Rock U - People - How to Delete a Person

Transcribed Video Content

So let's talk about how to delete a person. In general with Rock, you can't. And why can't you? Because there's a ton of data tied to these individual records. So if you were to actually delete a person, you would lose all of their attendance, all of your attendance counts and metrics would decrement by by one in a sense on all those weekends. Any giving that was tied to that person would also be lost and you wouldn't have access to that and all of your batches and transactions would just go away and now wouldn't match. So when you really think about it, deleting is not a good idea, even though it sounds a very natural thing. So instead, what you would generally do is you'd inactivate those records and give an inactivate reason for that. That allows you to because sometimes people leave but they come back, at a later point. But if you do run into a case where someone is very adamant that they want to be deleted completely from the database, there is one option. You can instead of deleting somebody merge them into an anonymous giver you, user or any other, , common user you create just for this. A lot of times there is a anonymous, giver already that comes out of the box. A lot of times people use that as the person that they merge into. Now once you do that, you have to be very careful. It's a one direction merge. You cannot unmerge that. You're basically throwing all that data into a big pile of other data and there's no way of going back. So be very careful. You wanna make sure that if someone does ask for that, that they understand that they will not be giving getting a contribution statement at the end of the year and that there's no way that you could ever tell them how much they gave or what their attendance was. But that often is a common way of actually doing a delete in the rare cases that you actually need to do that. So that's how to delete a person in Rock.