The Comprehensive Report of All Comprehensive Reports

Ever wondered how you can view all of the different volunteers at your church in one report on Elvanto? A report that shows the people listed by department, but in a mildly readable way? This is something we’ve been working on recently.

If this is something you’re after, I reckon you’ll probably need to become familiar with comprehensive reports.

Here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to set up a comprehensive report that matches your departments.

Step 1. Set up your departments.

First up, go into settings >> departments and set up the positions you need under the necessary department. Then add the volunteer roles you need. Here’s an example, using ours Holiday Kids’ Club (same one I used yesterday):

Step 2. Create a Comprehensive Report

On your sidebar, click on “reports” and then click on the green “Add comprehensive report” button. Give the report a name to match the department name (e.g., “HKC” or “Holiday Kids’ Club”) and then hit “save”.

Step 3. Create Standard Reports for Each Role

On your sidebar, click on “reports” and then click on the green “Add standard report” button. Give each report a name that matches the position in your department above, e.g., “HKC Director”.

Step 4. Specify Filter Criteria

Where it says “Specify filter criteria”, select “departments”, “contains”, and then the role you want it to match, e.g., “HKC Director”.

Step 5. Specify Fields to Display

Next, specify which fields to display. These are the ones we like to see for Youth and Kids’ Ministry:

Then click “save”.

Step 6. Do the same for all of your roles

Create standard reports for all of the other roles too. In my case, for “HKC Adult Leader”, “HKC LiT”, etc.

Step 7. Add Standard Reports to Comprehensive Reports

Now go back to your comprehensive report and add the standard reports, one by one.

Soon, it should look like this:

Then, click on “generate report” and you’ll get a list of all of the names, listed under each role. (I won’t give you a screenshot of this as it has lots of people’s personal details. This is a real example!)

And if you want more layers?

At our church we have more layers! This comprehensive report is added to our “Kids Ministry” comprehensive report. And we add the “Kids Ministry” comprehensive report to what we call the “Inception Report”, a comprehensive report that contains all of our other key ministry areas (e.g., Sunday Gatherings, Youth Ministry, Evangelism + eight others). We call it the Inception Report because it contains reports inside reports inside reports inside reports, like the movie Inception with dream inside dreams inside dreams.

We find it helpful to be able to view all volunteers in one report. If you’re interested in creating something like this, you basically just apply the logic of steps 1–7 above and apply them to all areas of your church.

Marty, shouldn’t you just get on with sharing Jesus with people?

I agree! That’s exactly why we put so much work into this at our church. As churches grow, we need systems that can accommodate the growth. If our systems aren’t up and running well, we inevitably fail to care for people, and it costs them, and it costs us when it comes to sharing Jesus with people.

By having good records of who is serving, we can do a better job at looking after people.

In smaller churches I’ve been at, it wasn’t really necessary to have something like this. As a pastor, I kind of just knew a lot of this information in my head.

But as churches get bigger, we need better systems to make sure we can love people more effectively, and to make sure we can best equip them to share Jesus with others.

We need robust trellises to support the vine work.

If you put together a system like this, hardly anyone will know how much time it took you (a fair bit of time). And nobody will care either. And that’s how it should be. But they will care if you have a system that doesn’t work and facilitates chaos!

This is by no means the best thing since sliced bread. There are plenty of weaknesses in it. Many of them are my fault! But I think it’s something worth investing time in this. Because we want to do the best possible job to help people know and grow in Jesus.

Something like this takes many hours. But I’m convinced that it’s worth it.