attendance roll

Discuss where to obtain or how to fill out specific reports or forms.
Post Reply
Paul44-p40
New Member
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 10:06 am
Location: Philippines

attendance roll

#1

Post by Paul44-p40 »

Our ward has over 800 members and about 200 are active. I will make attendance rolls with only the names of the active members. It is easier for the teachers to fill in the forms.
Can some one guide me in this? Thanks

PGM
User avatar
aebrown
Community Administrator
Posts: 15153
Joined: Tue Nov 27, 2007 8:48 pm
Location: Draper, Utah

#2

Post by aebrown »

Paul44 wrote:Our ward has over 800 members and about 200 are active. I will make attendance rolls with only the names of the active members. It is easier for the teachers to fill in the forms.
Can some one guide me in this?
Are you talking about all attendance rolls? There are rolls for each Primary class, each Sunday School Class, Young Women, Aaronic Priesthood, Melchizedek Priesthood, and Relief Society. That's well over 20 rolls just for the built-in classes, and you can add any number of custom classes.

The major challenge you face is that MLS makes your life easy for these built-in classes by automatically moving people into classes as they change ages. You have basically three options as I see it:
  1. Create custom classes with just the active members. This isn't really an option, unless you are interested only in Primary and Sunday School, since those are the only organizations in MLS that permit custom classes. But if you wanted to do this, you would:
    • In MLS go to Organizations > Primary
    • In the Classes section, click Add Class
    • Specify the rule (for example, Valiant 11 would have a minimum age of 10, and a max of 11).
    • On the list of members, deselect all the inactive members.
    • Save
    • Repeat for each Primary class, and each Sunday School class
  2. Remove inactive members from each class. This is the simplest approach, as you can use MLS class rolls with no other changes. The problem with this is that particularly for priesthood quorums, you will tend to lose track of these people. They won't appear on other lists, so there is the danger that these inactive members, who should continue to receive fellowship and nurture, will become truly "lost sheep."
  3. Create class rolls in another application, such as a spreadsheet. You can start with the current class membership, copy and paste the members from MLS to the spreadsheet, then remove the inactive members. This of course creates some work in designing the roll, but once you create one roll, the others should be relatively easy, although there is a lot of tedious work to create a couple dozen rolls.
  4. As a variation on option 3, you could also create some custom reports to help you generate the class members (with selection criteria for age, sex, priesthood, etc.). You could even add a custom member field for "Active" that would help you filter out the people to include in the classes. You would still have to copy the members from the custom report over to a spreadsheet to generate the actual roll.
With all these approaches, there is a question of how to keep track of who is "active", since MLS doesn't have such a property. It would be a big job to maintain these lists. And I would repeat my concern about labeling people as inactive with the potential for neglecting such people. But the above might give you some ideas how you could accomplish this task.
Paul44-p40
New Member
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 10:06 am
Location: Philippines

thanks

#3

Post by Paul44-p40 »

Thank you for your reply. I guess it will be option 3. I am retired and can spend some extra time for it.
If we print out the attendance roll for the adult sunday school class we have 15 pages, but we need only 1 page and a half.

have a nice blessed day.

Paul
russellhltn
Community Administrator
Posts: 34420
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 2:53 pm
Location: U.S.

#4

Post by russellhltn »

While this is beyond what you've been called to do, I'd want to see some effort made to locate the 600 inactive members. If they have moved outside of the ward boundaries, then it does no good to keep their membership record in the ward. If there is no effort made to contact them periodically, then the ward becomes a place where inactive records "collect" and the problem just gets bigger.
Have you searched the Help Center? Try doing a Google search and adding "site:churchofjesuschrist.org/help" to the search criteria.

So we can better help you, please edit your Profile to include your general location.
Post Reply

Return to “Reports and Forms”