Five features shipped this month for UK churches who carry the safeguarding and compliance load. Each one comes from a specific conversation: a DBS coordinator who missed a renewal because the spreadsheet reminder fell off her calendar; a treasurer rebuilding the charity register from scratch the week before AGM; a pastor who didn't realise a visitor had been on the follow-up list for four months. Here's what changed.

1. Automated DBS reminders at 30, 14 and 7 days

DBS and PVG checks expire on a clock that doesn't care about your inbox. The system now walks every DBS record each morning UK time and emails plus push-notifies the DBS coordinator at 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry, then once on or after the expiry date itself. Each threshold fires at most once per renewal cycle. The system tracks what's been sent on the person's record, so a re-run can't double-send and a paused renewal won't re-trigger when you come back to it.

When you save a new issue date the ledger resets and the next cycle starts. There's nothing to configure: switching on the DBS coordinator permission flag (Settings → Users) wires the recipient up. Pastor and Admin roles get the flag automatically.

2. A coordinator inbox with a 'renewal in flight' pause

Dashboard → Safeguarding → DBS is the new coordinator inbox. Open it on a Tuesday morning and you see who's expiring in the next 30 days, who's already expired, and who's currently renewing. The renewal-in-flight marker is the small feature that disproportionately helps: tick it on someone whose paperwork is in with the umbrella body, and the reminder cron stops nagging them while the application is processing. When the new check comes back you record the issue date, the marker auto-clears, and the next reminder cycle starts from the new expiry. No phantom 'YOUR CHECK IS EXPIRING' emails to someone who's been waiting on DBS for six weeks.

3. Bulk import for backfilling existing records

If you're switching to ChurchLinker from a spreadsheet of historical DBS records, you don't want to retype every issue date and reference number. The bulk DBS importer at Safeguarding → DBS → Import takes a CSV (issue date, expiry date, check type, provider, umbrella body reference, validity override flag) and matches rows to existing Person records by email or name. The dry-run preview flags any rows that don't match a person, so you can fix them before anything writes. Existing DBS records aren't overwritten silently. The importer skips conflicts and reports them, the same shape as the People CSV importer.

4. A Charity Commission members register, with AGM-ready PDF and snapshot reports

The general Member status (used for rotas, comms, groups) is too loose for charity-law purposes. The Charity Commission, OSCR and CCNI all want a formal members list: who can vote at AGM, who counts toward quorum, who can elect trustees. Both lists matter, but they aren't the same list, and conflating them creates problems at audit time.

There are now two distinct surfaces. On a Person's profile, the 'Church Member (Charity Commission)' panel records whether they're on the formal register and the date they were admitted. The /dashboard/admin/charity-membership report then gives you 'Members as at <date>' (the standard AGM snapshot, counting people ticked on and admitted on or before that date) and 'Admitted in <year>' (people whose admission date falls in that calendar year). Both have CSV export. Both are bookmarkable via URL parameters (?asOf=YYYY-MM-DD or ?year=YYYY), so the AGM secretary can save the snapshot link in the AGM paperwork folder.

The print-friendly PDF is the artefact most churches asked for. Open the report at the AGM date, hit Print → Save as PDF, and you've got the formal members list a trustee can sign off without any manual reformatting. A full audit trail records every tick and untick: who, when and any note added. A Charity Commission inspection has a clean line of evidence.

5. A formal visitor → member request flow

The previous visitor pipeline mixed two concerns: a welcome-team member who'd built a relationship with a visitor over a few weeks, and the pastor who actually decides someone is a member. In practice the welcome team didn't want to make a membership decision alone, and the pastor didn't have time to monitor the pipeline page.

The visitor pipeline now splits the two cleanly. A welcome-team member (granted the Visitor follow-up flag) sees the pipeline at /dashboard/people/visitor-pipeline. When they think someone's ready, they click 'Request membership' on the card and add a short note explaining why. The pastor sees a banner on their dashboard and an inbox at /dashboard/admin/visitor-conversions, where they approve (as MEMBER or REGULAR_ATTENDEE) or reject with a reason. The requester gets the decision by email and push notification. They don't have to chase. Every decision is audit-logged.

The split has a second benefit: someone who isn't ready for full membership but has clearly stuck around can be marked REGULAR_ATTENDEE rather than dropped from the pipeline. They stay in the comms net without being added to the formal register.

6. The anti-phishing agency contact card

DBS renewal phishing is real and increasingly convincing. A scam email from a domain that looks like a DBS umbrella body, asking the recipient to log in to update their details, hits at exactly the moment the legitimate reminder hits. The recipient is primed to act.

Settings → Safeguarding now has a 'DBS agency contact' card where the church records the legitimate agency or umbrella body's name, contact email, phone number and website. Once set, that card surfaces on every member's DBS panel on their profile. When a member gets a renewal email, they can compare the sender against the card their church has confirmed. A phishing email reads as obviously wrong because it doesn't match. It's a small UI surface doing a meaningful piece of defence.

What's next

On deck for next month: SMS reminders as an alternative channel for DBS, an 'Outstanding renewals over 30 days' report for the trustees pack, and an AGM-prep wizard that produces members register, trustees list and last year's accounts in one printable bundle. If any of these would meaningfully help your church, email hello@churchlinker.com and tell us. We read every reply, and roadmap order tracks what we hear.

Everything in this roundup is live on every plan, including Seed. The DBS coordinator and Charity register permission flags are auto-enabled for Pastor and Admin; grant them to delegated staff via Settings → Users.

What we shipped this month: DBS reminders, charity register, formal visitor-to-member workflow, and the anti-phishing agency card