Why a Member's Attendance Eligibility Starts at Their Record Creation Date

The two dates that could apply

A member record carries two dates that could plausibly mark when someone "started": the actual date their record was created in Sermfy, and the Date Joined field, which admins can set to reflect when someone joined the church, even if that's well in the past.

Why record creation date is used for eligibility

Attendance-rate eligibility is based on when the member's record was actually created in Sermfy, not their Date Joined, because Date Joined is often backdated to reflect someone's real history with the church, a member added today with a Date Joined from five years ago shouldn't be treated as though they'd been eligible for attendance tracking that whole time, doing so would skew a brand-new attendance-rate calculation with years of data that was never actually being tracked.

What this means in practice

If you backdate a new member's Date Joined to reflect their real history, you won't see any distortion in attendance-rate figures because of it, eligibility still starts from the moment the record actually entered Sermfy, so the numbers stay grounded in periods where attendance was genuinely being recorded.

Date Joined is still the right field to use for representing someone's real history with the church, it's simply not the field attendance-rate calculations rely on, the two serve different purposes.

Best practice

Feel free to backdate Date Joined whenever it reflects someone's real history, and trust that attendance-rate figures will still be based on real tracking periods rather than that historical date.