Get your data ready for check-in

Check-in is only as smooth as the database underneath it. Ten minutes at a kiosk with a queue of families will expose every missing date of birth and unlinked sibling, so the kindest thing you can do for your Sunday team is get the data right first.

The foundations

1. Create groups that match your children’s work, a group per age range, add every child to the right one, and add your leaders with the leader marker set; see managing who’s in each group. Check-in builds its registers from these groups.
2. Make sure every child has a date of birth and sits in the correct family; ages drive which groups children are offered, and families are what make checking in three siblings a few taps rather than three forms.
3. Check parents and guardians are marked as Adult/Guardian and have a mobile number on their record; that number is where guardian alert texts go. Enabling their website login is worth doing at the same time.
4. Complete each family’s address including the postcode. It looks like housekeeping, but check-in uses it to tell two families with the same surname apart.
5. Create a custom field for MADI (Medical, Allergy and Dietary Information). It must be a Text field, not Text Area, because it prints in the limited space on labels; make it global and set it to appear in My Profile so parents keep it current themselves. Since it prints where others can see it, consider agreed codes your leaders are briefed on rather than full descriptions.
6. Optionally, set up consent questions specifically for children, photo consent for your website and social media being the classic; setting up consent questions covers the mechanics.

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Good to know

• The full walkthrough of these foundations, with screenshots of every step, is our blog guide to children and family data management best practices; it’s the recommended companion to this section.
• We strongly recommend having the church app enabled and parents installed and logged in; it makes keeping their own details and MADI current genuinely easy.
• On your first live Sunday, have a confident Hubb administrator on hand with a laptop for last-minute fixes, wrong families, missing numbers; after a couple of weeks the database is clean for that group and the safety net isn’t needed.