Households

Group a family so letters, receipts, and giving tiers roll up together.

What households are for

A household groups the people who share a roof, a couple, a family, so that everything you send them and everything they give rolls up together. Without households, Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so are two separate records who each get their own year-end letter and whose gifts are counted apart. Group them, and the letters, the tax receipts, and the giving tier all treat them as one.

The list lives at /households, reached from Households in the top navigation, the second of three tabs sharing that row with People and Matches, three views of the same directory: everyone, everyone grouped into households, and the possible duplicates waiting to be resolved. Matches is staff-and-above only: the queue shows each candidate's giving as context for choosing a survivor, so a contributor does not see that tab.

The households list

The list shows one row per household with four columns:

Name: what you call the household, such as “The Whitfield Family.”
Greeting: the household’s formal greeting for letters (for example “Mr. & Mrs. Whitfield”), or “·” if you have not set one.
Members: a count of the non-archived people in the household.
Lifetime giving: the joint total, every member’s gifts added together.

The header offers Add household, which opens the form to create a new one, and View archived, which lists households you have set aside. Each archived row carries a Restore action to bring it back.

The household record

Open a household and the top of the page is three stat cards: Joint lifetime giving (the members’ gifts combined), Members (how many belong), and Events attended (the sum across every member, so a couple who each came to three nights reads six). If the household has been archived, an Archived badge sits by its name.

Below the cards is the members table, one row per person:

Name: links through to that person’s full record.
Role: the person’s active-role badges, such as Member, Board member, Volunteer, or Staff, or “·” if they hold none.
Email: the address a letter or note would reach.
Events attended: this member’s own attendance count.
Lifetime giving: this member’s own gifts, before they are rolled up.

Each row also has a Remove action, which takes that person out of the household without touching the person themselves. The page’s own actions are Add to household, a modal with a search box for finding one of your people and adding them, Edit household, and Archive.

Building a household

The form has two fields: the household Name, which is required, and a formal greeting, the exact words a letter opens with, like “Mr. & Mrs. Whitfield.” The greeting is what the year-end receipts and donation letters address the household by, so it is worth setting deliberately.

Membership is built with the member picker: search your people, and each one you choose appears as a removable chip. Add and drop chips until the household is right, then save, Fay reconciles the membership to match the chips you left, adding anyone new and removing anyone you took off.

Households can also appear on their own. When Fay spots that two people share an address and surname, it offers to link them from a match suggestion; accept it and a household is created for you, named “The {Surname} Family.” You can rename it and set the greeting from the record afterward.

Archiving & the delete rule

Like the rest of Fay, households are archived, not deleted. Archive hides a household from the list without detaching anyone, every member stays a member, and nothing about the people is lost. A restore from View archived brings it back exactly as it was.

There is a firm guard behind this: a household cannot be hard-deleted while it still has members. Try, and Fay refuses with “cannot delete a household that still has members.” If you truly want a household gone, remove its members first, but archiving is almost always what you actually want, because it keeps the shared giving history intact.

Maria’s day

Two of Riverside’s steadiest patrons are Tom and Peg Whitfield, who have sat in the same two seats for years. Every January they get two year-end letters, one each, because in Fay they are still two unlinked people, and their giving is split down the middle. It looks careless, and Peg has mentioned it twice.

This morning Maria fixes it for good. She opens Households, clicks Add household, and names it “The Whitfield Family.” In the member picker she searches “Whitfield,” adds Tom and Peg as two chips, and sets the greeting to “Mr. & Mrs. Whitfield.” She saves.

The record now shows one Joint lifetime giving figure, their two totals finally added together, which quietly bumps them into the tier above, and Members: 2. Next January the receipt run will address a single letter to the Whitfields instead of two. One household, one greeting, one thank-you, before the coffee has even cooled.