How to get report of actual church members?

[fbcsequim]

This is probably an old question. We have been using PC for many years but we don't know how to get a report of just church members, not to include non-members and others in the membership module who are attenders but not actual members. The Membership Master Report seems to list everyone in the module database. Do members have to be tagged? If so, what does it mean to be tagged - how do you tag someone?

[beas]

If you don't have some field set up to mark a person as a member, PC+ can't determine who is a member in the first place. And maybe you have this, but it doesn't sound like it. We have a user-defined field in Personal Profiles called Member? that has a drop-down list (user-defined) with a few available responses, one of which is Active. If a person is a "real" member, the response in the field is Active. You can then set up and save and run a report that selects only the people, etc. you ask for. This a very basic explanation.

Or you can tag the "real" members and use the same report with it showing only tagged records. The problem here is if you want to tag for some other reason, it will mess up the report since you can't specify why a record is tagged or have tags for different reasons.

You can also create a custom report in Personal Profiles if you're so inclined.

I know this sounds rather confusing, but it's not as bad as it sounds. I hope this is useful.

[NeilZ]

This is probably an old question. We have been using PC for many years but we don't know how to get a report of just church members, not to include non-members and others in the membership module who are attenders but not actual members. The Membership Master Report seems to list everyone in the module database. Do members have to be tagged? If so, what does it mean to be tagged - how do you tag someone?

Powerchurch comes with both Mailing List profiles and Personal Profiles as defaults. One of which is Member, hopefully you have been entering people as members and non-members this whole time. It also comes with some customizable data items such as dates, which are often used to enter the date when people joined.

Most Membership Module reports have filters that you can use to include those profiles you want to see, and those you don't. You can use these to include members and exclude non-members. I also hope that you've been tracking when people have passed, as this is also something you can use the Personal Profile statuses for to exclude people.

Tagging is just selecting profiles to be included in a report, this is very labor intensive as you may have reports in which you do NOT want to select people who are tagged. Using the profile statuses makes reporting much easier. If you've not been separating members from non-members using both the Mailing List and Personal Profile statuses, its makes very good sense to do so.

That said, it may take some time to go through the system, and mark each family, then each person in the family, but this can be done using the Integrated Data Entry screen, assuming that you have all the Personal Profiles linked to the proper Mailing List profile. However, using the IDE screen to find personal profiles that need to be added to the mailing list profile is rather easy in the newer versions of PCPlus.

[fbcsequim]

Thanks for these answers. I should have done more investigation before posting. Now that I look further ... I see we have a field called Personal Status in the Personal Profile which has a drop down and two choices are Member-Active and Member-Inactive. Not sure if this is a standard field with standard drop down choices or if someone set this up in the past.

What I'm really after is a simple report which lists church members, so we can update the list and know at a glance who our members are by generating this report. I see now that there is a Reports tab of Personal Profiles reports and Personal Status is one of the criteria for these reports. So we can get an All Individual Profiles report of Members-Active. This is what we need, minus all the details for each profile. Two questions: Can I make a custom report that will just list the names and not all the details for each person? Can the Personal Status drop down choices be customized?

[Zorak]

Personal Status is a standard field in PowerChurch, but the values are customizable. If those are your only two options, it would be useful to add things like Visitor and Deceased at a minimum.

When you run most any report in Personal Profiles, there will be a Personal Status selection where you can specify who you want to be included in the report.

[fbcsequim]

OK, so how do I customize the values of Personal Status?

[fbcsequim]

Ignore that question. I just found where to change or add the Personal Status codes. But I would like to know how to create a custom report. Is there some info about that somewhere?

[NeilZ]

Ignore that question. I just found where to change or add the Personal Status codes. But I would like to know how to create a custom report. Is there some info about that somewhere?

No custom report needed .. if you go to Personal Profiles reports, select the Selected Names, Addresses, Phones, select Member-Active as the Personal Status on the Selection Criteria page, then on the Report Options page, click the NONE button to remove all checkmarks, the report will list members by Last Name, First Name and nothing else.

That said, hopefully the database has been properly kept updated