The Different Partner Classes

A Partner in OpenPetra is any type of legal person: It can be a worker for the organisation, or supporter, or sending church.

Every Partner has a Class, which defines how that Partner will be used in OpenPetra.

A Partner Class must be specified when a Partner is created. It is not possible to change the Class of existing Partners.

These are the Classes that OpenPetra supports:

FAMILY	The basic class for the recipient of information. A Family can have one or more addresses, and each address can have 'valid from' and 'valid until' attributes. The word "Family" is perhaps not ideal, but no better term has been agreed upon.
PERSON	This Class of Partner is used in the Personnel module. Persons must be assigned to a Family, so the Family Partner must be created first.
VENUE	Used in the Conference module, a Venue has attributes that facilitate planning of accommodation for events.
BANK	Banks are necessary for account details to be created (that is, accounts are always at banks!) These account details can be linked to Partners.
CHURCH	Churches have a 'Denomination' attribute, and also a link to a Partner who acts as the Contact.
ORGANISATION	Any type of entity external to our organisation that doesn't fit into another Class is an Organisation. The Business Code attribute can be used to specify what kind of Organisation this is.
UNIT	Units help us to define our internal structure. Some Units are comparable to 'Division' or 'Department', but Units can also be used for an Event, or a Fund. The Type attribute specifies what kind of Unit this is.