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Knowledge Base General Help & Tutorials Contact Management

Entering Families

To see families currently in the system, choose Contacts along the left-hand side. Across the top, we see various groups of contacts, in this episode, we will be focusing on Families. 

The list of families can be sorted, by clicking on the table headers, searched, by typing in the search box and paged, by using the pagers at the bottom. In the list, we can see the family's name and the count of children that are currently in school.

Adding a Family

To add a family, click Add Family on the top right.

Go to Editing a Family for details on the form.

Editing a Family

To edit an existing family, simply click their name in the list of patrons.

Layout

Let's take a second to review the layout first...

  • Father’s information, along with his contact info is on the left.
  • Mother’s names and contact info are on the right.
  • Church group affiliation is at on the top-right, along with an Is Active checkbox (on the left) to specify if this family currently attends school.
  • Children’s info is below the parent's tiles.
  • Emergency contact information is at the bottom.

Functionality

Father's and Mother's Info

  • First Name - dad/mom's first name
  • Middle Name - middle name
  • Last Name - the family's last name - if the mother's last name is the same as the father's, it does not need to be specified
  • Known As - if the parent is not known by his first name, you can specify another name here

Contact Methods 
By default, the father's contact methods include a phone number and address. To add additional methods, click the gray buttons above the contact methods grid below the parent's name info. 

Children's Info
Below the parent's information tiles, we can see the children's information. 
To add a child, choose Add Child below the list. To remove a child, click the trash can on the left of the record.  
To edit a child: 

  • First Name - the child's first name
  • Middle Name - the child's middle name
  • Last Name - the child's last name - only specify if different from the father's
  • Know As - what this child is known as (e.g. Matthew, known as Matt)
  • Birthdate - birth date of the child
  • Student Group - the group of students this child has most of his classes in
  • Gender - gender is optional and is used on the birthdays report (more reports that use gender are coming, so we recommend setting it)

Emergency Contact Info

This is info that is used to contact the family should a teacher need to contact the parents for an emergency.

  • Priority - the order in which the teacher will see the contact info 
  • Name - the name of who to contact
  • Relationship - the relationship of the contact to the child
  • Type - the type of contact this is

  • Notes - notes regarding this contact

Additional Info 

At the top on the right side, it is possible to assign this family to a church congregation. This info is used on the Church Groups report.


Deleting a Family

A family may transfer to another school, or simply stop attending your school. How should this be handled in Candle? Families only show up throughout the system when they've have students in school. So, when you start you school term next year, simple remove the students from the groups they were put in, and the family will disappear from the reports and selection boxes. For future first graders, remove the young children from the family. Do not remove children that were already in school and have data entered.