Manual Registration: Adding a Member One at a Time

When to use this method

Manual registration is the right choice when a staff member or admin is entering a single person, at a front desk, during a home visit, or while updating an existing paper record, rather than processing a group of people at once.

The form, section by section

The Add Member form is organized into sections that mirror how your church actually thinks about a person:

• Personal - name, gender, date of birth, marital status
• Contact - phone number, email, address
• Address - residential details
• Education - level of education, education status, field of study, course, and up to three institution fields
• Employment - employment status, profession/job title, company, and work location
• Family - linking the member into an existing family unit (see Linking a Member to a Family)

Member Status and Member Type are both optional fields, you're never blocked from saving a member because one of these wasn't chosen yet.

Duplicate protection

Before saving, Sermfy checks whether the phone number you entered already belongs to another member. If it flags a duplicate, double-check the exact digits typed against what's on file, this is usually a real duplicate, not a false alarm.

Add a profile photo at the same time you register someone if you have one on hand. It saves a follow-up step later and means the person appears correctly everywhere, Membership Cards, search results, group rosters, from the very first save.

Best practice

Fill in Education and Employment when you reasonably can, even though they're optional, they make future reports and member-engagement insight far more useful than a record with only a name and phone number.