywhere except the following views:
- Envelopes, but only if they have an unarchived spouse
- Church register
- Audit log
- Archived people list
The archived people list can be accessed by going to People, clicking on the Smart Group selector, and scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking Archived.
Archived people’s offerings will still display on the Offerings view, and their attendance totals will be included in Attendance reports.
When Should I Archive a Person?
There is never really a time when you should archive a person, but if you are considering deleting a person, we suggest archiving them instead. In fact, with this update, you can only delete archived people since deleting cannot be reversed.
Here are some instances when you shouldn’t archive a person:
- They have contributed in the last year. Archiving a person will prevent you from generating a contribution statement for them.
- They are still a member of your church. Even if a person no longer attends, they should not be archived if they are still a member because archiving them will cause your membership totals to be inaccurate.
- They have immediate family members who are still active. Archiving a person will remove them from the relationships section of members’ profiles.
One last word of warning: “un-archiving” a person doesn’t automatically revert everything to how it was previously because changes may have been made that prevent some actions from being reverted, such as to offering envelopes or marriage.
If you have any questions about this new feature, please contact our software support team at support@cts.cph.org or (800) 346-6120.
