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Visitees

A visitee is a parishioner who receives visits from your parish — for Communion, the sacrament of the sick, confession, or simply pastoral presence. The Visitees page is the directory of every visitee your parish ministers to, with the address, contacts, pastoral needs, and visit preferences each minister needs in order to make a visit go well.

The Visitees page​

Navigate to Admin Dashboard → Visitation → Visitees. The page opens to a table of every visitee, with filters at the top, an Add visitee button on the right, and bulk actions when you select rows.

What each row shows​

Each row gives you a quick read of the visitee at a glance:

  • Name and a status badge (Active, Inactive, Deceased, or Moved).
  • Where they live — a facility name and room number, or the word Homebound if they are at home.
  • Pastoral flags — small badges for Needs Communion, Needs Anointing soon, or Confession requested.
  • Assigned minister — the priest, deacon, or Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion who normally visits.
  • Last visit — the date of the most recent completed visit.

Filtering the list​

Four filters narrow the table:

  • Search — by name, address, or contact person.
  • Status — show only active visitees (the default for daily work), or any of the other three statuses.
  • Facility — show every visitee at one nursing home, or filter to Homebound to see only the at-home visitees.
  • Minister — see only the visitees assigned to one minister, useful for handing off coverage.
  • Pastoral flags — show visitees flagged as Needs Communion, Needs Anointing soon, or Confession requested, so urgent pastoral needs surface quickly.

Adding a visitee​

  1. Click Add visitee in the upper right.
  2. On the Details tab, enter First name and Last name. These are required.
  3. Choose a Status. Most new visitees start as Active.
  4. If the visitee lives in a hospital, nursing home, or care center, choose it under At facility. If they live at home, leave this set to Homebound. When you choose a facility, the address fills in automatically — and you can add a Room/Unit number.
  5. Fill in the Address. The autocomplete suggests addresses as you type; selecting a suggestion fills city, state, postal code, and the geographic coordinates needed for route planning.
  6. Add a Phone and Email if you have them.
  7. Toggle the Pastoral flags that apply: Needs Communion, Needs Anointing soon, Confession requested. These flags are visible to the minister before they arrive.
  8. Move through the remaining tabs to add Contact people, Preferences (frequency, weekdays, times), and an Assignment (which minister normally visits). All of these are optional at first and can be added later.
  9. Click Save.

The new visitee appears in the list immediately and, if you set a frequency and an assigned minister, the next visits begin appearing on the visitation calendar automatically.

tip

You do not have to fill every tab when you first create a visitee. Many parishes start with just the Details tab — name, address, facility — and add contacts and preferences as they learn more about the visitee.

The four tabs of a visitee profile​

A visitee record has four tabs. The information lives in one place, but the tabs let you focus on one piece at a time.

Details​

The basics: name, status, where they live, address, phone, email, primary language, and pastoral flags. The Notes field at the bottom is a free-text spot for anything a minister should know — preferred name, language, family situation, sensitivities.

Contact​

Two contact people:

  • Primary contact — usually a spouse, adult child, or care coordinator. The minister calls this person before arriving.
  • Emergency contact — the person to reach if something is wrong.

For each, enter a name, phone, email, and the relationship to the visitee.

Preferences​

How often and when the visit should happen:

  • Frequency — weekly, biweekly, monthly, or a custom pattern.
  • Weekdays — which days of the week the visit can occur.
  • Time preference — an exact time, a window (for example, between 10am and noon), or no time preference.
  • Approximate duration — how long the visit usually takes, helpful for route planning.
  • Special needs and Access notes — wheelchair access, gate codes, dog at the door, "ring twice."

If the visitee lives in a facility that already has a group-visit pattern (for example, Mass in the chapel every Wednesday at 10am), you can usually skip the preferences tab and let the visitee inherit the facility's pattern.

Assignment​

The minister who normally visits. Choose a name from the dropdown and the Role: priest or Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (EMHC). Saving a preference and an assignment together is what triggers Sacramentum to generate visits onto the calendar.

Editing and bulk actions​

Every visitee row has an actions menu with View profile, Edit, and Delete. Clicking View profile opens a read-only view of the full record, including a Timeline of past visits and changes, a Schedule panel showing upcoming visits, and an Assignments panel.

To act on more than one visitee at a time, select rows using the checkboxes. The toolbar at the top of the table changes to show:

  • Reassign minister — pick a new minister and assign them to every selected visitee at once. Useful when one minister is taking over for another, or when a deacon is added to cover a whole nursing home.
  • Clear selection — deselect everything.

Statuses and what they mean​

Visitee status is more than a flag — it controls whether visits are generated and whether a visitee shows up in default views.

  • Active — included in the default list and on the calendar. Visits are generated automatically.
  • Inactive — paused. Use this when a visitee is temporarily unavailable — for example, traveling, in a short-term hospital stay where Communion is being brought by hospital chaplaincy, or "snowbirding." You can set an Auto-reactivate on date so the visitee returns to Active automatically on, say, March 1 when they come back from Florida.
  • Moved — the visitee has moved out of the parish or out of the area, but the record is preserved for history.
  • Deceased — the visitee has died. Their record is retained in the timeline so the ministry remembers them, but no further visits are generated.
info

Setting a status to Deceased is intentionally separate from deleting. Deletion erases the record and its history; Deceased preserves the visit timeline as part of your parish's pastoral record.

Linking to a Person record​

Each visitee can be linked to a parishioner's canonical Person record. Linking matters because it connects the visitation ministry to the rest of the parish's data: when the same person later requests a Mass intention, completes a sacrament, or appears on a household record, you see the visit history in their full pastoral profile.

Visitees you create from the Visitees page begin unlinked. From the visitee profile, you can match them to an existing Person record, or one will be created automatically the first time another part of the parish (such as a Mass intention request) records the same name and address.

Deleting a visitee​

If you need to remove a visitee entirely:

  1. Click the actions menu on the row and choose Delete.
  2. Confirm the deletion in the dialog.

Deletion is for typos or duplicates, not for parishioners who have died or moved. For those situations, set the status to Deceased or Moved so the parish keeps the record. Deletion is irreversible and removes the visit history along with the profile.

warning

Before deleting, check whether the visitee has past visits in their timeline. If they do, change the status instead of deleting — the timeline is part of your parish's ministry record.

What's next​