What's new.

Set up Face ID or Touch ID from My Account, and it becomes your second step at sign-in instead of the emailed code. Entirely optional, per device, and the email code is always there as a fallback — no one can be locked out.

When someone accepts a parish invitation, their new login is now linked to their member record — so they land in a populated My Parish instead of an empty shell. Their record also shows whether they have a login, with an "Invite to the app" button right there.

A confession booked from My Parish now lands in the same place as the rest of your confession workflow — the log, penance tracking, and reminders — instead of a separate inbox that never reached them.

Members can now see their own record of baptism, chrismation, marriage and the rest, and ask the office for a certificate in a tap. The request lands straight in the parish inbox for you to fulfil.

A parishioner can ask for confession, suggest times that suit them, and see it once you set a time — quietly, from their phone. Requests arrive in your pastoral inbox alongside everything else.

Members keep their own details current, manage the children in their household, look after their sign-in security, and can export or close their own account — less paperwork crossing your desk.

Sign up to bake the holy bread, check in at services, enrol children in church school, and read the Fathers in the parish library — the everyday life of the parish, now in the member’s pocket.

Members see what the Church keeps today and through the week, set their own rule of fasting, and receive a warm greeting on their patron saint’s feast.

Installed on a phone, My Parish keeps prayers, the rule, readings, the bulletin and the calendar available even with no signal, and a gift or RSVP made offline sends itself once the connection returns. The very same app now runs as a desktop application too.

The private notes a priest keeps — legacy notes, visit notes, a household’s pastoral record — are now encrypted at rest and readable only by the priest who wrote them. Even a database backup no longer holds them in plain sight, and a successor priest sees that a note is sealed rather than its contents.

If the ledger ever stumbles while recording an online gift, Symphonia now asks the payment processor to try again instead of quietly moving on — so a donor’s gift always lands on the books.

The public parish sites ship only the theme a visitor is looking at, heavy lists no longer load everything at once, and several busy screens make fewer trips to the database. The office feels a little quicker throughout.

A broad security and dependency refresh under the hood — tighter access checks on sensitive records, safer public forms, and current, supported libraries powering sign-in and the database. Nothing you have to do; everything a bit more solid.

Open a ministry on your phone and it’s a real mobile screen now — its overview, roster, schedule, budget, meetings and more, behind a single tab strip you swipe through instead of a squeezed desktop page. The same repair reaches the rest of the studio’s detail pages, so they use the full width of the screen and their columns stack cleanly.

Open a ministry and the next gathering greets you with your own part on it — bring the bread, sing, serve — with one tap to say you’ll be there. Beneath it, the life of the ministry: announcements, thanksgivings, photos, and the quiet news of parish work. The room stays warm on its own: a new sign-up sheet or scheduled meeting speaks for itself in the feed.

The ministry overview is now Pulse: unanswered needs, gaps for Sunday, people at the door, and a private, pastoral list of those quietly missing. Posts come pre-drafted — a thank-you from last week’s serving, a welcome for a new member — and one composer reaches the space and the inbox together. A Monday letter carries the week to everyone’s email.

A notification bell for every member: your confession is scheduled, your swap was approved, your pledge was received, the office replied. Nothing you ask for vanishes into silence anymore.

Notes sent with a confession request now reach the priest as written. The pastoral inbox names each kind of request plainly, care requests carry their details, and the proskomedia sheet gathers every commemoration a member sends.

Online gifts now always land on the member’s own giving record and statements, a fulfilled pledge reads as fulfilled everywhere, and the bulletin-by-email preference is honored on every send.

A cancelled event tells the people who were coming. A declined request says so kindly. A withdrawn confession request leaves word with the priest.

For You, the parish calendar, the weekly bulletin, daily prayers, preparing for Communion, the reading plan, commemoration lists, ministries, serving sign-ups, care requests, the parish directory, events and RSVPs, giving, pledges, statements, formation, and more. Nothing is a placeholder anymore.

From any My Parish page, “Add to Home Screen” installs My Parish under its own name and icon, opening straight to the member home — separate from the staff Studio install.

One-time or recurring gifts to any parish fund, paid on Stripe’s secure page. Members also see their own year of giving, their pledge and its progress, and their statements — theirs alone, never anyone else’s.

You assign the rule; they keep it daily. Now the member’s rule page shows you how it’s being kept, and the Pastoral inbox quietly mentions who has been quiet lately — a nudge toward a gentle check-in, never a scorecard.

