Meeting types

Meeting types are the kinds of meeting your church holds: Sunday service, prayer, youth, worship rehearsal. Each regular meeting is filed under one, and each type says whether it counts for participation: whether missing those meetings shows in each person’s attendance.

They’re useful for two things. To decide which absences matter: missing a rehearsal doesn’t mean someone is drifting away. And to compare like with like: this service with earlier services, and the attendance of each type in the reports.

Using them is optional. Your church starts with none and, until it creates one, the rule below applies.

A church’s list of meeting types: which ones count for participation and how many meetings each one has

Create a type

Go to Settings › Meeting types and select New type.
Enter the Name, as you want it to show in the agenda, in the meetings filter and in the reports.
Leave Counts for participation on, or turn it off for what says nothing about who stopped coming, such as a rehearsal or the board.
Select New type.

You can have up to 30 types in use. If you reach the maximum, archive one to add another.

Which meetings count

Whether a meeting counts toward each person’s attendance depends on its type:

With a type that counts: it counts.
With a type that doesn’t count: it doesn’t count for anyone. Missing it doesn’t show anywhere.
No type: it counts only if it’s for the whole church. A segmented meeting, or one for specific people, with no type doesn’t count.
A cell group’s encounters always count and don’t have a type.

In each meeting that counts, only what was marked counts: unmarked is not an absence. Take attendance explains it.

If you change Counts for participation on a type, each person’s attendance is recalculated automatically, including the meetings that have already happened.

The panel of a meeting type that counts for participation, with how many meetings it has

Choose a meeting’s type

When you create or edit a meeting, choose its Meeting type. No type is also an option. The field appears when your church has at least one type, and it doesn’t exist in a cell group’s encounters.

In a series, the type applies to all the upcoming meetings. In Meetings, the Type column and the type filter help you find them.

Classify past meetings

When a meeting ends, its date, its times and its place stay as they were, but its type can still be changed: the type files the record, it doesn’t change what happened.

Open the meeting and, next to Type, select Change.
Choose the type and save.
If the meeting is part of a series, choose This meeting only or All meetings in the series, which includes the ones that have already happened.

That way you can classify months of services in one go. Each person’s attendance is recalculated automatically. A cancelled meeting can’t be classified.

The panel of a service that has already ended, with its type open to choose another

Archive and delete

Archive takes a type off the list for new meetings. The meetings that already use it keep it and keep counting the same way. Restore brings it back.
Delete is only offered for a type that no meeting has ever used.

Who manages them

Creating, editing and archiving types, and changing the type of a past meeting, requires the Manage meeting types permission, which the Pastor role has by default. Choosing the type when you create or edit a meeting only requires being able to create or edit it.