The visitation calendar

The visitation calendar is the central place to see every pastoral visit happening across your parish. Each event represents one minister bringing the sacraments to a homebound parishioner or to a group at a hospital, nursing home, or care facility. Use this calendar to schedule visits, follow up on completed ones, and keep your visitation ministry organized day by day.

The Visitation Calendar page

Navigate to Admin Dashboard → Visitation → Calendar. The calendar opens with the current week or month in view, showing all planned, completed, skipped, and cancelled visits across every minister.

Toolbar controls appear at the top:

Today button — jumps to the current date.
Arrow buttons — move forward or backward through the calendar.
Refresh button — manually reloads the visit data.
Month and List view toggles — switch between the month grid and a chronological list of upcoming visits.
Schedule Visit button — opens the new-visit dialog directly without picking a date first.

A second row of filters lets you narrow what appears on the calendar:

Minister — show only visits assigned to one minister.
Facility — show only visits at a specific hospital, nursing home, or care facility.
Status — show only planned, completed, skipped, or cancelled visits.

A color-coded legend at the bottom of the page maps colors to status: blue for planned, green for completed, amber for skipped, and gray for cancelled.

tip

The List view is the fastest way to see what is coming up next, and it shows full addresses and phone numbers for each visit. Use the Month view when you need an at-a-glance picture of how visits are distributed across the weeks.

Reading the calendar

Each visit on the calendar shows the visitee's name, the time, the assigned minister, and the facility or home address. In the month view, small icons indicate the facility and the minister. In the list view, you also see the visitee's phone number, full address, and any pastoral flags.

Pastoral flag badges appear on visits when the visitee has been marked for special attention:

Needs Communion (blue) — the visitee is expecting to receive the Eucharist.
Needs Anointing Soon (amber) — anointing of the sick has been requested or is recommended.
Confession Requested (purple) — the visitee has asked for the sacrament of reconciliation.

These flags help the minister prepare what to bring to the visit and ensure no sacramental request goes unanswered.

Scheduling a visit

You can schedule a visit by clicking any date on the calendar or by pressing Schedule Visit in the toolbar.

The Schedule Visit dialog opens with the date pre-filled if you clicked a calendar cell.
Choose a Visit type:
- Individual visit — for a specific homebound parishioner or resident.
- Group visit — for a Communion service or shared celebration at a facility.
Fill in the visit details based on the type:

For an individual visit:

Visitee (required) — search the visitee directory and select the parishioner you are visiting. The dialog shows the visitee's facility or home address once selected.
Minister (optional) — assign a priest, deacon, or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion. Leave it as None if you want to assign someone later.
Date and Start time — when the visit will take place.
End time (optional) — defaults to a thirty-minute window if left blank.
Notes — any pastoral context the minister should know in advance.

For a group visit:

Facility (required) — select the hospital, nursing home, or assisted-living center where the group celebration will take place.
Minister, Date, Start time, End time, and Notes — the same fields as individual visits.

Click Save to add the visit to the calendar.

The new visit appears immediately and counts toward the route plan for that minister and date.

info

A visit's facility is normally inherited from the visitee's profile when you choose an individual visit. You only pick a facility manually for group visits or when the visitee has no facility on file.

Filtering the calendar

The filters above the calendar work together. For example, choosing a minister and a status of "planned" gives you a clean view of every upcoming visit on that minister's roster, without distractions from past or cancelled events. Filters only change the display — they do not change the underlying data.

To clear a filter, set it back to All Ministers, All Facilities, or All Statuses.

Editing or rescheduling a visit

Click any visit on the calendar to open the Visit Details dialog. The dialog shows the visitee, minister, facility, status, pastoral flags, and any notes attached to the visit.

From the dialog you can:

Mark as completed — record that the minister visited and any sacraments administered.
Mark as skipped — note that the visit could not happen (the visitee was unavailable, hospitalized elsewhere, or away). You can supply a reason for the record.
Cancel — call off the visit before it happens. You can supply a reason for the record.
Delete — remove the visit entirely. Use this for visits that were created in error.
Reopen — return a completed, skipped, or cancelled visit to planned status if circumstances change.

To reschedule a visit, open the visit, cancel or delete it, and create a new one for the correct date and time. This keeps the historical record intact rather than silently moving a visit to a new day.

Canceling a visit

Click the visit on the calendar.
Click Cancel Visit in the details dialog.
Enter an optional reason — this is helpful when the cancellation is significant, such as a hospitalization or family request.
Confirm the cancellation.

Cancelled visits stay on the calendar in gray so you have a record of what was planned and why it didn't happen. They no longer appear in route plans.

warning

Deleting a visit removes it from the record entirely. Prefer Cancel when the visit was real but didn't happen, and reserve Delete for visits that were truly created in error.

Connection to route planning

Every planned visit on this calendar feeds the route planning page automatically. When you schedule, edit, or cancel a visit, the optimized route for that minister on that day is updated the next time you load the route plan. This means the calendar and the route map are always two views of the same underlying data.

What's next

Minister availability — set the time windows when each minister can take visits
Route planning — turn a day's visits into an optimized driving route
Visitees — manage the directory of homebound parishioners and care-facility residents

The admin calendar — the parish-wide view of Masses, sacraments, and other events
Managing users — invite priests and ministers and configure their roles
The Minister App — how ministers see and complete their assigned visits in the field