As church buildings re-open and 'in-person' church services resume, we want to let you know about a whole raft of updates to the Children module which, we hope, you'll find helpful! Here's a rundown of the new features, as well as a video explaining it all:

Adding children to groups for each of your church's gatherings is now an even simpler process. You can now do this directly from a child's profile page with group suggestions being made based on the child's age and the entry criteria you set for your groups.

For churches that maintain children group attendance from printed registers, we've completely re-built the attendance entry pages to make this a much simpler and more intuitive process. Whether you're looking to add attendance data for regular children, visitors, or serving team members, the process is now simpler, more intuitive, and quicker!

The new visitors section builds on functionality that had been part of the module's Reports section. Given the importance of this for children's ministry, we've brought the Visitors functionality out of the module's Reports section into the centre of the module. The new Visitors section has all the previous functionality and much, much more - making it easier than ever to engage with families and children that are beginning to connect with you through your children and youth ministries.

Listening to the feedback we have been getting from churches using Child Check-in we've noticed that, in some cases, there was potential for confusion when creating the weekly check-in sessions as it can at times be hard to maintain a uniform naming convention across various serving teams.

This is why we're excited to announce "Session Templates"! You can now define a fixed list of session templates, with each template containing all the Child Check-In settings for that session. Starting or joining a session is now a "button click" exercise, with your check-in team selecting the relevant session for the day from a list. No more creating endless lists of new sessions! Your check-in team will love the simplicity of this new process, so it's worth taking a few moments to create a session template for each of your gatherings where you use the Child Check-in system.

In order to make it easier to view all of the session attendance for a gathering in one place, we've moved the Sessions report into the module's Attendance section and created a brand new "Sessions" section. All your historic check-in sessions are listed there, making it easier to view all of the session attendance for a Gathering in one place.

Why not watch our video on the new features available:

Children module updates from ChurchSuite on Vimeo.

We trust you'll find these updates helpful! If you have any questions or feedback about this, we'd love for you to get in touch with support@churchsuite.com