Staff who are also parishioners can flip between Parish Studio and My Parish from the rail or the phone’s command sheet — same sign-in, and each side only ever shows what it should.

Every member page carries everything its desktop counterpart shows, shaped for a phone — and the member tab bar now lights up properly on mobile.

On any sealed record you can ask that it be transferred to another priest at your parish. Ancient Designs confirms every transfer is legitimate before it takes effect — and even then, only the encryption key is moved: the notes themselves are never opened, by anyone.

Between one priest leaving and the next being confirmed, the record is sealed shut — no one at the parish can read it in the meantime.

Open anyone’s profile and you’ll find Legacy — a private place to record what a future priest must know: a history of hardship, a matter handled with care, something to never bring up. It reads like a quiet, permanent file, kept in date order with your name on each entry.

Only you can open it. It’s encrypted, and it is never shown to your staff, never included in any export, and never visible to Ancient Designs. Each entry stays hidden until you choose to reveal it, so nothing is exposed over your shoulder.

Entries are never erased. You can fix a typo for the first two days, add an addendum any time to amend what you wrote, and flag an entry for follow-up — the record grows, it doesn’t get rewritten.

Add or edit anything on your phone and the pop-up now stays inside the screen: it fits neatly between the top and bottom bars, scrolls inside itself when there’s a lot to fill in, and keeps Save and Cancel in reach at the bottom instead of hiding them off the edge.

Every pop-up form now sits on a clean white card with clearly outlined fields and larger text, so it’s easier to read and tap — and typing no longer makes the page jump and zoom.

Communications, check-in, the bulletin, the calendar, catechumens, the cemetery, media and inventory, contribution statements, canonical records, the audit log, clergy, imports, and every settings page now open as purpose-built mobile screens — add, edit, and remove right where you are.

The treasurer’s desk (bills, invoices, reconcile, payroll, 1099s), stewardship and campaigns, the parish store, and the whole volunteer rota are now workable from a phone — approve, record, and schedule without waiting to get back to the desk.

Open anyone’s profile on your phone and tap Edit to update their name, patron saint, birthday, contact details, and texting consent — the same fields as the desk, in a calm sheet made for touch.

Menus, redirects, permalinks, content curation, text overrides, patterns, and analytics for your public site are now editable on mobile, so a quick fix to the parish website no longer has to wait.

Open the studio on your phone and you land on a "For You" home: what needs you today, the day’s services, and quick ways to log a visit or record a gift. Tap the mark at any time for a command bar that jumps you anywhere.

Log a confession, take a sale at the candle desk, start a broadcast, add a catechumen, schedule a marriage session, check a child in — the everyday actions now work right from your phone, not only at the desk.

The "All apps" sheet now lists your whole studio — every product, area, and page — so nothing is buried on a small screen. Wide tables and reports scroll neatly inside their own frame instead of running off the edge.

On a device with Touch ID, Face ID, or Windows Hello you can now sign in with a passkey — no password to type — and it becomes your default second factor in place of an emailed code. There’s nothing to set up: the studio walks you through it the first time. On a device without one you still use email + password as before, and there’s always an "email code instead" option, so you’re never locked out.

The Welcome funnel now covers just the pre-enrollment stages — New, Returning, Ready to enroll. When you enroll someone they become an inquirer in Catechumens, so the two no longer overlap on the same stages. (Renamed from "Visitor Funnel"; the home/hospital log is now "Pastoral visits".)

Once someone is received as a catechumen they appear in your member directory as a member-in-formation — counted and commemorated — where before they were hidden. Inquirers stay tucked away until the rite.

Set someone’s status to inquirer or catechumen on their profile and they appear in the catechumen pipeline automatically — the two stay in step both ways. Anyone already marked has been added to the funnel.

A visitor, an inquirer, a catechumen, and a received member are now the same record — so a newcomer shows up everywhere the parish already looks, instead of on an island of their own. The directory stays tidy: those still in formation are kept out of the main roster until they’re received.

Schedule each session with a topic, note who came, and set the homework — and build your own curriculum (or import a starter set) of milestones, lectures, reading, and forms that every new catechumen begins with.

Each catechumen can now sign in and see their own journey: where they are on the road, their next session and its homework, their reading, their sponsor, and the date they’re preparing for.

When you receive a catechumen, the baptism or chrismation is written into the register, the godparent bond is recorded, and they become a full member — all in one step, instead of re-typing it three times.

