Family records

Families can link a spouse, co-parent, or guardian into their own household without any admin involvement. On My Profile, the Household Members card has an Invite a household member button. They enter the other person’s email and pick a relationship, and HomeschoolGo handles the rest:

• If the email has never signed up, it sends an invite that lands the new person in the same family, seeing the same students.
• If the email already has a HomeschoolGo account with no family in your co-op yet (a teacher-only login, for example), it emails them an invite to accept. Nothing changes until they accept: they don’t see your family or join your co-op before then. Until they do, the Household Members card lists them as Waiting for them to accept, with links to resend or cancel the invite.
• If the email already belongs to someone with their own separate family record in your co-op, the invite is refused. That household is already split across two records. An owner or admin can join them with the merge tool below; because it moves students, payments, and registrations one way, it stays out of the self-serve flow.

A newly invited member shows a Can sign in badge in the Household Members list. If the invite email never arrived, a Resend invite link appears next to their name until they sign in for the first time. Click it to send a fresh setup link. The invited person can also get a new link on their own: opening an expired invite link takes them to a page with an Email me a new link button.

A household can send up to five invite or resend emails an hour. After that, the card asks them to wait a little while before sending more.

Household members can set the name shown for them across the co-op, so it doesn’t have to match their email address or the name on their account. In the Household Members list, click the pencil next to your own name. Everyone can only edit their own, not anyone else’s.

The one exception is the family’s primary contact, who won’t see a pencil. Their name comes from the primary contact fields in Family Information, which already update everywhere the name appears. Editing it there is the single place to change it.

When one household ends up on two family records (usually two parents who each signed up instead of one inviting the other), an owner or an admin with the Manage members permission can combine them into one. The Members page flags likely duplicates (families that share an email, phone, or name) in a Possible duplicate families card.

Spouses or co-parents who each signed up under different names and separate contact info (so nothing matches automatically) won’t show up in that card. Use the Merge two families search box just below it instead. Look up each record by name or email and it opens the same review-and-merge screen.

Guardians can add a birthday to their profile, with the year being optional. This gives admins a heads-up to recognize community members on their birthday.

To add yours, go to My Profile and look for the birthday field in the personal information section. Enter the month and day, or month, day, and year if you want to share the full date.

Admins see a birthday count pill at the top of the Families page. Click it to open a list of everyone (guardians and students alike) with a birthday coming up in the next 30 days. It doesn’t require the year to be set. It just needs a month and day to work.

When you need to answer “has this family actually completed everything?”, open Admin › Members, find someone in the family, open their Member actions menu and choose View membership record. The page collects what the family has on file across every term they’ve been with you:

• Term reviews: each term the family confirmed their information for, and the date they did it
• Signed waivers: every waiver the family has signed, with who signed and when. Waivers signed as part of a membership application are marked With application, and a Declined badge shows where a waiver was one the family could decline
• Enrollment fees: the join fee charged for each term, the amount, and whether it’s paid or still pending

Any applications the family submitted are listed below those cards, with the answers they gave and the waivers they signed at application time inside each one.

Some teachers were approved before they had a household on file. When a household is set up for one of them later, either by the teacher with Set up my family on their profile or by you with Add as a household on the Members page, their approved application is attached to it. The match is on email, so it works when the application was sent from the same address they sign in with. The phone, address and waivers from that application then show on the family’s record.

Co-ops that meet in a church hall, carry their own insurance, or answer to a diocese are often required to hold something on file for every adult who is around the children: a background check, safeguarding training, CPR, a first aid certificate. A spreadsheet can hold that, until somebody has to say who has lapsed.

Go to Settings › Families to define the kinds of certification your co-op tracks. Each one has a name, instructions you can format properly (a link to the training provider, what a completed check needs to show), how often it has to be renewed, and whether it applies to every adult or only to some.

Records are kept per adult rather than per household, because the question being asked is which person lapsed, not which family. An adult who is not yet on the family’s roster can still be recorded by name, so a half-finished directory never stops you entering a date.

A section is a named group of families that you keep, such as “High school families” or “Nursery volunteers”. Once a family is in a section you can filter the Families page down to it and send an email blast to everyone in it, without picking the same households by hand each time.

A family can be in as many sections as you like. Only admins see sections. Families never see which sections they are in.

