Signing in to Vianney
Vianney is reached at your parish's own web address (for example yourparish.vianney.church). Who may sign in is controlled by the Staff & Teams list — if you are not on it, you cannot get in, no matter how you try to sign in. That list is your parish's whole security boundary.
Sign in with Google (the usual way)
- 1. Go to your parish address and click Sign in with Google.
- 2. Choose the Google account whose email is on the staff list and approve the prompt.
- 3. You land on the Today dashboard. Your role decides which tabs you see.
Sign in with a password
Some accounts use a parish password instead of Google. Enter your email and password and click sign in. If the office created your account, they will send you a one-time set-password link by email — open it and choose a password (at least 8 characters) to finish.
Signing in to a cluster
If your parish is part of a cluster, you instead go to the cluster's own address (for example yourcluster.cluster.vianney.church) and sign in once — with Google or a password — to reach every parish in the cluster from a single home screen.
Why was I signed out?
Vianney signs staff out on its own after a stretch of inactivity — 60 minutes at most parishes — and again 12 hours after you first signed in. You get a two-minute warning with an I'm still here button before the inactivity one. Nothing is wrong with your account; simply sign in again. See Automatic sign-out and staying signed in for what counts as activity and how to change the window for your parish.
Finish signing in on the browser you started in
Signing in with Google is a round trip: you leave Vianney, choose your account at Google, and come back. Vianney checks that the browser coming back is the same one that left — so the round trip has to finish where it started.
- Use the same browser and the same window. Copying the Google link into a different browser, or onto your phone, will not work. Start again at your parish address instead.
- Cookies have to be allowed for your parish address. If your browser blocks them, or a privacy extension clears them mid-trip, sign-in cannot finish.
- Finish within ten minutes. If you get distracted part-way, the trip expires and you simply start again.
If any of these is off you will see "this sign-in didn't match your browser — please start again at /auth/login", or "this sign-in link expired — please start again at /auth/login". Neither means anything is wrong with your account. Go back to your parish address and click Sign in with Google again.
Tips
- A brand-new parish is set up with its pastor's account already in place — Vianney creates it during set-up, not by whoever signs in first. After that, the office adds everyone else from Staff & Teams.
- For your own security, every sign-in attempt is logged in the audit trail.
- Forgot your password? See Resetting a staff password.
- If Google is having an outage, signing in with Google stops rather than half-working: on the web you get a brief "Google authentication is temporarily unavailable; please try again" reply, and in the phone app a "sign-in is temporarily unavailable — try again shortly" message. Either way it clears on its own once Google recovers, there is nothing to fix at your end, and your account is untouched. If you also have a parish password, that way in is unaffected — use it in the meantime.