Archive, restore and delete

Inperia separates three situations that aren’t the same: someone who stops taking part for a while, someone who left the church, and someone whose data has to be erased.

	Takes up a spot in the plan	Can be undone
Inactive	Yes	Yes, by reactivating them
Archived	No	Yes, by restoring them
Deleted for good	No	No

The inactive status is explained in Add and edit members.

Archive a member

Archiving takes the person off the roll without erasing anything. Use it for someone who left the church.

1. Open their record and select Archive, or select several people in the list and use Archive in the action bar.

2. Confirm in Archive member?.

When you archive someone:

• Their spot is freed in your plan’s limit.
• The people in their care now report to that person’s own leader. If they had no leader, those people become independent branches. The confirmation message tells you how many people this affects.
• They leave their cell groups, stop being responsible for their contacts and no longer appear on attendance lists.
• If they had a pending invitation, it’s cancelled and the link they received stops working.

An owner can’t be archived. To archive someone, you need the Archive members permission.

Restore someone who came back

1. In Members, open Archived from the list menu.

2. Select Restore on the person, or select several people and choose Restore selected.

There’s no deadline for restoring someone, but you need a free spot in the plan. To see archived members, you need scope over All members in the church; to restore them, you also need the Restore members permission.

Delete for good

When a person’s data has to be erased (for example, because they asked), you can delete them permanently. People can only be deleted from the archived list:

1. Archive the person, if they aren’t archived already.

2. In Archived, open that person’s record and select Delete.

3. Type their name to confirm, and confirm your identity.

The record’s personal data is erased and only an anonymous entry remains, so the attendance totals of past meetings don’t change. The Deleted tab logs each deletion: when the person was archived, when they were deleted and who did it. It doesn’t show their name: it says “Deleted person” instead.

It can’t be undone

Deleting for good is final: there’s no way to recover the data. If you only want to take someone off the roll, archive them.

To delete someone, you need the Delete archived members for good permission and scope over all members. With the roles Inperia comes with, the owner does it. It can’t be done from a support session or from another church in the network.