Person details, and defining your own fields
A person's Details tab holds the things a parish keeps about someone beyond a name and an address: marital status, profession, the languages they speak, what they are good at, whether the building works for them.
The remarkable part is that your parish decides what those fields are. No two parishes keep the same list, so this is settings, not code.
What ships to start with
Seven fields are seeded, and you may rename any of them:
- Marital status — Single, Married, Widowed, Divorced, Separated, Religious, Unknown.
- Profession — free text.
- Languages spoken — English, Spanish, Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, ASL, Latin.
- Talents & practical skills — free choices, empty to start, because yours are yours.
- Willing to provide meals — yes or no.
- Accessibility needs — Wheelchair access, Low vision, Hearing impaired, Large print, Homebound visits.
- Veteran — yes or no.
Editing a person's details
Anyone who can open a person can fill these in — it is the same rule the phone number and the address have always had. Open the person, go to Details, and edit.
An edit you make wins over a later import. If ParishSoft sends a marital status next month that disagrees with the one your secretary corrected by hand, the correction stands. Vianney records that a person edited the field, which is what makes that promise keepable. See Importing from ParishSoft.
Defining the fields: People → Setup
Go to People, then the Setup tab. It appears only for staff who hold the People setup permission — see Per-person access exceptions.
Here you can:
- Rename any field. Call it "Marital state" if that is your house word.
- Add or remove choices on a list field — add "Consecrated single," drop one you never use.
- Reorder fields with the up and down arrows, so the ones your parish actually uses sit at the top.
- Add a new field of your own — free text, one choice, several choices, or yes / no. "Instrument played," "Bus route," whatever you need.
- Retire a field by unticking Active, which hides it without destroying what was already recorded.
Two things you cannot change, and why
The seven starter fields show a small padlock beside their type. Their internal key and their type are locked, even though their label and choices are yours. Those keys are how the import mapping, the search facets and the demo data all address the same field — rename the label freely, but the plumbing underneath has to stay put.
You also cannot delete a starter field. Active is the way to retire one, so anything already recorded under it keeps its meaning.
The choices are suggestions, not a fence
The options you list are what the dropdown offers — they are not a whitelist that rejects everything else. If an import arrives carrying a marital status nobody thought to list, Vianney stores it and shows it rather than dropping it. Losing a real fact about a real family would be worse than showing an unlisted one.
Where the details go
Once recorded, details feed the plain-English people search — "who speaks Spanish," "who can provide meals," "who are our veterans." See AI person profiles and asking about your people.
Tips
- Add fields slowly. A field nobody fills in is worse than no field.
- Accessibility needs are worth the ten minutes it takes to record: it is the difference between a homebound parishioner being remembered and being missed.
- Use several choices rather than free text wherever you can — it is what makes a field searchable later.