How to track DBS expiry dates

Every church with a children’s or youth team has the same quiet worry: whose DBS check is about to expire? Hubb can carry that worry for you. A custom date field, a saved query and a reusable email turn it into a five-minute monthly routine, and the same recipe works for first aid certificates, food hygiene, or any other date you need to stay ahead of.

Setting up the tracking

1. Create the field: go to Site Settings > General > Custom Fields, add a category called DBS to keep things organised, and within it a field called ‘DBS expiry date’ with its data type set to date.
2. Fill it in on each leader’s record as certificates are issued or renewed. From here on, the data does the remembering.
3. Build the query: select your children’s group, open the Query tab and create a new query. Add one criterion, group membership set to Leader, and run it: everyone leading in that group, and nothing else.
4. Use Columns to add their email address and the DBS expiry date to the results. Then click the DBS expiry column heading: the results sort by date, soonest first (click again to reverse), and you can see at a glance who needs chasing.
5. Save the query. A saved query remembers its columns, so next month this is one click and a rerun against fresh data.
6. Chase the renewals: tick the people whose dates are close and use the send-a-mailing task on the results. A saved mailing template, a friendly thank-you for their time, what to bring, where to go, means you write the email once and reuse it forever.

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Good to know

• A DBS reminder is an operational safeguarding message rather than marketing, so if someone isn’t subscribed to your usual mailing channels you can choose to send it on another lawful basis; that’s a judgement your church’s data policy should cover.
• Sorting by clicking a column heading works on any column in any query results, and it’s one of those features people use daily once they’ve spotted it.
• Query results can do more than mailings: the tasks include exporting to a spreadsheet and granting group memberships, so the same leaders list can populate a training group in a couple of clicks.
• The register only works if the right people are in the right groups with the leader marker set; managing who’s in each group is the foundation.