User Support Forum

In adding new persons into the membership module
If I dont know what year a person was born, how do I just put in MM/DD with out the year, If I leave it blank the program inserts current year.

There's no way to enter a birthdate without a year, as you have already seen. The best we can do is suggest that you enter a year you know is fake, like 1900. That way, you can run a report to see what people don't have birth years, and you can follow up with them accordingly.

If a member is simply refusing to give their birth year, having them show up as being 103 years old on reports may persuade them to be more cooperative.

I'm wondering, given concerns with identity theft, PowerChurch would consider modifying the software so that in the future, input of a birth year is optional. We have never maintained this in our manual membership files... certainly we can key everyone in with a fake year such as 1900, but in general, we prefer to keep birth years confidential. --Jeff Rehbach, Memorial Baptist Church, Middlebury, VT

rehbach wrote:I'm wondering, given concerns with identity theft, PowerChurch would consider modifying the software so that in the future, input of a birth year is optional. We have never maintained this in our manual membership files... certainly we can key everyone in with a fake year such as 1900, but in general, we prefer to keep birth years confidential. --Jeff Rehbach, Memorial Baptist Church, Middlebury, VT

As was mentioned, use of a dummy year is the way to get around the requirement, however, there is no current way not to enter a year for a date, as the data item is specifically a DATE field in the database.

This date is also used to calculate the age of the person for use in determining age grouping for children's classes, and so on.

Finally, there shouldn't be a problem with identity theft as long as access to the database is restricted to only those persons needing access.

You will have better luck using 9999 as the year, rather than 1900. There are certain date functions that are disabled by using the 9999 year, rather than calculating everyone as over a hundred years old.

Zorak wrote:You will have better luck using 9999 as the year, rather than 1900. There are certain date functions that are disabled by using the 9999 year, rather than calculating everyone as over a hundred years old.

Really ... something else to add to my PC+ trivia knowledge !!