breeze-email-reports 1.2.0.1

Utilities to email Breeze CHMS reports

The Breeze Church Management System (CHMS) is used by many churches to manage their operations. Breeze has modules to support (not necessarily a complete list):

• A database of church members, with flexibility on data to keep on members

• Tracking giving, including pledges, and preparing giving statements

• Creating events, with volunteer management and attendance tracking

• Online giving

• Emails and texts to members

• Online forms

Breeze also has a network REST Application Programming Interface (API) that provides remote applications access to a church’s Breeze data. While the interface is pretty obtuse, the API makes it possible to retrieve and update a church’s data outside of Breeze’s normal web interface. The command-line utilities in this package do not update any data, but they can be used to email periodic reports on Breeze.

The current release includes two utilities. Each will mail a report to selected recipients based on command parameters. Typically, you’d set up a system that automatically runs these periodically (every week? day?). Any reasonable operating system has a way to do that, but it’s out of scope to describe details there. Best practice is to create a python virtual environment and install this package there. Then your periodic script should enter the virtual environment and run a command with appropriate parameters.

There are currently two commands:

• email_profile_report emails a report detailing changes in your church’s member database between runs.

• email_giver_report emails a report with details of who gave to a given set of funds for a range of dates.

Using these facilities requires some configuration to provide the credentials needed to access the Breeze API and to allow sending emails. Both of these are implemented in dependent packages, but to make it easier for users some basic detail is included in the documentation.

See DOCUMENTATION for details on use how to set up and use these reports.