Upgrades to people importer

Our bulk importer is an extremely helpful tool for new congregations first coming onto the platform. It allows them to import their existing membership records from other software, granted it can be provided in an Excel (CSV) format. However, since it's difficult to represent relationships in a flat spreadsheet format, it was never possible to import families or marriages. This has always been a nuisance, since it meant a bunch of work was still required after doing the member import. Administrators had to manually go through each member in their congregation, and group them into families, while also adding marriage information. We wanted this process to be easier, so last week we set out to improve it!

The people importer now has five new possible fields: family, marriage_status, marriage_start_date, marriage_end_date and ward. Meaning you can now automatically group members into families using the family field, setup marriages using the marriage_status, marriage_start_date and marriage_end_date fields, and as a bonus you can even set the family's ward (district) using the ward field. You can read more about how to use these new fields in our support article here.