If your church uses a debit machine for donations, you can now track that payment method when adding new contributions. When adding (or editing) a contribution, you'll now see a new "Debit Card" option in the payment "Method" select field.

We've added an option to the new prayer request form that now gives users the choice of whether they'd like to send everyone an email notification for that prayer request.

Previously notifications were always sent (unless disabled in the prayer settings by an administrator), but this made it more difficult to add a bunch of existing prayer requests — like when first enabling this feature in Church Social — without sending the whole congregation a notification for every single prayer added.

Now users can simply select if they'd like to notify other members at the point of creating a new prayer request.

We're excited to share a big update to the office-bearer roles in Church Social — you can now track office-bearer terms!

Previously when assigning someone as an office-bearer in Church Social you simply set their current role as either an elder, deacon or a pastor. However, there wasn't any way to keep track of their term length, start date, or end date, nor could you keep track of past terms. Meaning once you removed the office-bearer role from someone's profile, there was no history within Church Social that they ever served. We've changed all that!

On the edit person page, administrators are now able to track multiple office-bearer terms for a member. Each term has a role (elder, deacon or pastor), expected term length, start date, and end date. You can add as many past terms as you'd like, but of course each member can only have one active term at a time.

Since many churches have a standard term length for elders and deacons (three years anybody?), we've added an option for this on a new "Office-Bearer Settings" page. Adding this simply makes adding new terms a little easier since it will automatically set the term length for you for elders and deacons, and you can still customize it on a per term basis as needed.

Probably the most exciting part of this whole feature is the new "Office-bearer terms" report, found on the "Reports" page (only available to administrators, statisticians and report managers). This report will list all your active and past office-bearer terms, grouped by the year that the term ends. This is really helpful information when nominating new office-bearers, as you can quickly see who is currently serving and who has served more recently. Many of our customers give past office-bearers a two-year "break" out of office, which this report makes easy to see.

Finally, if tracking office-bearer terms doesn't makes sense for your church, but you would still like to set who your current elders, deacons and pastors are — no problem! Simply create a term without any length, start date, or end date, and when their term is completed you can simply delete it. Of course we think this is useful information to track, but if you'd rather not have to maintain this information that's totally fine too.

We really hope that this new feature helps your church, and especially your councils and consistories, keep track of these terms and provide a little better visibility into them moving forward!

We've just published an update to the giving section that allows treasurers to choose which name should be used for a person when generating their tax receipts. You can choose between:

• Their first name (the default)
• Their birth first name
• Their middle name

Of course these options will only be available if you've set either a birth name or middle name in the "People" section.

You can find this new option on the "Create Receipts" page in the three-dot dropdown menu beside each tax receipt. Any changes you make will be applied to both that tax receipt, as well as any future tax receipts you generate for that person.

This is a helpful change as it allows treasurers to use someone's real name when generating tax receipts — helping prevent any confusion with the fine folks in the tax department.

Continuing on our recent update to show deceased members on the family page to everyone, we've also updated this page to now show any other inactive family members to office bearers.

This includes members who moved away, but also those who may have left for other reasons, like withdrawing or excommunication.

This change gives elders, deacons and pastors a little more insight into a family's history, further helping them in their care for them.

We've updated the family page to now always show deceased family members. This includes their name, their birth date (if your church's privacy settings allow it) as well as the date they passed away.

Previously deceased members were only visible to administrators and office bearers, but we've had many churches reach out to us asking us to have these members visible to everyone.

Showing deceased members helps make the congregation aware of these loved ones, creating opportunities to show the family support — especially on sensitive dates like the member's birthday or on the date they passed away.

Further, this change removes an awkwardness that previously existed where if an administrator was quick to mark a member as deceased soon after they passed away, the member would disappear from the family page rather abruptly at a time when that family page is being visited frequently. Now they can safely update the church records and this former member will still be visible.

If for some reason you'd prefer that a deceased member not appear on the family page, you can use the existing "visible" privacy setting to hide them.

Librarians will be happy to hear that we've reorganized the library section a little to make it a bit easier to get around.

We've added a new tabbed navigation that provides quicker access to checkouts, categories, and a new library statistics page.

For now the new statistics page simply includes the stats that were previously on the checkouts page, but we hope to add more interesting information to this page in the future.

The checkouts page also has a new search input, meaning if you have a barcode scanner attached to your computer you can now scan a book and then mark it as returned.

The library section has been updated with a new streamlined "Return book" dialog when you click on a checkout on a book page or on the "Checkouts" page.

Previously clicking a checkout opened the "Edit checkout" dialog, which gave you the option to change who a book was borrowed by, the date they borrowed it, and also the date they returned it. Adding a "Return date" to a checkout would change its status to "Returned".

While this worked it wasn't super intuitive to have to edit a checkout in order to return a book. So we decided to create a new dedicated "Return book" dialog to optimize for this task, since that's the most common action to take when editing a checkout.

Plus we even autofill the "Return date" to today's date so you don't need to manually select a date unless it's different than today.

And you can still edit a checkout via the "Edit" link in the three-dot actions menu should you want too change who a book was borrowed by or the date that they borrowed it.

You can now send schedule reminder emails out up to two weeks prior to the scheduled date. You can find this new option when creating or editing schedules under the "First email reminder" field.

Just like our recent update to the files section, you can now also bulk download all the photos in a photo album. When viewing a photo album, click the three-dot actions menu at the top-right of the screen, and then select the "Download photos (ZIP)" option to download all the photos in that album.

You can now easily bulk download all the files in a specific folder in the files area. When viewing a folder, click the three-dot actions menu at the top-right of the screen, and then select the "Download files (ZIP)" option to download all the files in that folder.

We've fixed an issue with the message search feature where searching was previously really slow if your congregation had a lot of past messages. It should now be super speedy!

We've just released a small update for church treasurers. We've added the ability to sort contributions by data in both ascending and descending directions. This applies to all the sort options — name, giving number, entry date, fund, amount, etc. You'll find these new options on the deposit page as well as the contribution search page.

Have you ever wanted to send a message to multiple groups? Or maybe to a group plus a couple other people? You now can!

When sending a new message you can now choose multiple recipients. This can include segments like "All members" or "All women", groups like shepherding groups or Bible studies, or even just individual members. You can mix and match recipients however you want.

And there's more! Have you ever wanted to send a message to everyone, but exclude one or two people? Maybe you're arranging a surprise birthday party for your pastor and don't want him or his wife to see the message. Well you can now add message "exclusions".

To do this first select the segment or group you want to send the message to, like "Everyone". Next, click the people count beside the "Send to" label and you'll see a list of everyone who is going to be included on the message. Beside each person you'll see an "Exclude" button. Click that button to make sure those members aren't included on the message you send out.

We're really excited about this feature and believe it makes the messaging feature in Church Social even more powerful. Enjoy!

We've just pushed out a little improvement for church treasurers. Now when you're creating new contributions on a deposit page you can quickly create new donors and funds without leaving the page.

To do this, simply click the "add donor" button beside the "Contributed by" input to create a new donor and click the "add new" button beside the "Fund" input to create a new fund.

After creating the new donor or fund it will automatically be selected and you can continuing entering the rest of the contribution details.

A nice little productivity improvement!