TribeManager User Manual

Add a person from the Persons screen with New person: in basic mode a contact needs only a name. Open a person to edit their details, or delete them. Use the search box to find people by name or any other field.

Long lists are shown a page at a time. Below the list, First page, Previous page, and Next page move through the result set, and the line between them says which page you are on and how many records matched altogether. Above the list, Sort by chooses the field to order by and Direction whether it runs from A to Z or back. Changing the sort always returns you to the first page - page 7 of a different order would be nowhere in particular. Records that do not have the field you sorted by are listed at the end, in both directions.

Nothing you enter is ever rejected. If something is incomplete or does not look right - a missing name, a date that is not a date - it is still saved and shown as a warning so it can be fixed later (the general rule everywhere: warn, don’t block).

Add an appointment from the Events screen with New event: an event needs a title, a status, and a start. Everything else is optional.

All day switches between the two kinds of date an event can have. A whole-day event carries just a date; unticking All day adds a time and a time zone, which is stored with the event so a change to daylight-saving rules never moves it. The end may be left empty for an event without a fixed finish.

The status says where an event stands: In planning, Confirmed, or Cancelled. The fourth value, Template, marks an event as a copy source: it has no date and does not appear in the event list unless you tick Include templates.

A venue is picked from the organization’s location contacts, and events can be nested - a sub-event is a full event with its own time and place, which is how a festival splits into setup, the event itself, and dismantling. A sub-event that starts before its parent is fine; the tool only points it out.

Filter the list by text, by a date range - an event overlapping the range is included, not only one entirely inside it - and sort it by date, title, or status.

Add a to-do from the Tasks screen. A task needs only a title - no deadline and no owner - because a to-do you cannot write down until you have decided everything about it is one that ends up on a different piece of paper.

A deadline is optional and can be a whole day or an exact time. In this mode a task is either done or it is not, and the tick box is the whole of it: ticking it finishes the task, clearing it opens it again. Reopening something is a normal thing to do and nothing stops you.

If the organization has used the fuller mode before, a task may already carry a finer state - in progress, or cancelled. Those are kept exactly as they are; this mode simply draws them as done or not done. Nothing is lost by working here.

The Inventory screen lists what the organization owns, how many of each there are, and how many are currently free.

Kept at is one of your location contacts, and Shelf is a free-text label. It suggests the labels already used in that room, so spellings stay consistent without anybody having to maintain a list of shelves - and when the last thing leaves shelf 3, shelf 3 simply stops being suggested.

Things can contain other things: put a tool inside a toolbox, and the tool stays a full entry with its own count, borrowable on its own.

Each account - your bank account, the cash box - has its own cash book: what happened, in date order, with the balance after each line.

Two figures sit at the top and they mean different things. Balance is the money that is actually there, the number a bank statement would show. With planned entries is what it becomes once everything you have already recorded as expected has happened. Keeping them apart is the point: one tells you where you stand, the other whether you survive the invoices you already know about.

Upload a file from the Documents screen. A name is optional - the file name is used when you leave it empty. Find documents again by name, description, or file name, and download them with the link beside each one.

The Qualifications screen keeps a catalogue of what your organization recognizes - a first-aid certificate, a unit-leader course - as its own record, even before anyone holds it. Under Awards, connect a person to one they hold; narrow the list to one person, one qualification, or one status.

In advanced mode a contact carries the everyday fields the organization has turned on - name, email, phone, address, birthday, and any custom fields. The contact form shows a matching input for each: a date picker for dates, a dropdown for single-select fields, a plain box for text. Warnings still guide rather than block - an odd or missing value is saved and flagged, never refused.

The Contacts screen lists every kind together - people, organizations, and places - so the club’s insurance broker is as findable as its members. Narrow the list by kind, and open Filter by field for the typed filters: an exact value for text and selection fields, a from/to range for dates and numbers, so "everyone born before 2008" is a query rather than a scroll. Only the fields your organization has turned on are offered.

Beside those sits Needs attention, with a number next to it: tick it and the list shows only the records that are asking for something - a birthday that is not a date, a required field left empty, a value the organization’s complexity mode no longer offers a box for. Nothing was refused when it was entered and nothing is deleted now; the filter is simply how you find what is still thin, and untick it to see everyone again.

While you type a name or an email address, TribeManager looks for contacts that already exist - the same address, or a name made of the same words - and links them. It never stops you: if the two really are different people, save and carry on.

An organizational contact carries its own posts - the standing positions it has, such as unit leader or group leader - each with a count, so a vacancy shows up as a fact of the structure rather than something you have to notice yourself. Assign a person to a post, with a validity period: pick the post - each one shown with the path of the node it belongs to - and the node follows from it. A person holds one assignment at a time, and none is marked as preferred; several at once, and assignment to any node of the structure, are expert mode.

