Importing your sacramental register books

Vianney can read your old register books — baptism, marriage, confirmation, and first communion — from photographs, and turn each handwritten entry into a proper sacramental record with its register citation. You stay in charge the whole way: nothing is ever written without a person clicking Confirm.

How it works

• 1. Under Settings → Sacrament Import, create a batch for one physical book (say, "Baptisms 1948–1962"). The volume code you give it becomes the citation on every record from that book.
• 2. Photograph the pages and drop the photos into the batch, in order. See How to photograph a register.
• 3. Click Start scan. Vianney reads each page and proposes the entries it found — names, dates, godparents — with its confidence about each field.
• 4. Review each entry: check the reading against the page image, match the person, and click Confirm. See Matching and confirming entries.

What a confirmed entry writes

One click of Confirm writes everything at once: the sacramental record, its register citation (book, page, entry number), a row in the person's "In the register books" list, and a note saying exactly which book and page it came from and who confirmed it. Nothing is silent, and nothing is guessed.

The three buckets

• To review — entries waiting for your decision.
• Skipped — entries you set aside with a reason (illegible, not our parish, duplicate, other). Nothing is deleted; you can reopen any of them.
• Flagged — entries you marked to come back to later.

If a page cannot be read

Scanning happens page by page, and one difficult page never holds up the book.

• A page whose reading is interrupted is simply picked up again on the next pass and read from the start. You do not have to do anything, and you will not find a page sitting on Scanning… for ever.
• If a page still cannot be read after that, it lands on Failed with the reason shown right under its thumbnail, and the batch moves on to review with all the pages that did read. A single bad page can never leave a book half-open.
• Each failed page offers Retry to try again and Replace to swap in a better photograph — a fresh, flatter, better-lit shot is usually all it takes. See How to photograph a register.
• When the scan finishes, Vianney tells you how many pages could not be read, and the completion report counts them too, so nothing quietly goes missing.
• Retrying does not multiply your spend: a page counts once toward the batch's scanning cost however many attempts it took, and a page that never reads successfully is not charged at all. See Register OCR costs and the AI switch.

Take your time

Batches are resumable: close the browser mid-book and the workspace brings you back to the entry you were on — even on a different computer. Two people can even work the same batch at once: if you both happen to land on the same entry, the first Confirm wins and the other reviewer sees a clear "this entry changed" notice — never a silent duplicate. When the last entry is resolved, a completion report shows what was written, who was newly created, what was skipped and why, which pages could not be read, and what the scanning cost.

Questions? [support@vianney.church](mailto:support@vianney.church)