Getting started

The back office is where the church's everyday work happens: people and households, Sunday check-in, giving and the books, messages, the website, forms and events, and sermons. Everything you see today is a practice sandbox filled with made-up people, so you can learn by doing without any risk.

When to use this

Start here on your first visit, or whenever you want to show a colleague around. The Tour page (the first item in the menu) has a checklist of small jobs, one in each area, that together take less than an hour.

Find your way around

The menu on the left is grouped the way the week runs:

Group	What's in it
People	The directory, households, and the member app (off until the church is ready for it).
Sunday	Kids check-in and volunteer schedules.
Finance	Giving and the QuickBooks deposit sync.
Communication	Messages, the website, forms and events, and sermons.
Migration	How our copy of the Elexio data compares with Elexio itself.
Settings	Optional features you can switch on or off.
Help	This Help center, and Feedback for anything that's broken or unclear.

On a phone or a narrow window, the menu folds away behind the menu button at the top of the screen.

Every page has a Help button in its top-right corner. It opens the guide for that page in a panel beside your work, so you never lose your place.

Work through the checklist

1. Open Tour from the menu.
2. Pick any item on the Try it checklist. Each one says what to do and has a button that takes you to the right screen.
3. Do the job. Most items tick themselves off when the sandbox sees you've done it; for the others, tick the box yourself.
4. Come back to the Tour to pick the next one. Your progress is kept in this browser.

You don't have to go in order. If you look after the finances, start with the check batch and the QuickBooks sync; if you run Sundays, start with check-in and volunteers.

Good to know

• Nothing you do here reaches a real person, card or bank. Texts and emails land in a captured outbox, payments are simulated, and QuickBooks posts go to a pretend company. See Practice sandbox: what's safe to try.
• Your work stays in your browser. Colleagues testing at the same time won't see your changes, and you won't see theirs.
• The church facts are real; the people are not. Service times, classes, funds and ministries come from the church's own information. Every member, child, donor and gift is invented.

Top tips

• Keep the Tour open in one browser tab and do the work in another: you'll always know what's next.
• Press the Help button on any screen before you start a new job; the guide's numbered steps match the buttons you'll see.
• If a word on a screen means nothing to you, look for the small ⓘ beside it: it explains the field in a sentence and links to the full guide.
• Spotted something odd? Use Feedback straight away, on the page where it happened, so the team sees exactly what you saw.

Troubleshooting

A checklist item didn't tick itself off. Some jobs can't be detected automatically. Tick the box by hand. If you're sure the job was done and it should have been detected, send feedback from that page.

My work has disappeared. Someone may have pressed Reset sandbox in this browser, or the browser's site data was cleared (a private window clears it when it closes). The sandbox is meant for practice, so start again; nothing real was lost.