Open a contact to manage its relationships to the organization - member, customer, supplier, and so on - each with a validity period and, for members, a status (applicant, active, passive, honorary, resigned). A relationship changes as life does: switch the status, or end it - one click for "ends today" - and the relationship stays on the record with its history intact. Remove is for the entry you made by mistake, not for the membership that ended. The Members screen lists everyone who is currently an active member; membership is derived from these relationships, there is no separate member record.

Advanced mode is where an event stops being a single appointment. Nest events - setup, the event itself, dismantling - each a full event with its own time, place, and participants, so the setup crew and the audience are genuinely different lists rather than one list with a note.

Use templates as copy sources for the things you run every year, and limit places per role where a room or a minibus sets the number. A limit never stops anyone: going over it is pointed out, because the person booking usually knows something the software does not.

Point an event at a node of your organization’s structure and its posts apply automatically, requirements included. Keep the event’s own list of deviations where this one occasion genuinely differs - a post left out, one added, a count changed, a requirement relaxed - without touching the standing structure, so a correction made once holds for every other event that points at the same node. Where a deviation turns out to be how things should stand generally, adopt it: the standing structure is corrected and the deviation drops off the event’s list.

Ask participants your own questions under Participation fields: give a field a name, a type, and an option list where it needs one, and turn it on for the roles an event asks it of. Some answers belong to the person rather than to one weekend - a dietary requirement, an allergy - and are written straight into that person’s contact profile the first time they answer; others are only about this one event and stay with the participation. A field marked required never blocks: it warns, and the warning has a due point - on confirming, from a deadline, or both - so an empty answer is not something nobody notices from the day invitations go out. Give the event a registration deadline and every required field with no due point of its own falls due there.

Hang tasks on an event with a temporal relation - before, during, after - so an event carries its own checklist. Nest tasks the same way events nest.

A description belongs to this mode. Basic keeps a task down to a title, which already carries a sentence; anything longer starts here. A description written here stays on the task if the organization later drops back to basic - the mode decides what is shown, never what is kept.

The status has four values here rather than the tick box basic draws: Open, In progress, Done, and Cancelled. Cancelled is for work the organization decided against - it is a decision, and worth recording as one, which deleting the task would not do. A finished task also shows when it was finished; that date is read out of the task’s own history, so it is right by construction and goes away again if the task is reopened. A cancelled task shows none.

A task with subtasks shows how far they have got - "3 of 5 done", counting the whole tree below it however deep it runs, and never the task itself. Closing a task while work below it is still open asks first and says how much: you can close the whole lot, or close only this one and leave the rest, which is a legitimate choice and leaves a warning on the task rather than an error. Nothing travels the other way - finishing the last subtask never finishes its parent, because a parent may hold work of its own.

Comment on a task. The history already says who changed what; a comment says why something is still open, which is a different question. Each entry carries who wrote it and when, and entries are added rather than edited - a conversation whose earlier turns can be rewritten records nothing. You can withdraw your own.

Attach documents to a task - the quote to compare, the form to fill in, the photo of what broke. Exporting the task as a calendar entry carries the attachments with it as links into this installation, not as copies of the files.

Open a task and you can add subtasks from a single line - a title is all it takes. What you get is a full task, not a checklist entry: open it and it has everything any task has, its own subtasks included. The list under a task shows one level only, however deep the tree goes, because each line already says how much is open below it.

A task can have a start as well as a deadline. The two are one span rather than two independent dates: one Whole day switch and one time zone govern both ends, and the deadline has to lie after the start. Getting that pair wrong is one of the very few things the tool refuses outright instead of warning about - a calendar entry that ends before it begins is one no other calendar program can read. The form says so as soon as the dates disagree, so nobody has to press save to find out.

A priority is picked as a band: High, Normal, Low, or None. Those are the calendar standard’s own bands over a number scale, and the number is what is stored - so a task that arrived from another calendar with a value somewhere inside a band keeps that exact value, and reads as the band it falls in. Picking a band yourself writes the band’s own number.

The distinction between assigned to and responsible comes into its own here: assign a whole group of people to the work, and name one of them as answering for it - or leave it to follow the assignment, and let the duty move when the job changes hands.

Contain items in other items, and define kits whose contents are checked against a definition: what is missing from the first-aid box, and what is in it that should not be. Reserve material for an event and it takes the event’s own dates, so the two cannot drift apart - or reserve it for one participant’s own attendance, and it takes that participant’s dates instead.

A location - a room, a building - can be claimed the same way a thing is: give it a capacity on the contact record and no more people are placed there than it holds. Filling a post at an event is a claim too, held apart from the standing assignment - the same check that stops a room from being double-booked also catches the same person booked as group leader on two events at once. Whether what you claim is counted or handed out by name follows how it was recorded: sleeping bags counted as one item are counted on the claim too, tents recorded one by one can be claimed by name.

