We recommend our automated daily Promotion routine be configured at your church for Participants who promote from one Group to another based on their grade. For example, when a 4th grader (currently in the 4th grade girls Group) completes the school year, she is moved to the 5th grade girls Group.
To use the daily Promotion routine, open each applicable Group record and set the following values. Once this is complete and the routine is running on the server, individuals are moved daily and automatically:
Example:
You can make exceptions for certain Participants one by one or by Group Role Type. You can also determine if the Group Participant records are updated or created. See Promotions Routine for details.
Prior to the enhancements to the Promotion routine (Report & Database Update October 2016), our recommended approach for grade-based promotion of school-aged children was as follows. Note: This method is still valid, but can essentially be setup to happen automatically (see details above).
Approach: Rename the existing Age or Grade Groups. Create a new group only for kids entering the school system:
NOTE: Any children who need to be held back can have their individual Group Participant records edited.
TIP: This is a great time to review the promotion settings for any age-based Groups (babies through 4 years old).
Some churches have more complex promotion rules and/or have a "Sunday school" model (Groups based around a progression of classes not always tied to age or grade). If you need to explicitly promote some Participants from one Group to another and using the Promotion routine or renaming Groups is not an option, please view our Alternate Group Promotion article.
See Also: Routines, Promotion Routine, Promotion for Babies Through Preschool