User Support Forum

In preparing to print our church directory we are finding a lot of instances where we have duplicate entries. We understand how to move personal profiles from one family group to another, but in doing so we seem to have created a new problem!

Namely that we can't seem to control the order in which the family members are listed. For example we have an entry that appears correct in Integrated but when it prints in the directory as a family, the wife is the primary name, and the husband's name appears in parentheses underneath with the children, as if he is a child rather than head of family as he should be. When we pull up the family members, the wife is listed first, then the husband, and we can't seem to find a way to fix this.

Do we really have to create yet a third entry for this family and move the profiles over? This will change the registration dates, etc., which will make subsequent reports where we are trying to contact new visitors inaccurate, as there will be families who the database thinks are new, but who are actually long-time members.

I hope this is not a duplicate question, I have searched the forums for an answer to this, and see lots about moving profiles to new entries, but nothing about the order of the profiles. Thank you for your help!

On the personal profiles you will find a field called directory sequence. This controls the order people print on the church directory sequence. PowerChurch also uses this to determine who in the family is the parents and who the children are.

If a person is listed as directory sequence 1 or 2, PowerChurch treats them as spouses. Children should be assigned directory sequence 3 and up. In your example, I am going to assume the wife was listed as Directory Sequence 1 and the husband as Directory Sequence 3 or higher.

In the case of a single parent household, you would assign the parent as directory sequence 1 and then list the children as directory sequence 3 and higher skipping directory sequence 2.

To add what Jeff said, in many cases, there is a middle child listed at position 2, father in 3, oldest child in 5, younger in 4.

The easiest way to clear this up is to:

Change the person in 2 to a number greater than that in the family, in this case, a family of 5, change it to 6.
Then you can change the mom to 2, the father to 1, the oldest to 3, the youngest to 5, then change the middle child from 6 to 4.

Then you'll have the family listed properly with the kids in the proper age order

This has helped IMMENSELY, I cannot thank you guys enough! We have been going crazy trying to figure this out. We knew the number was significant but couldn't figure out how or where to change it. Thank you Thank you Jeff and Neil!

Just in case you are not clear on how to make the sequence change. Under the Integrated Data Entry window and select Family Members. Then select Change Profile on the family member you need to change the sequence number. The box is located in the center right of the window.