We've just released an update to schedules in Church Social that gives churches more control over who is able to see a particular schedule. When creating or editing a schedule, you'll now find a new "Who can see this schedule?" setting, which includes the following three options:

Everyone

With this option everyone can see the schedule and the entries within it. This is exactly how schedules have always worked in Church Social, and is what we recommend by default unless there is a specific reason to keep the schedule hidden.

Only those on the schedule

With this option only those who are included on the schedule are able to see it in Church Social. This option is useful for situations where it doesn't make sense for everyone in the congregation to see that particular schedule. For example, a schedule that organizes meals for a struggling family, or a schedule that arranges visits to elderly or widowed members.

Only those on the schedule, and they can only see their own entries

This option takes the previous option one step further by hiding all schedule entries that aren't your own. This option provides the most privacy, and is useful for schedules where it doesn't make sense for anyone else to see what you're schedule for. For example, a schedule that organizes home visits by elders or deacons.

We just fixed a small issue where the contributions were not sorted correctly in the contribution summary of emailed tax receipts.

A super small change for our US-based churches — we've updated the giving section to say "check" instead of "cheque".

Librarians can now add library barcodes to your church library books. Many libraries use their own barcode system to track books, CDs, DVDs and other library resources. This means that in Church Social you can now keep track of items that don't already have a product barcode (ISBN or EAN) and situations where you have more than one copy of a library resource.

Treasurers can now export the list of contribution receipts to CSV and Excel. You can find this option on the contribution receipts page in the three-dot dropdown menu in the top right of the page, and then selecting "Export (CSV)" or "Export (Excel)".

Treasurers can now filter contribution receipts by the date they were issued. This is done from the "Filter" dropdown on the receipts page.

We've updated the member contributions statement in the giving section to now include the member's giving numbers. This is a small change to help members learn their giving numbers and encourage members to use them.

To date, in order to receive emails from Church Social, such as messages or schedule reminders, members (and guests) had to have login access enabled on their account.

We've just updated the app to remove this requirement. Now any user with an active membership (member or guest) and a valid email address can receive emails from Church Social, even if they cannot login.

Removing this login access requirement can be helpful in situations where you want a specific person, such as a regular guest at your church, to receive email communications from your Church Social account, but where it's unnecessary to give them full access to the app.

Note that those who receive emails but do not have login access are still able to unsubscribe from emails via the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of each Church Social email.

You can now search for past messages! On the message page there is a new search input where you can search for past messages by the sender's name, the message subject, body, and even comments.

In addition to uploading a family photo, families can now also include a short biography about themselves in Church Social. You can add this from the my profile settings page, and it will then appear under your photo on the family page.

But what should you include? Imagine you were introducing your family to a new member in the congregation. What would you share? Include that here! Maybe share the things that interest you — your hobbies, favourite music, what you do for work, where you went to college, how God has impacted your life — anything!

This is a wonderful way to help the congregation become better acquainted with one another, and is especially great for new members at your church.

Treasurers can now filter contribution receipts to only include those that have not been emailed yet. This is helpful when you want to only print the tax receipts that need to be hand delivered or mailed.

By default family correction emails are automatically sent to all administrators and statisticians. You can now override that behaviour by explicitly setting which users receive these emails. You can find this new option on the "People" settings page under the "Family corrections" heading.

We've just made a small update to schedules to allow exporting schedule entries to Excel (CSV). You can find this option on the schedule page in the three-dot dropdown menu in the top right of the page, and then selecting "Export entries".

We have just added the ability to send out same-day schedule reminders. Please note that schedule reminders are sent at 5am in your congregation's local time.

We've just released a small fix for nested lists in messages. Previously if you tried to create a nested list within another list, the formatting of those lists got messed up after sending the message. This has been corrected.