Put a demand on an event under Demands - a bed, a sleeping bag, one per participant unless their own answer says they bring it - and claims for it appear and disappear as people accept, decline, or change their answer. An event expecting fifty people holds fifty beds from the day it is planned: those are provisional claims, computed from the expected head count, and they turn firm person by person as registrations come in. What was provisional and never redeemed is released automatically at the event’s registration deadline. Where a resource must be shared only among people alike in some way - by gender, say - state that as a separation criterion on the room or the building it belongs to; it is inherited by everything under it, and any node may relax what it inherited where the numbers do not allow it.

Run the allocation for an event and it proposes who gets what - a list of quantities for a counted demand, a named room for an individual one - for you to confirm or adjust. Running it again only fills what is still open: a confirmed placement is never moved by a later run, only by a deliberate change. Claiming more than there is, or a conflict between two claims, is pointed out rather than refused - the earlier claim holds and the later one carries the warning, and a firm claim outweighs a provisional one in how loud that warning is.

Budget with planned entries: they show in the register and in the outlook without touching the balance, and turn into reality when you record what actually happened. Attach entries to an event to see what it cost and what it brought in.

Write a message under Mailings: a subject, a text, and the kind it is. Saving keeps it; nothing leaves the building until you send it, which is a separate click on the mailing itself. Writing and sending are apart on purpose - a draft should never be something somebody already received.

Write {recipientName} into the subject or the text and each person sees their own name there. Anything else you write stays as it is, including a marker nobody knows - a visible {amount} in a sent mail is a mistake you can find, an empty gap is not.

Tick Keep as a template and the message becomes a copy source instead: it is never sent, and Use this template writes a fresh mailing from its words. A mailing that already went out can be written again the same way, which is what you want for last year’s invitation.

A sent mailing carries the date it went out and cannot be sent a second time. It reports how many people it reached, how many had declined that kind, how many are waiting for their digest, and how many have no address on file.

Under a contact you can produce two documents. The erasure report says what would be anonymized and what statute keeps, and hands the person who asked a readable answer before anything happens. The access request is the other half: what is stored about them in full, where it came from, and how many postings, participations, and relationships elsewhere point at them - counted rather than reprinted, so the document is not another copy of the data.

If your organization takes donations, mark the finance category they are booked under (see the admin manual). Then a person’s Zuwendungsbestätigung for a year is a download: the collective receipt over everything they gave, in the wording German tax law requires, with the amount written out in words. Naming a single posting confirms that one gift instead.

Record the issuing body, the date granted, a validity with its own expiry date, and evidence - a reference number, a linked document, or both - on an award. A qualification can be marked as needing its expiry or its evidence recorded, and an award missing either is flagged rather than refused. An award nearing its expiry warns ahead of time - using a lead time you set on the qualification itself where the organization’s default does not fit - and an expired one warns too; both are read off the date whenever the screen opens, never stored as a flag that could fall out of date.

Expert mode does not add data. Everything an expert-mode organization records is recorded the same way in basic mode - the difference is how much of the surface you are shown. Raising or lowering a module’s mode therefore never migrates anything: something created in expert mode simply hides in a lower one, and reappears when you raise it again.

That is worth knowing before you turn it on. If a mode is too high, turn it back down; nothing is lost by trying.

A place is rarely just a place: give a location contact the location it is part of and the address book grows a map - campus, building, room. Every node stays a full contact, usable as a venue or a storage place on its own.

Phone numbers and email addresses carry a type - work, home, cell, or whatever your organization uses. The list is not fixed: vCard’s own registry is open, so what you type is kept and exported as you wrote it.

Record contact persons for the organizations you deal with: which individual speaks for which partner, with an optional role such as chair or purchasing. It is a communication pointer, deliberately not a statement of who is responsible for anything - responsibility lives with tasks.

Somebody arrived a day late or left early? Their participation can carry its own dates. They sit behind an action on the participant’s row rather than in the list itself, because they are the exception: unset means "the event’s dates", and that is almost always right.

The dates matter where paperwork is generated from a template - a certificate then prints what that person actually attended rather than what was planned. They are usually filled in after the event, when the certificate is written.

Subscribing to the calendar in expert mode also carries who occupies each standing post at an event - unit leader, group leader, whatever your organization’s structure names - as a participant entry any calendar programme already understands. Only confirmed occupancies leave the instance; a proposal nobody has agreed to and an unfilled position stay inside it, and so does any participation field’s own answer.

A qualification can carry an ESCO URI where the European skills classification reaches it - most of what a club recognizes has no entry there, which is normal rather than a gap. Qualifications can sit inside a forest, so "everyone with any leadership course" is a question the tree above one specific course answers. Record the issuing body’s own accreditation, and a renewal rule for qualifications that are not simply held once and forever.