A household groups related people who share a home or address: a family, a couple, or roommates receiving assistance together. Households help your team see who is part of the same story when you review giving, requests, visits, or care.
Each person belongs to one household. You don't add the same person to two households. CoolFocus is built around a single "home" household for each person, usually with one person marked as the head of household.
This can trip people up, because in real life someone can feel like part of two families. When that happens, the answer is almost never a second household, it's a relationship. See the section below and Relationships.
CoolFocus is moving away from treating a spouse as name fields on one primary record and toward two separate people in one household.
More and more of CoolFocus works on the individual person: their own gifts and soft credit, notes and tasks, communication preferences, search identity, and future person-level features. Those do not work cleanly when the spouse only exists as text on someone else's form.
The household owns the shared couple/family context (including when they give as a household). Each member can still hold different roles — board member, volunteer, donor, client, or any combination — without forcing both people into one form.
So for a couple who share a home, the preferred pattern is:
1. Two person records (donor, client, contact, or volunteer roles as needed on each).
2. Both members of the same household.
3. Optional Role in Household values such as Head and Spouse/Partner. See Household Member Roles.
You do not need a Relationships tab link for every couple who already share a household. Use Relationships when people are connected but do not share that one home household (separated spouses, adult children in another home, shared custody, and similar).
Donor-specific guidance, including legacy spouse fields and soft credit for joint gifts, is in Donors and Contributions.
• The members of the household and who the head of household is.
• Each member's Role in Household (optional), such as Head, Spouse/Partner, or Child. See Household Member Roles for what the role means and when to use it.
• Shared details like address and phone.
• The activity connected to the household and its members: contributions, requests, visits, notes, and tasks.
Each household member's record has an optional Role in Household field.
Use it to describe how a person relates to the others in their household. Depending on your organization's list, common choices include Head, Spouse/Partner, and Child. Your organization manages this list, so the choices you see may use different names.
The role only describes the household relationship. It is not a client type. It never changes a person's services, eligibility, permissions, or client status.
Leave it blank when the relationship isn't known, or when none of the available choices fits. Don't select a role based only on a person's age. Some household workflows use the role together with age to help identify dependents, but the role does not add someone to a household by itself; the person still has to be added as a member.
The field appears on household member lists and on the person's client, donor, staff, or volunteer details.
Some older contact, donor, client, staff, and volunteer records still store spouse information as plain text typed directly on the record, rather than as a separate person in a household. CoolFocus recognizes these as legacy inline spouse fields and displays them more clearly:
• The Spouse Name column in grids combines the spouse's name parts, including a middle name, prefix, and suffix when they're recorded.
• A Deceased badge appears next to the spouse's name when the record's Spouse Deceased flag is set.
• A Legacy badge marks any spouse name that still lives as inline text on the record instead of as its own person and household member.
These fields are carryover from older data. They do not create a second person record, and they are not the same as adding a spouse as a household member with a Role in Household. CoolFocus keeps them visible so existing data is not lost while teams move couples onto real person + household records.
Contact and donor records with a legacy inline spouse show a Split Household option in the record's actions menu. Selecting it opens a read-only preview showing what the primary person and the inline spouse would look like as two separate people sharing one household.
The preview is for review only. It does not create the spouse as a separate record, move any data, or change the household. CoolFocus is building more guidance and tooling on this path; for now, to give the spouse their own record, add them as a person and household member the normal way (search first), then use Relationships or Merging Duplicate Records only if you need to connect or clean up history.
Clicking a member's name in the household panel opens their record in whichever module matches their role:
• A client opens in Client Care.
• A donor opens in Give.
• A volunteer opens in the Serve module, on their volunteer record.
• Anyone without one of those roles opens as a contact in the Connect module.
A person can hold more than one role. If someone is both a client and a volunteer, CoolFocus opens the client record first, since client status takes priority for navigation.
Volunteer and staff records don't show a household panel. Client and donor records do, since both have a household-level workflow: shared giving, shared assistance history, and a shared address that matters for reporting.
Volunteering and staff work don't have that household layer. Hours, shifts, and background checks are all tracked per person, so there's nothing household-level to show. If a volunteer or staff member is also a client or donor, open their client or donor record to see their household.
Search for an existing household or person before creating a new one. Duplicate households and duplicate people split history and make giving, assistance, and reporting harder to trust. If duplicates do slip in, see Merging Duplicate Records.
This is the most common household question, and it has a clear pattern. Take a child who splits time between two parents' homes:
1. Add the child once as a client (or contact), not twice.
2. Put them in one household: their primary home. Pick whichever household your team treats as the main one for reporting and day-to-day work.
3. On the child's record (or on a parent's record), go to the Relationships tab and add a relationship to the second household, or to the parent who lives there. That captures the second home without creating a duplicate person.
Now staff who review either household can see the connection, and the child's history stays on one record instead of being split in two.
The same approach works for any "belongs to two homes" situation: estranged spouses, a client whose parent is a separate client, or extended family across addresses. Keep one household, and use relationships for the others. See Relationships for how to create them.
• Donors and Contributions
• Household Member Roles
• Relationships
• Contacts and Organizations
• Clients and Households in Love INC
• Merging Duplicate Records
