Visiting clergy assignments

When a visiting priest covers a Mass — a neighboring pastor helping with a weekend, a retired priest filling in for vacation, a chaplain visiting from another diocese — the parish typically owes them a help-out fee, mileage, and sometimes an additional honorarium. The Visiting Clergy Assignments page is where you record those engagements, calculate what is owed, and post the amounts to the ledger so they show up on the next payout.

The Visiting Clergy Assignments page

Navigate to Admin Dashboard → Finance → Visiting Clergy Assignments. The page lists every engagement your parish has recorded, sorted by creation date, with these columns:

• Date — when the assignment was created.
• Visiting Clergy — the cleric assigned, with their preferred title applied automatically.
• Help-out fees — the base + additional-Mass fees calculated from the cleric's policy.
• Mileage reimbursement — miles driven multiplied by the rate per mile.
• Honorarium — any additional offering you added on top of the standard policy.
• Total — the sum of all three lines, in the engagement's currency.
• Status — Draft, Approved, Posted, or Void.
• Actions — buttons to advance the engagement through the workflow.

Three filters sit above the table: a Visiting Clergy dropdown to focus on one cleric, a Status dropdown, and a Show archived checkbox that includes clergy you have archived in the past.

Visiting clergy records vs. assignments

This page is the financial counterpart to the visiting clergy people-records. To add or edit a visiting cleric (their name, diocese, help-out policy, mileage rate), see Visiting clergy. The assignments here read those policies whenever you create a new engagement, so the fees are always pulled from the cleric's current configuration.

Workflow stages

Every engagement moves through up to four statuses:

• Draft — the engagement is recorded but has no financial impact yet. You can still review it, edit the underlying records, or void it without leaving a posted entry behind.
• Approved — an admin has reviewed the totals and signed off. Still no ledger impact, but the engagement is locked from edits.
• Posted — the engagement has been written to the parish ledger. A payable now exists for the visiting cleric and will be settled on the next payout.
• Void — the engagement was cancelled. If it was already posted, a reversing entry is recorded so the ledger stays balanced.

The action buttons on each row reflect what is allowed from the current status — you cannot approve a posted engagement, and you cannot un-void a void one without creating a new draft.

Creating an assignment

1. Click Create clergy assignment in the top right corner.
2. In the Visiting Clergy dropdown, pick the cleric. The list is filtered to clergy your parish has on file with Visiting scope.
3. Choose a From and To date for the range you want to search for Masses.
4. Click Load Masses. Sacramentum pulls every Mass in that window where this cleric is already listed as a celebrant. Cancelled Masses are filtered out.
5. Tick the checkboxes next to the Masses this engagement covers. Each row shows the date, time, location, and Mass status (Scheduled, Celebrated, etc.).
6. Fill in the financial details below the Mass list:
   • Miles driven — total round-trip miles for the visit. Leave blank if no mileage applies.
   • Rate (per mile) — defaults to the cleric's configured rate, but you can override it.
   • Honorarium — any extra offering on top of the help-out fee, in dollars.
   • Notes — optional free text, useful for explaining unusual fees or one-off arrangements.
7. Click Preview to see the calculated totals broken down by day. The preview shows whether each day is treated as a weekend or weekday, how many Masses fall on it, and the fee for that day.
8. Click Create to save the engagement as a Draft.

The new engagement appears at the top of the list. Nothing has posted to the ledger yet — that happens at the Post step.

tip

The day-by-day preview is the quickest way to spot mistakes. If a Saturday vigil shows up under "Weekday" or the Mass count looks off, close the dialog, fix the Mass record, and rebuild the engagement. Posting is much harder to undo.

Approving and posting

From the Draft row, you have three actions in the Actions column.

• Approve — moves the engagement from Draft to Approved. Use this if your parish requires a second pair of eyes on every payable before it lands in the ledger. Approval does not yet post the financial entries.
• Post — writes the engagement to the parish ledger. This step is available from both Draft and Approved status, so a parish that does not need a separate approval gate can go straight from Draft to Posted. Once posted, the visiting cleric's payable shows up in the Payouts tab and on the relevant financial reports.
• Void — cancels the engagement at any stage except Void itself. Voiding a Draft simply removes the unposted record. Voiding a Posted engagement records a reversing ledger entry so the original posting stays auditable.

Voiding an assignment

When a Mass falls through, a cleric does not appear, or you discover an error after posting, void the engagement rather than deleting it.

1. Click Void on the engagement row.
2. Sacramentum confirms the action and posts any reversing entries that are needed.
3. The engagement remains visible in the list with the Void badge so the audit trail is preserved.

If the engagement was voided after posting and the cleric had already been paid out, follow up with your usual remediation workflow — the void leaves a clear record of what was reversed.

How the totals are calculated

The numbers on each row come straight from the cleric's help-out policy plus any inputs you provided in the dialog:

• Help-out fees — base + additional-Mass fees applied per day, with weekend and weekday rates handled separately. A priest with a $100 Sunday base + $50 additional-Mass fee covering two Sunday Masses earns $100 + $50 = $150 for the day.
• Mileage reimbursement — miles driven × rate per mile. The rate defaults to the cleric's defaultRateCentsPerMile from their visiting profile.
• Honorarium — flat dollar amount you enter in the dialog. Use this for one-off generosity (a special-occasion Mass, an unusually long drive, a thank-you for short notice).
• Total — the sum of the three lines, displayed in the engagement's currency.

If the cleric's policy changes after you create the engagement, the engagement keeps its original numbers — the policy is read at creation time, not re-read when you Approve or Post.

Reviewing past assignments

Use the Status filter to focus on what you need to act on:

• Draft for engagements you still need to verify or post.
• Approved for engagements waiting on a final post step.
• Posted to confirm what has hit the ledger this period.
• Void to see what was rolled back.

Pair the status filter with the Visiting Clergy dropdown to see one cleric's full history at a glance — handy when a visiting priest asks for a year-end summary or when a diocese requests records.

What's next

• Payouts — settle posted assignments and see what each cleric is owed
• Reports — pull financial summaries that include visiting clergy lines
• Visiting clergy — add or edit the underlying cleric records and their help-out policies

Related articles

• Finance and accounts — how visiting clergy assignments fit into the parish ledger
• Accounts — the chart of accounts and where visiting clergy payables land
• Roles and access — who can create, post, and void assignments