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ParishCRM

Regional Configuration

ParishCRM defaults to Australian conventions (July–June financial year, Sydney timezone, en-AU locale, AUD currency), but these are runtime settings, not hardcoded — one published container image can serve a church in any region by setting a few environment variables.

Using it

Section titled “Using it”

Set these in your .env (see Installation), not in the app UI — regional config is read once when the server process starts.

Variable Meaning Default
APP_FY_START_MONTH Financial-year start month, 1–12 (7 = July) 7
APP_TIMEZONE IANA timezone name (e.g. America/New_York, Europe/London) Australia/Sydney
APP_LOCALE BCP-47 locale for money/date formatting (e.g. en-US, en-GB) en-AU
APP_CURRENCY ISO-4217 currency code — also the currency used for Stripe checkout, when card payments are enabled AUD

All four are optional; leave any unset to keep its default.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”
  • Values are validated at server start, not lazily: an out-of-range APP_FY_START_MONTH, an unrecognised APP_TIMEZONE, a malformed APP_LOCALE, or a non-3-letter APP_CURRENCY throws immediately at boot rather than surfacing as a confusing error later in a report or PDF.
  • The financial-year setting drives every FY-scoped view — dashboard summaries, budgets, and financial reports all derive “current FY” and FY date ranges from APP_FY_START_MONTH (see Financial Reports and Budgets).
  • The timezone and locale drive date/time and money formatting consistently across server-rendered pages, generated PDFs, and emails, and are also injected into the browser at page load so client-rendered components format identically to the server — there’s no separate client-side timezone/locale config to keep in sync.
  • APP_CURRENCY is also the currency ParishCRM requests when creating a Stripe Checkout session for event ticket payments (see Card Payments (Stripe)).

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”

Set at deployment time in .env (or your platform’s environment variable configuration) — see Environment Variables for the complete list. A change to any of these four variables requires a container restart to take effect.

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