Adding and managing gatherings

What is a gathering?

A gathering is any occasion where people meet together in person or online. For a church, a gathering might be a weekend or weekday service, but you may have other gatherings where people also meet and for which you'd like to record attendance, like a Holiday Club, a midweek Youth Club or a Parent & Toddler Group. In the context of ChurchSuite, add each of these as distinct gatherings. You can then configure each gathering's Attendance and Children module settings for attendance recording. Attendance can be added manually or recorded automatically by using the Check-In system. In a multi-site setup, a gathering is always site-specific, which means you'll add separate gatherings for each site. For example, if you have 9.30am and 11.30am Sunday Services at Site A and a 10.30am Sunday Service and a 7pm Thursday Youth Club at Site B, you'll add four distinct gatherings, two for Site A and two for Site B.

Adding a gathering

Gatherings can only be added and managed by a user with at least Write permissions for the Attendance module or the Children module. From the Menu, select Account and then Gatherings:

To get started, click Add gathering:

Give your gathering a suitable Name and specify the Day of the week and Time that this regular meeting happens; you can also select a colour to help differentiate between gatherings in a long list. Multi-site customers will also need to specify the Site this gathering is a part of. Click Save to add your gathering.

You are now taken to the gathering's view page, where you can manage the gathering's settings.

Managing gatherings

If you need to make changes to a gathering at any point, navigate to the gatherings section of the Account menu. From the action menu, select Edit.

In the same menu, you can optionally Archive or Delete a gathering. Note, it isn't possible to delete a gathering until all Attendance records associated with that gathering are also deleted. Archiving is a less destructive action, preserving any historic attendance records while removing the gathering from the available options for future Attendance recording.