Record the real bonds between people — spouses, godparents, the koumbaros, guardians, emergency contacts — with a simple “add a family member” and a family tree that keeps itself right. A wedding you record now links both spouses and their sponsor automatically.

When someone reaches out through your “Becoming Orthodox” page, it lands in your inbox to follow up — and you can hand each catechumen to a catechist to walk with them.

Add, rename, and organize your accounts, post a manual journal entry, and enter opening balances when you move over from another system. The accounts the ledger depends on stay protected so nothing breaks.

Connect QuickBooks Online and keep both sides in step — entries flow to QuickBooks and back, so your accountant’s books and your parish books agree.

Link your bank once and transactions flow in automatically, matched up against your ledger on the Reconcile page. No more typing in a CSV every month (though you still can).

Generate the year-end 1099-NEC batch, review it — including a warning when a contractor might be counted twice — and e-file, all from one page.

Run payroll through a trusted provider that files and remits the taxes, while every run posts to your ledger and gets a quiet second look for anything unusual.

Parish Chat now updates live as people write — with conversation threads to keep a topic together, @mentions, message search, file and photo sharing, read receipts, and typing dots. The everyday feel you expect.

Recorded giving now posts to the general ledger correctly, and editing, deleting or reversing a gift, a vendor payment, or a customer receipt keeps the ledger in step instead of drifting. The Reconcile page has a one-click way to catch the ledger up on past giving.

Cemetery burials and memorials are kept when they’re cancelled or an interment is moved — marked, never quietly erased. Calendar events go to the trash instead of vanishing, and the chancery certificate on a sacramental record is protected.

Fixed an intermittent problem where a page could open blank and need a refresh. Pages now always show their content.

Tightened who can do what across the pastoral, financial and records areas — sensitive actions are gated to the roles that should hold them, and a parish’s records stay within that parish.

Gift dates, calendar repeats, year-to-date totals and prayer-rule days now follow your parish’s own timezone and calendar, so nothing reads a day early or double-counts.

Every screen is redesigned for mobile: a floating command bar along the bottom, and each area — the parish home, prayers, giving, the calendar, your people — rebuilt for one-handed use. Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app.

A warm new dark mode — “Hearth at night” — across the entire studio, on every device. Choose Light, Dark, or Auto (which follows your phone’s setting) under Settings → Appearance.

Tap a parishioner to open their profile, filter and search the lists, and jump straight into any record — the mobile screens are fully interactive now, not just something to look at.

The parish-database filter bar was rebuilt to finally work the way you expect, the home screen’s reminders are more useful (name-day and birthday cards now show the actual date and how many days away), and the Quill document pages render clean and fill the screen.

Page tabs now read as real file-folder tabs, the navigation type is easier to scan, and the active highlight holds its place even when you zoom the page.

We’ve begun building the member-facing side — a “My Parish” app your parishioners will one day open on their phone for their prayers, giving, calendar, ministries and more, each with their own secure sign-in that only ever shows them their own parish life. The foundation and the first sign-in are in place; the real features arrive next.

Every page now reads in a warm parchment-and-olive palette with a gentler, more readable type, and the navigation and work area float as soft rounded panels. The same studio, calmer to spend the day in.

Instead of one generic list everywhere, key areas are being rebuilt around their real work — a parish home that greets you with the day, a confessions queue, a month calendar, a sacrament register, the treasurer’s books, and more.

Settings is now a single, quiet reference sheet — set it once and revisit rarely. Each section reads at a glance and opens for a clean inline edit. The old clutter and dead options are gone.

Connect your parish’s own Stripe account so donations and paid event tickets pay out to you directly. Find it under Settings → Online giving & payouts.

See every service your parish connects to in one place — Stripe, QuickBooks, email, text messaging, storage, maps, documents and more — each with a clear status.

The confessions page now lets you record a walk-in or a confession heard at another parish without waiting for a request — and remove a record entered by mistake. Your private notes stay encrypted and never leave the terminal.

A new tool surfaces likely duplicate people in your directory and merges them safely into one record — history kept, nothing lost. Available to the rector.

When an event has ticket tiers, your public site now shows a clear "Register / Buy tickets" button that takes visitors straight to checkout — no more dead-end event pages.

More sensitive fields are encrypted, partial refunds reverse the matching ledger entries proportionally, importer duplicates are caught, and a batch of smaller reliability fixes landed across the studio.

A set of pages (ministries, finance reports, the diocese view, attendance and more) could misbehave depending on how your parish is set up. They now load and save correctly everywhere.

