View and manage households

The Households tab lists every family and household in your church in one place. From here you can find a household, rename it, add people to it, and pick who the primary contact is.

Before you begin

You need access to the People area to open the Households tab.
Renaming, adding people, and choosing a primary contact all require edit access to People. If you only have view access, you can look but not change anything.

Open the Households tab

Go to People. Open the People page from the left menu.
Click the Households tab. Along the top you'll see All, Tags, Groups, Teams, Households, and Audiences. Click Households.
Browse the list. Each row shows the household name and how many people are in it. Use the Search households… box to jump to one by name.

Why there's no "New" button

You won't find a New or Create button on this tab, and that's on purpose. An empty household isn't useful, so households are always created around real people:

From a person's page. Open someone in People and group their family there.
From the possible-households review. When you import people, Churchday looks for likely families. If it finds any, a banner appears at the top of the Households tab (for example, "3 possible households to review") with a Review link. See Review possible households.

Open and manage one household

Click a household. This opens its detail page with everyone in it.
Rename it. Click the household name at the top, type the new name, and press Enter to save.
Add people. Click Add people, then pick someone from the list. See below for who shows up here.
Choose the primary contact. Each person has a Make primary button. Click it to make that person the primary contact. The current primary is marked with a Primary badge, so only one person holds it at a time.

Who shows up under "Add people"

The Add people picker only lists people who aren't already in a household. Each person can belong to just one household, so this prevents you from quietly pulling someone out of their existing family. If everyone already has a household, you'll see "Everyone is already in a household."

Removing someone from a household

You remove a person from their household on that person's own page, not here. This keeps the safe-removal steps in one place. Open the person from the household detail page (or from the People list), and manage their household from their profile. See Managing a household on a person's profile.

Good to know

The primary contact receives household-level messages by default, such as an email sent with "one per household" turned on.
If you open a household that has since been deleted, you'll see a "resource deleted" page with a link back to Households.
Removing the last person from a household deletes the household automatically, since an empty household serves no purpose.