Setting up ministry rosters

Before you can schedule, Vianney needs to know your ministries and who serves in each — your rosters. This is the foundation the scheduler draws from.

Ministries opens with a row of tabs: Overview, Rosters, Schedule, History, Sign-ups, Subs, Availability & Reminders, AI helpers, Needs attention, and Setup. You only see the ones your role allows. Rosters and Setup are the two you need first.

Name your ministries

• 1. Open Ministries → Setup → Ministry positions. Vianney starts you off with the usual list — Lectors, Extraordinary Ministers, Ushers, Altar Servers, Cantors, Sacristans, Organists, Music, Hospitality / Coffee — and you edit it freely.
• 2. Click + Add a ministry for anything missing: a short one-word code and the name you want people to see.
• 3. Tick Requires SE on any ministry that needs Safe Environment clearance.
• 4. Click Save positions.

How many people each Mass needs is not set here. It lives on Setup → Masses & staffing, so a weekend Mass and a Tuesday morning Mass can ask for quite different numbers. A ministry that still has members cannot be removed — Vianney names who is blocking it rather than quietly orphaning people.

Build the roster

• 1. Open Ministries → Rosters. Every ministry is one tight line: how many members, how many it needs at a weekend Mass, or (not scheduled) when it needs none. Click a line to open its roster underneath; click again to close.
• 2. Under Add a member, search the parish directory by name and click the person's chip to select them. Vianney never guesses identity, so you always pick from the directory.
• 3. Set their Role (member or lead), an optional Preferred Mass and Notes, then click Add.

On a ministry that requires clearance, each search result says there and then whether that person is SE cleared or not cleared — so you know before you press Add, rather than meeting a refusal afterwards.

Keep it current

• remove takes someone out of the rotation. The record and its history stay; the scheduler simply skips them from now on.
• Somebody who steps back shows as inactive with a Reactivate button — the old record wakes up instead of a duplicate being created.
• Only active members are offered by the scheduler, so removing someone is a quiet way to pause them.
• A person can serve in several ministries; add them to each.

The tools that live under Rosters

Beside the roster list is a second row of tabs, for the things that describe people rather than dates:

• Fairness — how the load is actually shared, and who is waiting for a first place.
• Crews — people who should be kept together at the same Mass.
• Qualifications — training and standing: who is still a trainee, whose qualification has lapsed, who is on pause.
• Rotations — standing assignments, as in "Jim ushers the first Sunday of every month".
• Households — how a family serves: the Masses they usually attend, a family ceiling, and away dates for the whole household.
• Minor Accompaniment — the record that a young server was accompanied.

The Safe Environment gate

Setup → Safe Environment decides what happens when someone without clearance would be scheduled for a ministry marked Requires SE:

• Off — don't check.
• Warn — allow it, but flag it.
• Block — keep them off; a Safe Environment coordinator can still act deliberately.

Unless your parish chooses for itself, Vianney uses Warn — or your diocese's own published setting, which may be stricter. Either way the gate touches only the ministries you have marked Requires SE; mark none and nothing changes.

Tips

• Each person can record a preferred Mass, a monthly limit, and dates they cannot serve — see Availability, caps, and blackouts.
• The Overview tab answers "are we covered this weekend?" in one screen — a row per ministry with a Find eligible → link that takes you straight to the gap.
• With rosters in place, you are ready to create a schedule.