Fund adjustments, transfers and voided expenses now post matching entries to the general ledger, so the trial balance and statements line up with the fund records.

The Taskbook creates and updates real task cards, Forms can be authored and saved end-to-end, and the Cemetery map supports plot coordinates for walk-to-grave navigation.

Command-K search is now index-backed, so it stays quick as your parish directory grows.

Sensitive giving amounts, sacramental records and pastoral notes are gated and encrypted more consistently, and behind the scenes your nightly database backups were repaired to cover everything.

Click a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document in Drive and it opens in the editor without leaving Quill. Your edits save back to the file automatically — no download, edit, re-upload.

Click any PDF, image, photo, text note, audio or video in Drive and it opens right inside Quill, with download, share and open-in-new-tab a click away. (Office documents open in the editor — coming next.)

Files you upload now arrive complete — an earlier issue could save them empty. Drag a file onto Drive, or use the Upload button.

The details panel no longer dims the whole screen, and its heading is no longer clipped.

A real cloud drive for your parish: upload files and folders, star the ones you reach for most, share any file with a private link, and restore anything you remove from the Trash. It sits right beside your documents.

The Taskbook now reflects your actual task boards and cards instead of sample data, so the whole office can see what needs doing at a glance.

Open any form and choose “Send to fill out” for a link anyone can complete, or invite a colleague to collaborate on it — ideal for sign-ups, surveys and registrations.

The home screen gets more generous spacing, clearer widget cards and tidier controls.

After your email and password, we send a 6-digit code to your inbox to confirm it’s really you. A small, familiar second step that keeps parish data safe.

For safety, you’re signed out 6 hours after signing in and asked to sign in again — so a session left open on a shared or lost device doesn’t stay accessible.

Emails sent from the bulk email tool now deliver as the styled, branded message you built in the editor — headings, buttons and all — with a plain-text version included automatically for older mail apps.

You can now send a test copy of a broadcast to your own inbox before sending it to the parish, so you can check exactly how it looks.

Pointing at an icon on the far-left rail again shows its name in a little flag, so you always know where each icon leads.

A few menu links that weren’t ready yet have been removed, so every link in Quill now opens a working page. They’ll return as those areas are finished.

When a document is open, a small control in the top-right lets you switch the editor engine — handy while we settle on the best one for the parish.

When opening a document, spreadsheet or presentation in Chrome, the editor and its toolbar now sit neatly below the navigation instead of slipping underneath it.

The documents area has a clearer name and a tidier shape: Quill opens straight to CloudDrive, with Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Taskbook and Forms each on their own tab.

Email and Chat now live together under a single Communication area, so every way your parish keeps in touch sits side by side.

Opening a document, spreadsheet or presentation now uses a richer editor with more familiar formatting tools. Your work autosaves as you type.

Parishioner cards, store tiles and similar panels were briefly drawing nested boxes after the design update. They now render as single, clean cards.

Buttons that sit together — like the actions on the Parishioners page — now share one shape, so a row of buttons reads as a set.

Page titles in the Store, the Cemetery, the Parishioner directory and more now share one refined style — a small area label above, the page name in serif with a single accent mark — so every screen feels part of the same whole.

People, Pastoral, Email, Giving, Workspaces, the Store and the Cemetery now wear the same warm parchment palette and the same elegant serif type. Page titles, spacing and buttons match from screen to screen, so nothing feels out of place.

A single restrained accent marks where you are — slate for People, mauve for Pastoral, blue for Email, green for Giving, ochre for the Store — used only as a touch, never washing over the whole page.

Bright icons and emoji are replaced with fine line icons, and the heavier glass effects give way to clean, flat cards — easier to read and gentler on the eye.

Open a document, choose Share, and add someone by the email they sign in with. Pick “Can edit” and they can work in it with you; pick “Can view” and they can only read it. Each person gets exactly the access you granted — no more everyone-or-no-one.

Flip on “Anyone with the link” to share a document read-only with people who don’t have a Parish Studio sign-in — a council member, the diocese, a vendor. They can open and read it in their browser, but never change it. Turn the link off any time to revoke access everywhere.

You can always edit the documents you created. Shared documents open with precisely the access you were given, so nobody is left stuck in read-only by accident.

As you pick your free days and how long each visit takes, the scheduler now shows you — right there — about how many visits fit each day and across the whole round, and gently warns you if you’ve chosen more homes than your hours allow. Each free day shows its weekday so you don’t misread a date, and you can set a visit length with a single tap.

