Household ownership, invitations, and merging duplicate records

Tasks on a household's People tab beyond portal-login provisioning: inviting another adult, owner vs. primary contact, moving an adult between households, and consolidating a duplicate prospect household. Open a household from Households, then go to the People tab for all of these except notes, which live on Overview.

These are two distinct roles on a household, and they don't have to be the same person:

• Owner controls who can be invited and who has access. Only the owner (or staff) can invite another adult, change the primary contact, or transfer ownership.

• Primary contact is the household's main point of contact for communications. It doesn't carry any access control.

Both are set automatically only when unset (for example, the first adult to join a new household becomes both). After that, changing either one is restricted to the household owner themselves, or staff with the manager or admin role.

1. Open the household → People.

2. Expand Invite another adult.

3. Enter the new adult's first name, last name, and email, then Send invitation.

Who can do this: the household owner, or staff with manager/ admin.

Members can also invite another adult from their own portal Household page. That page now clearly separates two things members used to confuse: "Give another adult their own login" (a different person, their own sign-in. This invite flow) vs. "Add another email for yourself" (an alternate sign-in address for the same person, which does not create a second person). If a member says they "added someone" but no invite went out, check which of the two they actually used.

Notes on how invitations behave:

• The invite link expires after 7 days.

• An email can only have one pending invitation across the whole organization at a time. If that email already has a pending invite to a different household, a new invite is rejected — resolve or let the first one expire before inviting the same address elsewhere.

• Re-inviting the same email to the same household while its invite is still pending doesn't create a duplicate. It resets that invitation's token and expiry.

• There's no limit on how many times you can resend an invitation. Avoid resending repeatedly (see Known issue below).

• An invitation's status only flips from pending to expired the moment someone tries to use it after the deadline. An unused expired invite otherwise just drops off the pending list rather than visibly changing state.

Next to an adult who isn't already the owner, use Transfer ownership (confirm the prompt. It explains the new owner will control adult invitations). This changes only who holds the owner role; it does not change the primary contact, billing, or membership status.

Use this to correct a member who was attached to the wrong household. For example, after a CSV import misfiled someone.

1. Open the household → People.

2. Under the adult's entry, expand Move adult to another household.

3. Choose the destination household and confirm Move adult.

This is staff-only (manager/admin). It does not touch any financial rows: billing history stays with the original household. It's blocked if the adult is the last member of a household that is not a prospect (you'd be emptying an active household). Moving an adult also cancels any pending invitation to that adult.

Use this when a duplicate prospect household should be merged into the correct one: for example, after resolving a match in Reviewing possible duplicate households.

1. Open the source household. The duplicate you want to merge away. The Consolidate duplicate prospect card only appears when the household's status is prospect and it hasn't already been merged.

2. Choose the destination household and confirm Consolidate prospect.

This is staff-only. It only works when the source household is a prospect with zero financial history. No memberships, invoices, payments, bond, waitlist entries, or anything else with money attached. If the source has any of that, consolidation is hard-blocked. Use Merge into another household (below), which is built for duplicates that carry financial history.

A household that has applied is an applicant, not a prospect. Since applying now creates a real applicant account (and provisions a sign-in), a just-applied duplicate won't show the Consolidate duplicate prospect card, that tool is only for bare prospect leads that never applied. For a duplicate that already applied (or is on the waitlist), use the duplicate-review flow and handle it as a manual follow-up instead. The public join flow also screens for likely duplicates before creating a record. See Reviewing possible duplicate households.

The source household is never deleted. It's kept as a terminated record that redirects to the destination household, so historical references stay valid and the merge is auditable.

When a confirmed duplicate has money attached on either side, a membership, invoices, payments, bond, or credits, use this instead of consolidation.

1. Open the household you want to merge away (the duplicate). The Merge into another household (keeps financial history) card appears for any active, un-merged household that isn't a bare prospect.

2. Choose the survivor household, the one to keep, and confirm.

What it does, and what it leaves alone:

• People and dependents move to the survivor.

• No financial row is ever moved, changed, or deleted. Every invoice, payment, bond entry, and credit stays exactly where it was, on the record it belongs to. The merged-away household becomes a terminated redirect to the survivor.

• The survivor's ledger and statement automatically show the combined picture: both households' invoices, credits, and bond roll up into one view: without any row being rewritten.

It refuses, and tells you what to clear first, when:

• Both households have a live membership. Two memberships can't collapse onto one household. Relinquish one first through the normal path at Relinquishments, which produces the bond refund as a check payable, never a Stripe refund, then merge.

• The household being merged away holds the live membership. Because memberships don't move, make that household the survivor instead (merge the other one away), or relinquish it first.

• The household being merged away has an open invoice. Money still owed can't disappear into a redirect. Settle, void, or reissue that invoice on the survivor first, then merge.

Reversible. If you merge the wrong pair, open the merged-away (now terminated) household and use Undo merge on its Overview banner: the people and dependents that moved return, the redirect clears, and both households read independently again.

This is staff-only (manager/admin).

On the household's Overview tab, the Notes card lets any staff role add a note. Notes are append-only. There's no edit or delete. If a note was wrong, add a new note correcting it rather than trying to change the original.

There's no rate limit on invitation emails (or the alternate-email/alias request flow). A household owner can trigger unlimited invitation emails to the same address. If a member reports getting repeated invite emails, that's expected current behavior.