Search, filters & archiving

Three habits, every list

Fay is really a stack of lists, people, households, events, seasons, donations, contacts, ticket orders, and the three ways you shape a list work the same on every one of them. Learn them once and every screen obeys: you search to find a row, filter to narrow the set, and archive to put a row away without ever losing it.

There is no separate page for any of this. The search box, the filter row, and the View archived toggle live at the top of each list, right where you are already working. This article is the one place they are explained in full; each page’s own article points back here rather than repeating the rules.

Forgiving search

The People and Households lists, and the person pickers built into forms, such as choosing who a donation is from, carry a search box. You search by name or email.

Matching is deliberately forgiving. It uses trigram similarity, which compares the little three-letter runs inside words, so a partial name or a small typo still lands. Type “Whit” and you get the Whitfields; type “Whitfeld” and you still find “Whitfield.” You do not have to spell it perfectly or type the whole thing, which matters when you are reading a name off a box-office receipt in someone else’s handwriting.

Filters & switches

Below the search box sits a row of filters. Most are link-based dropdowns: each reads “Filter: selected value” so you can see the current state at a glance, and opening one shows a check-mark beside the choice that is active. Pick a value and the list narrows instantly, there is no “Apply” button. Changing one filter keeps the others exactly as they were, and it resets you to the first page so you are always looking at the top of the newly narrowed set.

Which filters a list offers depends on what the list is about:

• People: Role, Audience, and Giving dropdowns, plus two checkboxes.
• Events: a Season dropdown.
• Donations: Season and Campaign dropdowns, an Unthanked only toggle, and a received from … to date range for the monthly close.
• Contact log: Medium, Follow-ups, and Made by dropdowns.

The date range is the one exception to “no Apply button”. A range is only meaningful once both ends are typed, so it waits for Apply rather than reloading the list on every keystroke, and offers Clear dates to undo it.

A dropdown that would have nothing in it does not appear at all, Campaign stays away until you have a campaign, and Made by until somebody has actually been credited with a contact. A filter for nothing is worse than no filter.

Some refinements are on/off rather than dropdowns, and the two lists that have them do not agree on a widget: People’s Has opted in to email and Happy to receive postal mail are checkboxes, while Donations’ Unthanked only is a switch. Both flip instantly just like a dropdown does, only the widget differs, not the behavior. The People and Donations articles walk through what each of their filters means.

When a filter leaves you with nothing, Fay says which filter emptied the list and what would put somebody back into it, “Nobody can be emailed yet,” and then the four things Has opted in to email requires. A filter that legitimately matches nobody looks exactly like a broken one, and on a young database the honest answer is usually that the data has not been recorded yet rather than that anything is wrong.

Archiving, not deleting

This is the big idea, and it is worth saying plainly: Fay archives, it never deletes. People, households, events, seasons, donations, contacts, and ticket orders can all be archived. Archiving hides a record from the working lists while keeping every bit of its history, every gift, ticket, note, and link to other records, completely intact.

Every archivable list has the same pair of controls: a View archived ↔ Back to … toggle that swaps between the live list and the archived one, and a per-row Restore on each archived record. The confirmation you see before archiving spells out the promise, it reads like “It will be hidden from your lists but never deleted.” Open any archived record and an Archived badge sits by its name so you are never confused about why it is missing from the live view.

A few records refuse outright deletion on purpose, to protect the history hanging off them: a household that still has members, or a season that already has events or donations booked against it. Rather than let you break those links, Fay asks you to archive instead. The same safety net is why match suggestions and duplicate events are tidied by archiving, not by throwing anything away.

Exports & paging

Two smaller behaviours round out how lists act. CSV exports, offered on People and Donations, always match the filters currently on screen. What you export is exactly what you see, so narrowing the list first is how you shape the file you hand to the board or the accountant.

And every list pages in chunks of 25. If you ever land on a page number that no longer exists, because a filter shrank the set, say, Fay simply clamps you to the last real page instead of showing an error. You cannot navigate yourself into a dead end.