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.

If a couple is still stored on one record with a Legacy spouse badge, Create Spouse Record does all three steps for you. See Create Spouse Record below.

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.

If a donor record shows "Donor household not found" instead of this panel, that's a known bug, not a sign the household was lost. See Troubleshooting: "Donor household not found" on a household record.

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:

These fields (Spouse Name and its prefix, middle name, and suffix, plus Spouse Deceased) are the main legacy fields you'll run into. They 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.

To spot records that still have a legacy spouse, look for the Spouse Name column and the Legacy badge in lists such as Donors and Contacts. On the Volunteers list, the Spouse Name column is hidden by default; add it from the list's column options.

Contact, donor, volunteer, staff, and client records with a legacy inline spouse show Create Spouse Record in the record's actions menu. You need permission to edit the record. The dialog shows the primary contact, the spouse, and whether the spouse is marked deceased, and lists what will change before you click Create spouse record.

Creating the spouse record:

Existing history stays with the primary person. Gifts, time sheets, the Volunteer checkbox, and volunteer details are not moved or duplicated. The new spouse is marked as a donor when the primary person was a donor, and is never marked as a volunteer. If the spouse is the one who volunteers, check Volunteer on the spouse's record, then change Staff / Volunteer on each of their time sheets to the spouse (see Time Sheets), and uncheck Volunteer on the primary person if they don't volunteer.

If someone in your organization already has the spouse's first and last name, CoolFocus doesn't create a second person and changes nothing. If it's the same person, add their existing record to the household instead: open the household, go to Household Members, and use Select Existing. Then clear the Spouse fields on the primary record.

For how gifts, salutations, and giving statements work once both spouses share a household, see Donors and Contributions.

Clicking a member's name in the household panel opens their record in whichever module matches their role:

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.