Skip to content
ParishCRM

Settings & Branding

The Settings page (/settings, ADMIN role only) is where a church configures its identity, look, letters, and a handful of app-wide behaviours after first login. Environment variables provide fallback defaults for some of these fields until an admin saves a value in-app — see Environment Variables.

To switch whole features on or off (Events, Accounting, Sunday School and so on), see Choosing Features.

Using it

Section titled “Using it”

Sign in as an ADMIN and open Settings from the sidebar. Each section below is its own form and saves independently. A sticky bar at the top (General / Branding / Email / Members / Receipts / Security) jumps to each group without reloading, so unsaved edits elsewhere on the page are kept.

Church Information

Section titled “Church Information”

Church name, address, tax/charity registration number, contact email, and website — shown on donation receipts and public pages. Values here override the CHURCH_NAME / CHURCH_ADDRESS / CHURCH_ABN / CHURCH_WEBSITE environment fallbacks once saved.

Official financial documents (donation and tax receipts) require the name, address, and registration number to actually be configured — the app refuses to issue a receipt with the placeholder name or a blank address/registration number, prompting the admin to finish Church Information first.

Branding

Section titled “Branding”

Upload images that replace the built-in neutral placeholders everywhere they appear — login screen, sidebar, public event pages, browser tab, and PDF letterheads:

Slot Used for
Logo Login screen + sidebar
Crest Sidebar + event-organiser header
Crest (header) Public event page header
App icon / favicon PWA icon + browser tab
Letterhead Banner across receipts and letters (PDF)

Accepted formats are PNG, JPEG, and WebP only — SVG uploads are rejected (serving arbitrary SVG same-origin is a stored-XSS risk). “Reset” restores the neutral default for that slot. Uploaded images are stored in the database, not on disk, so they survive container restarts/redeploys.

THEME_PRIMARY / THEME_PRIMARY_DARK / THEME_ACCENT environment variables set the brand colours (see Environment Variables) — there’s no in-app colour picker; colours are deployment config, images are admin-uploaded content.

Welcome Letter

Section titled “Welcome Letter”

Bank account details (general fund and a second, tax-deductible fund), default letter signer name/title, and the intro/contributions/closing paragraph templates used when generating the new-member welcome letter PDF.

Membership

Section titled “Membership”

Options for the public membership application form:

  • Whether to ask for previous church, transfer letter, and spouse’s church (toggle)
  • Minimum monthly dues amount (also pre-fills dues when adding a family manually)
  • Custom field label for an overseas/home-country address (blank = don’t ask)
  • Custom field label for an arrival date (blank = don’t ask)

Birthday / Anniversary emails

Section titled “Birthday / Anniversary emails”

Subject and body templates for automated birthday and wedding-anniversary emails, plus on/off toggles for each.

App Settings

Section titled “App Settings”
  • Login notification email — receives an alert on failed login attempts; blank disables it.
  • Membership secretary email — where public membership-form notifications go (see MEMBERSHIP_SECRETARY_EMAIL fallback).
  • Session idle timeout — minutes of inactivity before a session expires.
  • Card processing fee (% and fixed) — the percentage and fixed cost-of-acceptance surcharge passed on for card-paid event tickets, when card payments are enabled (see Card Payments (Stripe)).

Email Templates

Section titled “Email Templates”

Editable subject/body templates for the app’s transactional emails (receipts, reminders, notifications) — see Email Notifications.

Receipts

Section titled “Receipts”

Donation-receipt wording and options — see Receipts.

About

Section titled “About”

Read-only footer showing the running app version and (if set) the short git commit SHA, from NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_VERSION / NEXT_PUBLIC_GIT_SHA.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”
  • Most Settings fields are stored as rows in an AppSetting key/value table, read at request time (a short-lived cache backs the church-identity read path so a Settings save is picked up quickly).
  • Branding images are stored as binary blobs in a BrandingAsset table (one row per slot) and served through /api/branding/<slot>, which returns the neutral placeholder SVG when no row exists yet.
  • The web app manifest (used for “Add to Home Screen”) reads the current church name and the uploaded icon at request time, so a PWA install picks up the church’s own name and icon rather than a generic one — see Help and What’s New for PWA install notes.
  • Theme colours are read once at process start from THEME_* env vars and applied consistently across the UI, generated PDFs, and transactional emails, so a redeploy with new values changes everything at once. Colours are not editable in-app — that keeps a single container image usable for any church without a rebuild.

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”
Variable Effect
CHURCH_NAME, CHURCH_ADDRESS, CHURCH_ABN, CHURCH_WEBSITE Fallback values shown until Church Information is saved in-app.
THEME_PRIMARY, THEME_PRIMARY_DARK, THEME_ACCENT Brand colours, hex #RRGGBB.
MEMBERSHIP_SECRETARY_EMAIL Fallback membership-form notification address.

See the full reference at Environment Variables.

Section titled “Related pages”