New Member "roll"

Hi,

I'm trying to help our ward keep track of New Member attendance at sacrament meeting. Is there a way to print a New Member "roll" from within MLS? I have been craving such a document so we can check off a box for each New Member each Sunday throughout the quarter. I made a template in excel but was wondering if it is possible to do this from within MLS.

New members in the ward or new converts? I'm pretty sure there is not a way to print a roll of either, but you can find a list of new members on the lds.org/leader and in MLS under reports/forms>Other Reports>members moved in while new converts can be found in MLS by looking at the Quarterly Report.

crislapi wrote:NewI'm pretty sure there is not a way to print a roll of either,

If custom reports allows selection by "Move in Date" or "Baptism Date", I think it should be possible to make a report.

As another thought, I wonder if you could create a New Member class and then add just those you want to have on the roll and then print a roll just for that class.

crislapi wrote:As another thought, I wonder if you could create a New Member class and then add just those you want to have on the roll and then print a roll just for that class.

The way I understand classes, you would have to devise a rule for the class to define who you want in the class. Otherwise, every member is listed in the class by default. I'm not familiar enough with the class rule conditions to know whether Russell's suggestions above can be applied to a class.

allenjpl wrote:The way I understand classes, you would have to devise a rule for the class to define who you want in the class. Otherwise, every member is listed in the class by default. I'm not familiar enough with the class rule conditions to know whether Russell's suggestions above can be applied to a class.

Just did some investigating in the test unit on adding classes. Rules are limited to min/max age during the year and/or priesthood office. However, on the next screen you can select which members you'd like to add to the class. If you select just those you'd like to put on the attendance roll, you should be ok. And it can be done so that it won't affect the other classes MLS automatically enrolls them in.

I'd suggest the following, then.
1) Go to Organizations > Sunday School and then make sure "Sunday School" is selected in the menu on the left side of the panel.
2) In the 3rd tile/section (Classes), click on the hyperlink in the right ("Add Class")
3) Give the class a name (New Members, perhaps?)
4) Do not enter anything into Membership Rules. Click next
5) Put a check mark next to the names of the members you would like to track then click Next
6) A pop-up will appear for each member you have added asking to select the class you'd like to remove the member from. Do not check the box but do click ok. This will keep the member in both classes.
7) On the final screen, review the names to make sure just those you want to track are present and that no membership rules have been entered.
8) Click close on the bottom right and in the popup that appears, click Save.

You have successfully added the class.
1) To print the roll, go to Organization>Reports/Tools>Print rolls and lists
2) For "List type to print" select "Attendance Roll"
3) Put a check mark in Class or Group next to your new report (New Members?)
4) Enter the month to start the roll from, the number of months to print, and the number of blank lines.
5) Click on the Print button on the bottom of the page

To update the members in the class, do the following.
1) Go to Organizations>Sunday School and then select "Class Members" from the menu on the left side.
2) For "Show" (top right), select your new class (New Member?)
3) In the second panel (Members), you should see a list of those currently enrolled. To remove someone already enrolled in the class, find their name in the list and click on "remove" in the far right column. To add a new member to the list, click on the hyperlink "Add Members" in the upper right of the "Members" section.

Incidentally, clicking the hyperlink "print" in this screen will bring up the same print menu as Print Rolls and Lists mentioned above.

nweyand wrote: I made a template in excel but was wondering if it is possible to do this from within MLS.

I suspect you could make a custom class containing members you select, such as new members, but I haven't tried it. I'd do it with a custom report as RussellHltn suggests, but it would not have spaces for your attendence like a roll does. If you want that, save your custom report to a file (which will be CSV) then open from your spreadsheet to add columns for you to track attendance. The advantage over your current spreadsheet is that MLS does the selecting of the names that meet your criteria for you.

For example, select as your criteria for the custom report something like "confirmation date" "was in last" "6" "months" (or a year, or whatever.) IF you want to filter out those that were 8 when baptized, add age as an additional criteria, such as 9 or older. If you want to track new move-ins, it's very similar, but use "move in date" "was in last" _______ "months."

As the member falls outside of the date range you specify, or they move, they drop off your report...
We made one that tracked the home teaching visits made to all new move-ins and converts this way every month. We made another one that tracked which new move-ins have spoken in Sacrament meeting, by adding a custom member field that we update each week with our sacrament speakers.

crislapi wrote:New members in the ward or new converts?

It may be helpful to track both.

crislapi wrote:4) Do not enter anything into Membership Rules.

Unless MLS has changed recently, this is a bad idea. When you have no rules, then everyone matches the rules. That isn't a problem right as you create the class, but as people change classes at the first of the year, people may get moved into the class that you don't want. It's much better to set rules that don't match anyone (age > 200) so that no one will be moved in automatically. Then you can explicitly move people into the class.

aebrown wrote:Then you can explicitly move people into the class.

It's the manual updating that I don't want to do, such as you must do if you create a custom class, because I miss people. This is why I'd vote to have a custom report. I can specify the criteria to use, such as defining a new member as somebody who was "over nine when confirmed, and the confirmation has been less than a year." Whenever I run the list (monthly or quarterly,) the computer will pull up every member meeting that criteria....nobody gets forgotten and left off the list accidentally by me.

kisaac wrote:It's the manual updating that I don't want to do, such as you must do if you create a custom class, because I miss people. This is why I'd vote to have a custom report. I can specify the criteria to use, such as defining a new member as somebody who was "over nine when confirmed, and the confirmation has been less than a year." Whenever I run the list (monthly or quarterly,) the computer will pull up every member meeting that criteria....nobody gets forgotten and left off the list accidentally by me.

I was simply responding to the issues related to setting up a class. I completely agree with you that the custom report is a great way to determine what the set of people is. The question is what you then do with that list. Do you create a class in MLS with exactly those members, so that you can use the MLS class rolls feature? You won't miss any people that way. Or do you use that data in a spreadsheet application to generate your own lists or rolls? Either approach can work.

aebrown wrote:Either approach can work.

Perfect solution

RussellHltn wrote:If custom reports allows selection by "Move in Date" or "Baptism Date", I think it should be possible to make a report.

Looking at my test install of MLS, both "Move in Date" and "Confirmation Date" are available. The only down side is that you'll have to enter a specific date and change it each time you run the report. There's no way to do "Conformation Date" is < 90 days ago. It's more like "Confirmation Date" is > "Aug 1, 2011".

But it beats the heck out of trying to do it by hand.

RussellHltn wrote:Looking at my test install of MLS, both "Move in Date" and "Confirmation Date" are available. The only down side is that you'll have to enter a specific date and change it each time you run the report. There's no way to do "Conformation Date" is < 90 days ago. It's more like "Confirmation Date" is > "Aug 1, 2011".

You should'nt have to enter a new date ever if you do it like this-

kisaac wrote: ..."confirmation date" "was in last" "6" "months" (or a year, or whatever.)

kisaac wrote:You should'nt have to enter a new date ever if you do it like this-

Huh. I missed that. Thanks.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. This will help me a lot to keep track of new converts in our ward so I can report on their attendance for quarterly reports.