Processing Deceased Members in PowerChurch Plus

Information about each person is stored in various areas of the program. When a person passes away, it is necessary to go through the following steps to allow them to be excluded from all of the different reports and selections in the program. In the following example, Brian Adams has passed away and we will be updating the information in PowerChurch Plus accordingly.

Family Mailing List

Remove the deceased person's name from any of the following fields on the Integrated Data Entry/Maintain Family Mailing List forms. This will remove the person's name from reports, mailing labels, and mail merge exports created in the Family Mailing List.

Before:

• Household Key Last Name, First Name. These fields are used mainly on reports.
• Mailing name. This field is the top line on mailing labels printed from Family Mailing List.
• Salutation. This field is used in Family Mailing List mail merge exports.

After:

Personal Profiles

Change the following fields on the deceased person in the Maintain Personal Profiles form. This will allow them to be removed from most other reports and selections across the program.

Before:

• Personal Status. This is the most used field in the program and categorizes a person's status in the church or organization. This field is used in most other modules of the program to select people from Membership. Change this to "Deceased" or a custom value that you specify.
• Envelope Number. Remove the envelope number from the deceased person's record to keep them from being included in the Contribution Statements. If the surviving spouse has the same number assigned, they will be listed on the statements and will still receive credit for the contribution and pledge history. Important note: If no one else has this envelope number assigned, removing the deceased person's envelope number will permanently move their contribution history to the 99999 envelope number and will become anonymous. Make a backup and/or print out their Contribution Statements before making this change if no one else has this envelope assigned.
• Directory Sequence. The Directory Sequence field defines what order people in a family/household will be printed on reports like the Church Directory. Internally, the program treats people with Directory Sequence 1 and 2 as "parents" or "adults" of the household. Moving the deceased person to Directory Sequence 99 will exclude them from selections like "To the parents of" mailing labels, e-mails, etc.

After:

Change the following fields on the surviving spouse's Personal Profile.

Before:

• Directory Sequence. Move the surviving spouse to Directory Sequence 1, if they are not already.
• Marital Status. The Marital Status field can be used to exclude people from things like the Birthdays & Anniversaries report in Personal Profiles.

After:

Activities & Skills

Remember to also remove the deceased person from any activities that they were members of, especially if you record attendance. Otherwise, you will be recording an absence every week for them, making your Attendance reports and statistics inaccurate.

Before:

After:

Conclusion

Once all of those changes have been made, you should then see the updated Family Members list on the Integrated Data Entry screen look something like this: