Families and households
Families and households: add a whole family at once
Churches meet families, not rows. When the Riveras visit for the first time, you want to write down the four of them and how they fit together, once, not create four disconnected records and stitch them up later. That is what Add a family does: name the household, add each person with a role, share one address if they live together, and save a single time. This guide walks through the wizard, the household model behind it, and the other places addresses live.
What is a household?
A household is its own record, with a name your church chooses, and people belong to it as members with a role: adult, child, guardian, spouse, or other. The role describes how someone fits in that home. It never changes their person type or their billing count, which stay on the person's own record.
Households live on their own page beside the People directory, and a person's profile shows the household they belong to, so a hospital visit for one member of the family carries the context of the rest.
- A household is its own record; people belong to it with a role: adult, child, guardian, spouse, or other.
- Add a family creates the people, the household, and an optional shared address in one atomic save, up to 25 members.
- New member rows carry the family surname forward, and a role tap alone never creates a ghost member.
- Household roles never change billing: nobody counts until you review and mark them counted.
- Addresses live on the person form, on the profile with inline editing, and on the wizard's shared address.
- Planning Center imports carry home addresses, and a re-import backfills them for people imported earlier.
How does Add a family work?
From People, choose Add a family. The wizard starts with one question, the household name, and the rest of the form appears once you have answered it. Add each member with a name and a role chip: adult, spouse, guardian, or child. New rows carry the family surname forward so you are not retyping Rivera four times.
If they share an address, tick the shared address box and enter it once; it lands on the household's people together. Then save, a single time. The whole family is created in one step, people, household, and address together, so a family can never half-exist because a save failed in the middle. If a network hiccup interrupts, retrying is safe and will not create doubles.
Do the usual person defaults still apply?
Yes. Every person the wizard creates follows the same honest defaults as the Add person form: person type comes from the role you chose, nobody counts toward billing until you review and mark them counted, and children never count. The billing guide covers that model in full.
The wizard is for creating a family from scratch. To connect an existing person to a household instead, edit them or use the household picker on the person form; and the Households page manages membership for any household after the fact.
Where else do addresses live?
Three places, one address. The Add person form has an address section for a single person. A person's profile shows their address under the label Address, with an inline edit for adding or correcting one later. And the family wizard's shared address writes the same kind of record for everyone in the home at once.
Imported churches get addresses too: Planning Center imports carry home addresses, and a re-import fills in addresses for people who arrived before that was possible. Addresses are visible to staff whose permissions include people access, like the rest of a person's contact details.
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