Add people by hand: you choose, not an algorithm

Where do I add someone?

Open People in the app. Staff who can manage people see an Add person button at the top of the directory, next to Households. The form only requires one thing: a name. Given name, family name, or display name, any one of the three will do. If you leave display name blank, FlockConnect builds it from given plus family.

Everything else on the form is optional, so you can save a person knowing nothing but their first name and fill in the rest as you learn it. When you save, FlockConnect takes you straight to the new person's profile. Adding people is a permission, not a given: the Add person button appears for the account owner and for admins granted people access, while care partners work from a view scoped to the people assigned to them.

• Only a name is required: given, family, or display. Everything else can wait until you know it.
• Adult, Child, or Not sure yet: you choose the person type. FlockConnect never decides it for you.
• The billing decision sits on the form: count, exclude, or decide later. Decide later is the default and means not counted.
• New people start as Active. Archiving later removes them from the billing count and is reversible.
• Households are separate records: add people as members with a role of adult, child, guardian, spouse, or other.
• Hand-entered people are stamped as manual entries, marked reviewed at entry, and appear in your directory right away.
• The manual form does not check for duplicates. Duplicate detection runs during CSV import, matching on email and phone.

What does the form ask for?

Three short groups. Name is the part covered above. Contact holds an email and a phone number, both optional; the form itself notes they are used for forms, reminders, and duplicate detection during imports, so anything you fill in now pays off later.

Profile is where the judgment calls live: a person type, a newcomer status, a preferred language for the person (English, Spanish, Thai, or Lao), an optional date for when they joined the church, and the billing-tier count decision. The next sections take the two decisions that matter most one at a time.

Who decides adult or child?

You do. Person type has three choices: Adult, Child, and Not sure yet, and Not sure yet is the default. The form has no birthdate field and no age cutoff deciding this for you: a person is an adult or a child because you said so, never because an algorithm guessed.

The choice matters for billing. Only people marked as adults can ever count toward your plan, and children are excluded from the billing count by default. Not sure yet is a safe place to rest: someone left there never counts toward your bill until you come back and decide.

What is the billing count decision?

Every person record carries a billing setting with three options: count toward the active-adult tier, exclude from it, or decide later. Decide later is the default, and it means not counted. FlockConnect never guesses, and the default always errs in your favor.

A person only counts toward your plan when all four conditions are true: marked adult, status active, marked counted, and not archived. If any one is missing, they do not count. The active-adult billing guide linked below walks through the whole model.

What about statuses and archiving?

Two different ideas share the word status. Newcomer status describes the person: Newcomer, Returning, Established, or Not sure yet, with Not sure yet as the default. The active status describes the record: every person you add by hand starts as Active, and when you edit them later you can set Active, Inactive, or Archived.

Archiving keeps the record but drops the person from your People directory and out of your billing count, regardless of their other settings. It is also reversible: unarchive someone and the record returns to active. Inactive people likewise do not count toward your plan.

How do households work?

A household is its own record with a name of your choosing, managed from the Households page beside the people directory. After creating one, you add people to it as members, each with a household role: adult, child, guardian, spouse, or other.

The household role describes how someone fits in that home. It is separate from their person type and does not change their billing count, so marking someone a guardian in a household leaves every billing decision exactly where you set it on their person record.

How does manual entry fit with CSV and Planning Center import?

They are built to coexist. People you add by hand are stamped as manual entries, just as imported people are tagged with the import that brought them in, so the source of every record stays clear. Hand-entered people are also marked reviewed the moment you save them, since you typed in every field yourself, and they appear in your people directory right away.

One honest caveat: the manual form does not check for duplicates. Duplicate detection lives in CSV import, which checks each row against the email and phone of everyone already in your church, hand-entered people included, and flags likely matches before anything commits. So if someone may have arrived through an import already, look them up in People before adding them again. Mixing the paths is normal: many churches sync from Planning Center or import a CSV once, then add people by hand week to week.