An email to a section goes to the families in it at the moment it is sent. If you schedule one for next week and add a family to the section in the meantime, that family gets it too. Deleting a section takes families out of it but changes nothing else about them, and emails you already sent to it stay in your history.

For the rare case where a family’s records need to be erased outright (a duplicate created by mistake, an unclaimed import, or a formal deletion request), you can permanently delete a family from Families. Open the family, click Edit, and look for the Danger zone at the bottom of the panel. This is separate from Suspend and cannot be undone.

Deletion is only offered once a family is already withdrawn, so you always meet the reversible option first. Before you can delete, you’ll type the family’s own name to confirm and, if they have payment history, explicitly acknowledge it.

Once a family is deleted, they can apply again through your join link with the same email, and the application reaches you like any other. That works only when nobody still in your co-op uses that email. A parent who is also on your staff keeps their staff role when the family is deleted, so they can’t apply again this way.

The Families page answers two different questions with two different badges, and it helps to keep them straight. Registered and Accepted are about the registration fee: Registered means the fee is paid and the family’s spot is secured, while Accepted means you have accepted them but the fee is still outstanding. Enrolled is about classes: at least one child in the household is enrolled in a class for the current term. A family can be Registered without being Enrolled (they have paid but haven’t picked classes yet) and a teacher whose fee you waived can be Enrolled without ever showing Registered. Hovering over any badge shows what it means.

A count above the list reads something like “18 registered, 3 awaiting payment,” and a Registration filter pulls up just one group, which is useful when you want to email everyone who still owes. Once enrollment opens, a Classes filter does the same for enrollment. “Not enrolled in classes” is the list of families to nudge about signing their children up.

The Registered badge reads the registration fee charge on a family’s ledger, so it appears on its own once a family has been charged. If your co-op collects the fee automatically when an application is approved, it is already there. If you collect it some other way and want the same visibility, charge it by hand: go to Admin › Billing, click Charge family, and pick Registration fee as the type. That type is what the badge and the filter read, so Dues or Custom will not show up here.

A co-op that doesn’t charge a registration fee sees none of the fee badges. No Registered or Accepted badge, no Registration filter, no count. The Enrolled badge still appears on its own once families start enrolling in classes.

Adding a household by hand

Families can join through the join link. For one who signs up at a table on a co-op day, or over the phone, the Families page has an Add family button. Enter the household’s details and as many children as you need, and save.

The record is created the same way an imported one is, which means it behaves the same way afterwards: it shows as unclaimed until you invite the parent and they sign in and take it over, and everything you have already typed is waiting for them when they do. A student row with only some of its fields filled in is refused rather than saved half-blank, so you find out at the point of typing rather than weeks later.

A short label on a family

Sometimes you want a word or two on a household that the family’s own description is too long for: a board member, a first-year family, whoever hosts the nursery. Edit a family from the Families page and fill in its Directory label.

Where labels appear is a separate decision, under Families view settings on the same page: on the cards, in the table, or nowhere. They are off until you turn them on, so a family with a label typed in shows nothing until you choose where labels go. A family without one looks exactly as it always did.

Correcting a student’s details

A birthdate typed wrong, or an allergy a parent mentioned to you in the hall, used to mean asking that family to sign in and fix it themselves. Open a family from the Families page and each child has an Edit button of their own.

It opens the same fields the family sees on their own children: first and last name, birthdate, grade, the student’s email and phone, an emergency contact name and phone, and free-text boxes for allergies, medical notes or special needs, and dietary restrictions. Save and the change is theirs too, so nothing has to be repeated back to them.

Withdrawing a student

When a child isn’t coming back, open the family from the Families page, click Edit, and click Withdraw on that child’s row. A withdrawn student drops off the directory, the Students page and the class pickers, but their past rosters, attendance and grades stay as they were. The family sees a Withdrawn badge next to the child on My Profile, so they know not to add them again.

Withdraw is refused while the student still holds a seat in a term that hasn’t ended, or has their own sign-in. Drop the classes and turn off the sign-in first, so withdrawing never empties a roster or cancels a fee on its own.

Withdrawn children are listed under Withdrawn in the same panel, each with Restore and Delete permanently. Restore puts the child back as they were. Delete permanently erases the student’s records, asks you to type DELETE to confirm, and can’t be undone. It’s the step for a parent who has asked you to erase their child’s information, not for a child who is taking a year off.