Person status, locations and areas categorize and structure the data you record in your ChurchTools to give you a better overview.

By combining personal status, locations and areas, you can map complex community situations. It’s worth coming up with a well thought-out concept – preferably together with your church leadership!

Personal status #

The person statuses describe the relationships between people and your congregation. Each person always has exactly one person status in ChurchTools. By default, these are: Member, Friend, Interested party or To be deleted. You will later use the person statuses to assign the first permissions for the system.

Location #

A location in ChurchTools is a kind of virtual administration room in which all the data collected in it is labeled. This marked data can be filtered and can also be authorized separately. Each person in ChurchTools is always assigned to exactly one location.

There is always at least one location for the church in ChurchTools, which is designated as the head office by default. You can store the church information for this location in the system settings and create and publish a church profile in Public Relations.

You can add further locations for a daughter church or a missionary organization, for example. You also manage the data for this location in your ChurchTools. You can create and publish separate location profiles for this in Public Relations.

You can authorize the location data separately. This makes it easier to use ChurchTools.

To be able to use the locations as filters, you assign people, Groups, services, calendars, resource types and wiki categories to a location. If you do not assign a location, this means that the corresponding group, resource, etc. is independent of a location and visible to all users of all locations. Of course, this always depends on whether the user is allowed to see the group, resource, etc. at all.

If a user is only allowed to see data from one location, no selection of the location is displayed in the top left menu and the filter cannot be used.

Range #

A division is a part of a location that operates largely independently and wishes to use its own list of people. This subdivision makes sense if there are areas that have their own management structure and list of people, e.g. a division of church and youth work. If this is not the case, it makes more sense to use Groups to structure the data. If you have stored more than one area for your ChurchTools, each person must be assigned to at least one of the areas.

You can also authorize the data of the areas separately.