Households

A Household is Sacramentum's canonical family grouping. It bundles related People together — a couple, a family with children, multiple generations under one roof — so the parish can see them as one unit for things like bulletin announcements, family-level offerings, and address-of-record updates. Every Household has a display name, an optional address, a primary contact, and a roster of member People.

Households are not the same thing as requesters or login accounts. See Understanding parish records for how Households fit alongside People, requesters, and users.

Households in the Directory

Navigate to Admin Dashboard → People → Directory. Every card in the Directory is a household: the family name, the adults with the head of household first, the children with their ages, and chips for anything worth a look — Needs review, No primary contact, Empty, or Archived.

• Search — find a household by its name or by any member's name, email, or phone.
• Filters — No primary contact, Empty households, and Archived narrow the list to households that need attention; the Parish status selector narrows it to registered, visitor, inactive, or unknown families.
• Add → Household — opens the create dialog.

Click the household name to open its panel. Click a member's name to open that person instead; the family rail on the left keeps the whole household in view either way.

The household panel

The household record reads top to bottom, and the family rail's On this page list jumps to each section:

Section	What it shows
Header and details	Address, primary contact, parish status, and preferred language, with the Edit button.
Members	Everyone in the household with their role, age, and contact details, plus the controls described below.
Notes and Family scheduling	Canonical notes, and — when ministry scheduling is enabled — the scheduling policy panel.
History	Collapsed by default. Every change to the household — creation, edits, members linked, moved, or removed, merges — with who made it and when.

Status and source badges

Status	Meaning
Active	Currently maintained household record
Archived	Inactive — kept for history but hidden by default
Merged	This household was merged into another

Source	Meaning
Admin Created	Created manually by an administrator
Family Profile	Created from a household or family registration
Imported	Brought in by a data import
Merged	Result of merging other Household records

Creating a household

1. Choose Add → Household in the Directory toolbar.
2. Enter a Display name — required. Most parishes use the family-style form, e.g. The Garcia Family or Bud & Caroline Ederer.
3. Choose a Preferred language if known — English or Spanish. This influences which language Sacramentum uses for emails and printed correspondence directed at this household.
4. Pick a Primary contact if the person already exists, or leave it as None and crown a head of household from the Members section later.
5. Set a Status (typically Active) and a Source (typically Admin Created).
6. Enter the Address — line 1, line 2, city, state, postal code, and country. All address fields are optional individually but together they make the household findable for visits and mailings.
7. Add any Notes — household-level reminders that don't belong on an individual Person record.
8. Click Save.

:::tip Households are usually created automatically Most household records get created behind the scenes when a parishioner submits a family registration. Manual creation is mainly for situations like adding a household whose members already exist as separate Person records. :::

Parish status

Each household carries a Parish status that says how the family relates to the parish today:

Status	Meaning
Registered	A registered parish family
Visitor	Attends or requests occasionally but is registered elsewhere
Inactive	A family the parish no longer hears from
Unknown	Not yet decided — the default for every household until staff set it

Set it from Edit household. The Directory shows the status as a chip on the household card and lets you narrow the list with the Parish status selector, so you can print registered families or follow up with visitors without leaving the page. Households created before this field existed simply read as Unknown; nothing is guessed for you.

Editing a household

Open the household and choose Edit household from the panel's actions menu. The dialog shows the same fields as the create form. Click Save to apply.

Managing members

Open the household's Members section. Each row shows the person, their role, their age when a birth date is on file, and their contact details.

• Add member — search the parish. A person without a household is added straight away. A person who already belongs to another household shows Move here; Sacramentum asks you to confirm before it moves them. Create a new person at the bottom of the search creates the person directly into this household.
• Role — open the row's ⋮ menu and pick Head, Spouse, Child, or Other. The current role shows as a small label next to the name. Choosing Head goes through the confirmation below, and it is not offered for minors.
• Head of household — choosing Head in the menu makes that member head of household and primary contact. Sacramentum tells you what happens to the previous head (they become the spouse when the new head was the spouse, otherwise Other) before you confirm.
• Move to another household… — pick the destination household, the role there, and an optional reason. The person's intentions, invoices, and receipts follow them, and both households' History sections record the move.
• Remove from household… — takes the person out of the household without deleting them. If they were the primary contact, the household is left without one until you crown someone else.

A person's own panel offers the same shortcuts: Add to a household… when they are unassigned, and the family rail's actions menu for members.

Head of household and primary contact

The household's Primary contact is who receives parish correspondence. Each member also carries a Household role. Crowning a member from the Members section sets both at once — that person becomes the head and the primary contact — which is what most families want. The two can still differ when a spouse handles correspondence on behalf of the family: set the role from the member's row and the primary contact from Edit household.

If a member is the primary contact but not the head, the family rail marks them with a small star.

Merging duplicate households

Duplicate households happen when the same family is registered through different channels, when an import creates a second record, or when family members independently set up household profiles.

1. Open the household you want to dissolve and choose Merge into another household… from the actions menu.
2. Pick the Target household — that's the survivor. The search box starts with the source family's surname so likely duplicates appear first; change it to search by household name, address, or notes. Each result shows the primary contact, member count, and town so you can tell similar households apart.
3. Click Generate preview. Sacramentum computes exactly how many records will be rewritten in each downstream collection (People, Mass intentions, invoices, receipts, memorial offerings, sacrament cases, and so on) and runs invariant checks to confirm no stale references will be left behind.
4. Review the preview tables, click Apply merge, then type MERGE in the confirmation field.

The source household is marked Merged and hidden from active lists. The target household keeps its record and now points to all the People, financial records, and sacrament cases that used to point at the source.

:::warning Verify before merging Household merges cascade across many collections and cannot be automatically undone. Always run the preview first, confirm the rewrite and recompute counts make sense, and only type MERGE when you are confident the right household is surviving. :::

Archiving households

When a household is no longer relevant — every member has moved away, the family no longer attends, or the record was created in error — archive it instead of deleting so the historical link from past intentions and offerings is preserved. Choose Archive household… from the panel's actions menu, or use the Archive shortcut on empty households in Data cleanup.

The badge changes to Archived and the household is hidden from the default list. Use the Archived filter in the Directory to find it later.

Why households matter

Households tie the system's records together at the family level. When a parishioner submits a Mass intention, the identity-resolution layer can link that intention not just to the Person who paid but to the Household they live in — making it possible to roll up offerings by family, send one bulletin announcement that names the whole household, or print mailing labels for an annual stewardship appeal. See Understanding parish records for the broader picture of how Households connect to People, requesters, and login accounts.

What's next

• Managing people — open, edit, and merge the people in a household
• Data cleanup — empty households and households without a primary contact
• Identity review queue — handle automatic identity matches that need a human decision

Related articles

• Managing requesters & payers — requester profiles and merge workflows
• Managing users — login accounts and parish staff