Parish directory and census software

The census the office works from

• • Parishioners grouped into households, with addresses and contact details
• • Status on every record — active, inactive, moved, or deceased
• • Custom tags for the categories your parish cares about: lector, volunteer, new member, visitor
• • Staff notes with author and timestamp
• • Full-text search across names and email addresses
• • Duplicate detection, so two people entering the same family does not quietly corrupt the census

The directory families see

Separately from the staff census, a parish can publish an opt-in family directory at its own URL. Parishioners choose whether to be listed, and the page carries a noindex directive so names, addresses, and phone numbers stay out of search engines. A directory is something a parish hands out, not something Google should find.

That distinction is deliberate and enforced in code rather than left to a setting someone has to remember.

Getting your census in

Import from CSV on any plan, including the free one. Most parishes are moving off a spreadsheet, so that path is free on purpose — see the guide to switching from a spreadsheet.

Keeping a census current

A census is only as useful as it is current, and the main reason parish records rot is that updating them is somebody's extra job. Status on every record helps: marking someone moved or deceased is one change rather than a decision about whether to delete a row and lose the history with it.

Duplicate detection handles the other half. Households get entered twice — at a baptism, at a registration drive, by a volunteer working from a paper form — and finding those pairs deliberately is far cheaper than discovering them when a family gets two copies of the same appeal letter.