Copies for the Diocese

A diocese can now keep a safe copy of the records of each of its parishes on parishrecordkeeper.com. If a parish computer is stolen, breaks down or is wiped, the registers and the closed years of the parish accounts are not lost: the diocese has them. It is custody, not sharing — once a copy has been sent, the parish can no longer see, download or delete it, and nothing the parish does to its own workspace afterwards reaches it.

• One button for the parish. The workspace administrator presses Copy for the diocese in Server Actions. The datafile travels together with the archive files of the closed accounting years — starting a new year empties the parish ledger, so those years exist nowhere else — and the program reminds a diocesan parish to send a copy right after it has started a new year.
• Collections run by the diocese. The diocese asks its parishes for copies with a deadline, and every parish administrator is told when Parish Record Keeper starts. A parish may send as often as it likes: a new copy replaces the previous one until the diocese endorses the collection.
• Nothing bloats, nothing good is lost. The diocese keeps its most recent collections and the year-end ones it pins; the accounts archives are kept for ever. A copy with suddenly far fewer records than the one before is flagged, and never pushes out the last good copy.
• The same desktop program. The diocese works in its own Diocese Office window, downloads the copies of one parish or of all of them, and opens any copy like an ordinary datafile.

Open a diocesan workspace at no extra cost. Each parish that sends keeps its own Workspace, and a diocese that pays centrally for all its parishes gets a group reduction of up to 20 % on top of the discount a longer term already carries — the table is in the FAQ. Dioceses are welcome to write to developer@parishrecordkeeper.com.

Read the full Copies for the Diocese documentation

Datafiles Now Travel Packed

Publishing a master, handing in a version and downloading the master are now about five times quicker on a slow line: the datafile is packed (zipped) before it travels — a 24 MB datafile goes up as about 5 MB — and unpacked and checked at the other end before anything is done with it. Nothing has to be set up. Computers with a Windows older than the Windows 10 of 2018 simply send and receive the files unpacked, as before.

Try a Workspace Free for Six Months

A parish can now try the whole online Workspace before contributing anything. With a free-trial token from the developer, typed in where the "Register a new workspace" window asks for an activation code, the Workspace is set up at once and runs free for six months — the shared master file, the online search, the phone apps, transport booking, shared report logins and copies for the diocese. Each email address can start one trial.

The start screen shows how long the trial has left. A contribution before it ends keeps the Workspace exactly as it is; without one it closes, and nothing on the parish computer is affected.

Read how a workspace is registered

Find and Merge Duplicate Church Records

Over the years the same person is often entered twice — a family re-registered at a new station, a register typed up a second time, or two parishes synced and the same person arriving from both sides. This new tool searches the whole set of church records, scores every likely pair on how alike they are, and lets you review and merge them two at a time — or let the safest, highest-scoring pairs merge automatically.

Nothing is guessed blindly: the search leans on your own Synonymous Names table to handle spelling variants, weighs dates of birth and baptism entries far more heavily than names alone, and remembers every pair you mark "not the same" so it is never offered again. A merge carries children, contributions and family files across correctly, keeps a full history of what was moved, and can be undone.

Read the full Finding Duplicates documentation

The Server Actions Panel

Everything the "workspace" page of parishrecordkeeper.com does in a browser can now be done directly from inside Parish Record Keeper: publish a new master datafile, rebuild the online search database, hand in a version for the administrator to merge, download the master or a queued version, or clear the workspace on the server — all without opening a browser. Corrections made on the phone are now carried into the database with one click, without first downloading and reimporting the change notes as was done in the older versions.

It is built for parishes with a slow or occasional connection: uploads and downloads run in real chunks with a visible progress bar, a failed chunk is retried instead of losing the whole transfer, and a large master file can be sent in the background so the computer stays usable while it goes up. Sign-in is remembered per datafile, and the start screen quietly shows whether the current datafile is registered and connected to its workspace.

Read the full Server Actions documentation

Parish Transport Booking

A parish hires a bus or a lorry that picks people up at several outstations. There are only so many seats, the fare comes in instalments over the weeks before the journey, and the people taking the bookings are catechists and outstation leaders with a phone, far from the parish office. This new register holds all of it in one place — the journeys, the pick-up areas with their own seat allocations and fares, the passengers, the waiting list and every payment.

There are two ways in, and they are the same register: the catechists book at parishrecordkeeper.com/transport.php using one shared username and password that the parish administrator creates — no email address and no account of their own — while the office works in the TRANSPORT window inside Parish Record Keeper. A seat taken on a phone is gone from the office screen at the next refresh, and the other way round. Free seats are counted on the server under a lock, so two people taking the last place at the same moment simply cannot happen, and what a passenger was told to pay is frozen at the moment of booking even if the parish changes the fare afterwards.

Read the full Transport Booking documentation

Sharing Parish Figures with People Who Have No Account

A parish treasurer, a section leader or a stewardship committee often needs to see the figures they are responsible for — but they have no email address, no account on this website, and giving them a full parish account would hand them the whole database. This new feature does what the transport booking page does for catechists: the parish administrator creates one shared username and password, hands it out, and that is all the person needs.

What such a login may open is decided when it is created:

• The whole parish, or one area only. A treasurer can be given everything; a section leader can be tied to their own station, prayer centre or section, and then sees only the people of that area — nobody else appears in their lists at all.
• Which reports. The contributions search (who has given what, with a spreadsheet download), the account ledger with its running balance, and the area sheet that totals the accounts per area — the same views the parish office uses on its own computer.
• Read-only, or allowed to suggest corrections. A login can be left as read-only, or given the right to send corrections when a figure looks wrong or a contribution is missing.

A correction never changes the parish records by itself. It travels to the parish office as a note, exactly like a note from the offline phone app, and the administrator goes through the notes one at a time and decides which to accept. Nothing is written until they do.

Because the password is shared, everyone using it is asked for their own name once, and every sign-in, every report opened and every correction sent is written to an access log the administrator can read. A login can be switched off at any moment, which locks out everybody using it immediately — including phones that are signed in at that second.

It works on a cheap phone and, once the copy has been downloaded, the ledger and area sheet keep working out where there is no network.

Read the full Shared Reports documentation