A household groups related people who share a home or address — a family, a couple, 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 is the point that trips 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.
The members of the household and who the head of household is.
Shared details like address and phone.
The activity connected to the household and its members — contributions, requests, visits, notes, and tasks.
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:
Add the child once as a client (or contact) — not twice.
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.
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 reviewing 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, extended family across addresses: keep one household, and use relationships for the others. See Relationships for how to create them.
