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. The status moves between Open, In progress, and Done, in any direction: reopening something is a normal thing to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.