At the end of the year, after all of your year-end reports have been run and printed, you may want to archive people who have been removed, deceased, or otherwise, are unneeded on any reports or views.
With the archive feature, you can place these people in a special section of Church360° Members that allows you to exclude them from all reports but still retain them in most membership, attendance, and offering figures.
Archiving is also the first step to deleting a record entirely. Households are automatically hidden when all members within it are archived.
It is not recommended to archive people you may need to report on later. It would be a good rule of thumb to keep removed members for at least five years. Though unarchiving is available, as the database changes over time, it may become increasingly difficult to reintegrate their record into the updated interface.
If a person is giving jointly and is archived, the giving unit is severed and the remaining spouse will contribute separately from that time forward. If the person is unarchived, they will need to be marked as contributing jointly with their spouse again as well as reassigned their envelope.
If you are needing to archive multiple records, you can use the Bulk Archive utility on the People view.
To archive a person,
- Open the person's record from the People view from your preferred mode. Keep in mind, only individual records can be archived.
- Below the Timeline section of the person record, click the button that says "Archive this person".
- Click the "Archive Person" button to confirm that you want to send this person to the Archived section.