Fixed a hiccup that could show “Something went wrong” on the House Blessings page and some parishioner records. Everything opens cleanly again.

App icons and the dock on your home screen now lift gently as you point at them, so the page feels alive under your hand.

The landing page is now a home screen you arrange yourself — glanceable widgets (today in the church, stewardship, pastoral requests, upcoming, your tasks…) and app shortcuts you can move, resize, group into folders, and spread across pages. Tap Customize to make it yours; it remembers your layout.

Pick the homes you want to visit, tell it which days you’re free and how long each visit should take, and it plans the whole round — fitting visits into your available time, grouping nearby homes to save driving, and dropping each one onto your parish calendar. Anyone who doesn’t fit is flagged so nobody is forgotten.

Each person’s page now shows a little map of their home address, so you can picture the visit before you make it.

The parishioner list no longer breaks into pages — everyone shows in one scrolling list you can filter instantly. And search now finds people by phone number however it’s typed: “555-1234”, “5551234”, or “(555) 123” all land on the same person.

The fasting calendar now makes the Wednesday and Friday strict days plain during the Apostles’, Dormition and Nativity fasts, instead of labelling the whole season with one soft word. The day-by-day discipline in the Living Typikon was already right; this brings the year-at-a-glance view in line.

New: plan your Theophany house blessings as an efficient route. Tell it which days you’re visiting and where you start, and it geocodes the homes that signed up, groups them by area, orders each day’s stops to keep the driving short, and gives you a printable day-by-day schedule to carry in the car.

When you log a pastoral visit you can record the trip’s miles in the same step, and your mileage log now shows which visit each trip came from — one entry, not two.

A clean place to keep tax-exempt purchases made on the parish’s exemption — vendor, amount, category, and the exemption reason — totalled by year for the bookkeeper and the diocese.

“Relations” is now “Relationships”, and the top navigation’s active highlight no longer drifts to the wrong product on first load.

Your tools are now organized as products along the top, with their areas and pages down the left — and browser-style tabs let you keep several places open at once. Open a member, an email and a report side by side and click between them, just like the tabs in your web browser.

Mail, Drive, Docs, the Store and the Cemetery now share the same calm, parchment design as the rest of Studio, so the whole thing feels like one app instead of separate tools. Duplicate menus and extra columns were cleared away so each page has room to breathe.

On the dashboard, the names in this week’s birthdays, name-days and memorials no longer run into their little italic labels.

Your parish’s people, giving, sacraments and pastoral notes are now kept in a database of their very own, completely separated from every other parish on Symphonia. No one else’s records ever share the same space as yours.

Personal information — phone numbers, emails, home addresses and your private pastoral notes — is now scrambled (encrypted) wherever it is stored, including in backups. Even someone with direct access to the files cannot read it; only the studio can unlock it for you when you are signed in.

Your sacramental and audit records carry a built-in seal that proves they have not been altered — preserved exactly, byte for byte, as they move into your parish’s new private home.

We’ve strengthened how Symphonia guards your sign-in: it can watch for sign-ins from an unfamiliar device or a distant place and check that it’s really you, and we’ve laid the groundwork for passwordless sign-in with Face ID or a fingerprint — rolling out to clergy soon. A few behind-the-scenes safeguards, like how outside calendars are imported, were tightened too.

A new way to lay out your parish's worship for a whole season or year at a time. It hands you every Sunday, feast, fast and special service the Typikon calls for, you confirm what you'll serve and set the time, and it goes straight onto your calendar. There's an Overview tab for the year at a glance and a Plan tab for the work — plus a beautiful printable PDF of the plan.

Each day links out to the day's readings and commemorations as published by your jurisdiction (Antiochian to begin with), so the texts are always one tap away.

A clean, modern gallery with working filters and a full-screen viewer. Every parishioner photo now lives here, named and filed in its own folder.

Plain-language guides to every part of the studio, written for every level of comfort with technology — searchable, and reachable from the “?” in the corner.

Compose a beautiful parish email block by block, choose your audience, preview, and send — the quick-and-limited composer is gone in favour of the full editor.

The bell's unread count now stays in step with what you've read — “Mark all read” sticks, across the bell, the inbox, and your devices.

Birth dates no longer show a day early, ages read cleanly next to the date, and commemoration lists show the baptismal name only — as they should.

Update notes so you can keep up with what's changing in Parish Studio. We'll add a new entry each time we deliver something worth knowing about.