The correspondence log: recording a call, a visit, a letter
Open a person and go to Engagement → Correspondence. This is the parish's memory of contact: who spoke with this family, when, and what was said.
It exists to answer the everyday question at the front desk — *has anyone called them back yet?* — before two people call the same widow on the same afternoon.
The six kinds
Phone Call, Email, Text, Home Visit, Office Visit, Letter. Pick the kind, set the date and time it happened (parish local time — not the moment you typed it up), say who it was with, and write what you want remembered.
The With box lists your active colleagues by name, and defaults to you. For anyone who is not on staff — a visiting priest, a deacon from the cluster, a family member — there is a free-text box beside it. Vianney will not accept an address it does not recognize as a staff member: identity is never guessed, so an unknown name goes in the free-text box rather than being silently written as somebody.
Who can see it, who can change it
Everyone with People access reads the whole log. There is no per-entry privacy switch here, and that is deliberate: a parish office cannot function if half the calls are invisible to the other half of the staff.
Judgment and pastoral read live one tab over, in Insights, which does have visibility tiers — see Insights: pastoral notes and who can see them. The dividing line is worth keeping in your head: *what happened* goes in Correspondence, *what you make of it* goes in Insights.
Only the author edits or removes an entry. You may correct your own record of a conversation; you may never rewrite someone else's. Removal is soft — the row and its history are kept, not shredded.
The audit log records that an entry was added, edited or removed, and the field names involved. It never records the words. An audit trail must not become a second, unguarded copy of pastoral content.
Connect messages appear here too
The table is a merged view: your handwritten entries plus the Connect messages already sent to this person — the email or text, whether it was opened, whether a link was clicked.
Those are surfaced, never copied. The message lives in Connect's own record and is read from there each time you open this page, so a resend or a bounce correction can never leave two disagreeing copies behind.
Reading the table
- Type — Phone Call, Home Visit, Email, Text, and so on.
- Person — who entered this, not who it was about. For something you logged by hand, that is you. For a Connect message it is whoever composed it, or "Vianney Connect" when the message came from the system itself.
- When — newest first, in American format.
- Source — whether the row is a hand-written entry or a Connect message.
Search across the log, filter by type or source, and click a column heading to sort by it. The roll-up counts above the table are computed over the person's full history, so they do not dance around while you filter.
Tips
- Log the call even when nothing came of it. "Left a message, no answer" is exactly the fact the next person needs.
- The date is when it happened. Backdate a Tuesday visit you are writing up on Friday.
- Nothing confession-related belongs here, or anywhere in Vianney.
- For the wider picture of everything between a family and the parish, see the Story.