Over time, with people coming and going through your church's doors, your database will distinctly grow. And you may want to clean up records that haven't been used in years.
For a single record that is unneeded for any reporting, you can open the record and archive it manually.
If you have multiple records you need to archive, Church360° Members offers an easy bulk archiving utility on your People: Individuals view.
When archiving a person record, you are placing them 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.
It is not recommended to archive people you may need to report on later for any reason and a good rule of thumb is to keep removed or deceased 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. This will be true even if the other spouse was archived as well.
Due to deletion being a permanent process that cannot be undone, there is no bulk deleting feature.
To use the bulk archiving feature,
- Go to the People view and select the Individuals mode. This utility is not available for any other mode.
- Select those you want to archive, either by checking boxes next to each name or filtering using Smart Groups, traits, or tags. If filtering you will want to click the topmost checkbox to select all visible records.
- Once the desired records have been checked, a black bar will appear at the bottom of the screen. Click the first button that's labeled "Bulk Archive".
- A pop-up window will appear with the rest of the screen greyed out behind it. This window will tell you how many people are selected to be archived as well as any person records with a Members or Unite login assigned. The warnings will reiterate that joint giving, attendance records, offering records, and other membership information may become unavailable when archiving the chosen records.