Church Admin Plugin

Bulk Edit Date of Birth

⭐ Premium

The bulk edit dates of birth screen lists every person in your directory with a date picker next to each name, letting you review and update date of birth records across your whole congregation without opening individual records. It is particularly useful when setting up Church Admin for the first time with imported data where dates of birth are missing or need correcting.

Using the screen

Go to Church Admin → People → Bulk edit dates of birth. Every person in the directory is listed alphabetically by last name then first name, with a date picker showing their current date of birth — or blank if none has been entered.

  1. Work through the list and set or correct the date of birth for each person using the date picker. Dates can be entered as far back as 1910.
  2. Leave any dates blank that you don’t have — blank fields are saved as empty rather than causing an error.
  3. Click Update dates of birth at the bottom of the screen to save all changes at once.

A success message confirms the update. The screen reloads showing the saved values so you can verify everything looks correct.

Large directories

The screen shows every person in the directory on a single page with no pagination. If your directory is large this page can be long — use your browser’s find function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to jump to a specific name rather than scrolling through the whole list.

What happens to existing values

Every person’s date of birth is updated when you save — including anyone left blank. If a person currently has a date of birth stored and you clear their date picker before saving, their date of birth will be removed. Scroll through the full list before saving to make sure you haven’t accidentally cleared any existing dates.

Any date entered that isn’t a valid date is discarded rather than saved, so typos in the date picker won’t corrupt your data.

The previous value for each person is also stored temporarily in the background immediately before saving, so a record of what changed is kept if you need to refer back to it.

Why dates of birth matter

  • Key Dates module — birthday lists and automated Happy Birthday emails depend on dates of birth being stored. Without them, people won’t appear in the birthdays list or receive birthday emails.
  • Children’s Work module — age-related groups are allocated automatically based on date of birth. Children without a date of birth can’t be allocated to the correct group.
  • People types — if you use date of birth to determine whether someone is a child, teenager, or adult, accurate dates keep people in the right category.

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