Add date of birth as a core field

[tim-pearce]

I know I can add a custom field and there is age brackets, but for youth ministries date of birth is quite significant.

I don't have jethro set up for my ministries yet, but with my current spreadsheet and contact list based system I am looking to create a list of kids who have been to our play group and should be starting grade one this year so we can invite them to primary age youth group. This would be simple in jethro with a date of birth field.

I should be able to action this enhancement request.

[tbar0970]

Hi Tim

Storing the date of birth in a custom field would satisfy the use case above. You can use a person report to filter by whether that custom field's value is within a certain range.

The reason I'm hesitant about adding DOB as a core field at this point is that many systems will already have it set up as a custom field. So if they upgrade to the next version and a DOB core field appears in addition to their existing custom field that will create a lot of confusion. A special migration process to move the custom field values into the core field would be needed, and that would be yet more work...

Just a note on age brackets: Some people like to set up age brackets for each school year for more fine-grained analysis. Given that some kids start school early or late this can be more relevant than DOB.

Tom

[tbar0970]

I recently found an area where it would be valuable to have DOB as a core field rather than a custom field. When printing a contact list (aka church directory) you typically want to have the kids in a family ordered by age. There might be several kids in the same age bracket (eg primary school). Jethro doesn't know which custom field is DOB. If it was a core field, the contact list could put kids in age order.

[jefft]

Our church has Age Brackets Adult, High School, Primary School (Yr 3-6), Infants School (Yr K-2), Preschool (Age 3-5), *Toddler Age 1-2), Baby. Every non-adult has to be reclassified once a year. It certainly feels like DoB should be a core field, with Age Bracket** a derivative classification.

[tbar0970]

They are certainly related. A "school year" custom field is also related to "age bracket". But for some people you don't have DOB or school year, so age bracket stands on its own.

[jefft]

When printing a contact list (aka church directory) you typically want to have the kids in a family ordered by age. There might be several kids in the same age bracket (eg primary school). Jethro doesn't know which custom field is DOB. If it was a core field, the contact list could put kids in age order.

A more severe variant of this problem occurs in Jethro instances with age brackets of just Adult and Child.