Create a New Person

Concepts

A person must be entered into VSys before they can be included in a mailing or included in your volunteer pool for future assignments.

If a person is already in VSys, do not create him again as a new person. If a person is created multiple times, VSys will treat each one as a different person. It will become very difficult for you to maintain the person's information accurately and see his history with your organization. If you do find that a person has been created more than once see Combining Duplicate People.

A new person can be added to VSys in three common ways:

If you are registering people to work on a specific project, the Registration Wizard from within a project lets you create a new person while also registering that person in the project.
From the person lookup tool, click the Create a new person button in the left navigation panel. (This method is described here.)
You can use a custom application form set up by your organization to add a new person to VSys. Any custom application forms you may have developed are accessed from the Custom Application Forms panel.

Steps in This Task

From the Data entry panel, click By personal data - name, date of birth... The Person Lookup screen opens and shows the lookup criteria fields.
If the person you want to create is not already in VSys, then follow the steps below to create a new person.
In the left navigation panel under Tools, click Create a new person or click the Create new person button at the bottom of the panel. The Create new person window opens.
Enter the person type, group and the primary first/given and last names. They are required fields.

Field Name	Definitions and Comments
New person type	The primary type of person, such as volunteer, VIP, etc. (required)
Group	The primary organization this person is associated with. (required) Note that the person must be assigned to a group, even if you have to assign him to a general group for now and later change them to a specific group when the information is available.
Gender	Enter this to help VSys look through existing people to ensure that you're not creating a duplicate person.
Date of birth	(see Gender above)
Primary First/given Name	(required)
Primary Middle Name
Primary Last/family name	(required)
Primary Suffix	Jr, III, etc.; often used to indicate generation.
Alternate Name	Nickname or preferred alternate name. This information can be used on reports, name tags, and credentials. (These fields won't be visible if you haven't enabled alternate names.)
Sounds like (phonetic name)	If the name is difficult to pronounce, or easily mispronounced, enter a pronunciation hint here. This information can be used on reports, name tags, and credentials.

Your VSys installation may be set up to automatically adjust capitalization in the name fields. If needed, you can turn off the automatic capitalization feature for this person by checking the Ignore capitalization rules checkbox at the bottom of the window.

Click the Continue button to create this person. If the Don't check for duplicate people checkbox is not checked, VSys will first look through all of the people already in VSys to ensure that you're not making a new copy of an existing person. If it finds people who may be a duplicate of the new one, it will show you those and allow you to either create the new person anyway, or work with one of the people that it found.
After entering all applicable data on the volunteer profile screen, click the Save button at the top to finish creating a new person in VSys.

Example

Kadijah J. McAdoo is a licensed electrician who has volunteered her expertise to the organization's upcoming construction project. Ms. McAdoo has not worked with the organization before, so I need to enter her personal information into VSys One.

I open the Person Lookup panel and select the By personal data... link. I enter her family/last name, first/given name, and her date of birth, and then click the Search button to see if she is already in VSys One. In the search results I don't find her, so I click the Create a new person button in the left navigation panel.

Notice that in the Create new person screen, the name information I supplied in the previous screen is already filled in. I identify Kadijah as a volunteer in the General group. Then I complete her name in the Primary name fields.

It may not be obvious how to pronounce this name, such as where the syllable stress goes or how to pronounce some of the vowels. To help pronounce her name correctly, I enter the phonetic name as shown in the Sounds like (phonetic name) fields below. Notice that I insert a space between syllables, and I use all upper case letters on the syllable that receives the stress/accent. (The Phonetic name values are entirely optional.)