Editing Whole Rehearsal Series and Keeping All External Contacts in One Place: Two New Features for Choir Life

Two questions have come back from choirs especially often over the past months: "Why do I have to open every single occurrence of my rehearsal series by hand when the venue changes?" and "Where do I keep the contact data of our sponsor, our bank, the city's cultural office and the trumpeter we hire every Christmas — without pressing them into the member list?" Both now have a proper answer in the productive release. This post walks through what changed and how to use the new features in everyday choir life.

Editing Rehearsal Series as a Whole

Until now, you could create a recurring rehearsal as a series, but once it sat in your calendar, the individual events were independent of one another. If you wanted to change the venue from July onward, you had to open every event by hand and retype the venue field. Cancelling all rehearsals of a series meant deleting them one after the other. With the new release that is finally over. When you edit or delete an event that belongs to a series, Chorilo asks a short question: should the change apply to this one event only, to this and all future events, or to every event in the series?

The three options cover the typical cases directly. "Only this event" is the safety valve for "next Tuesday we are moving exceptionally to the parish hall because the main hall is double-booked" — the other rehearsals stay untouched. "This and all future events" is right for permanent changes: a new fixed venue, a different start time, a new note for participants. "All events in the series" is for retroactive corrections that should repaint the whole series — a typo in the title, a wrong tag, a piece of sheet music that always should have been attached.

The time handling is where it gets interesting. If you move one rehearsal from 19:30 to 20:00 and choose "all events", Chorilo deliberately does not snap every rehearsal to 20:00; it shifts every rehearsal by exactly the half hour you moved this one. If one event in the series had a special time of its own (say a dress rehearsal that always starts earlier), it keeps its own offset relative to the others. Special cases do not get steamrolled — the individual logic of your series stays intact.

Delete works the same way. From the bin icon on an event's detail page, you can remove just this one event, take everything from this date onward off the calendar, or cleanly retire the whole series. Events you deleted earlier do not come back, and any dates you deliberately left out when creating the series (holiday weeks, for example) stay the way you set them.

The new chooser sits on the web on the edit and delete pages of an event, and in the app on the matching screens. For one-off events — a concert, an AGM, a single workshop — nothing changes: the old edit and delete behaviour is unchanged.

The help pages on events were updated, and the built-in AI assistant in Chorilo knows the new options and will explain them when a member asks.

All External Contacts in One Place

Concert promoters, sponsors, banks, insurance brokers, honorary guests, the soloist you book once a year, the printing shop, the cultural office at the town hall — every choir has a pile of contacts that do not belong on the member list but show up constantly in daily business. Until now, that data tended to live in spreadsheets, shared notes or at best in a single board member's personal address book. With the new Contacts area, it finally has a fixed place — cleanly separated per choir and visible to those who are allowed to see it.

Creating, Importing, vCard and Tags

You create a contact straight from the list via "New contact": name, email, phone, postal address, IBAN, BIC, tax id, free notes. If you already have an Excel list of addresses, you can feed it through the import wizard. Chorilo gives you a downloadable template, you upload the filled file, and you then see a preview of which rows would be added and which ones Chorilo suspects to be duplicates of contacts you already have — comparison is done via email address and IBAN. Row by row you decide whether to skip, add as new or merge with the existing entry. Only once you confirm does the import actually run, and it runs in one go: either every row goes in or none. A half-aborted import does not leave half-finished records behind.

Any single contact can be downloaded as a vCard and dropped straight into your phone's address book. Bigger exports (Excel or CSV of the entire list) are not a button on the contacts page — instead, like the other reports, they live in the central report area of the choir. That keeps the contacts page calm and uncluttered.

You label contacts with tags and filter the list by them. Chorilo ships with a handful of sensible default tags — concert promoter, sponsor, bank, insurance, honorary guest, guest musician, printing service, hall operator and a generic catch-all for other externals — which you can rename, recolour or extend with your own in the settings. A contact may carry as many tags as makes sense: the bank that also sponsors the summer concert is simply both and shows up under either filter.

Linked to the Cashbook and to Events

The address book becomes really useful where it touches the rest of Chorilo. In the cashbook, the invoice form has a contact picker at the top: pick the recipient from the address book and name, address, tax id and email auto-fill into the invoice's customer data. As soon as you save the invoice, Chorilo remembers that this contact was the invoice recipient — you see the invoice in their history the next time you open them. Cashbook transactions work the same way: typing in the counterparty field suggests matching contacts, picking one auto-fills the IBAN and account holder, and the finished transaction hangs onto the contact as a donation or payout. You can also set a link manually after the fact.

On an event's detail page there is a new "External guests" section. From here you link honorary guests and guest musicians to the concert and optionally give them a role — "solo trumpet", "patron of honour", "welcome speech: cultural attaché". External guests then appear in the printed programme draft and, if the event is published, on the choir's public website.

Donation Receipts Directly from the Contact

A frequent request from non-profit choirs has been to issue donation receipts directly from a donor's contact card. That is now possible: on a contact's detail page you will find the "donation receipt" action. It opens an overview of every cashbook transaction associated with this contact in the chosen year that is not yet covered by a receipt. You tick the ones to include, and Chorilo generates the receipt in your choir's template — the donor's address comes directly from the contact, so there is no chance of typos or an outdated address pulled from an old invoice.

Permissions, Security Log and GDPR

Who in the choir may see, add or delete contacts is governed by the existing permission system. There are separate permissions for viewing, editing, deleting, importing, exporting and for handling disclosure requests under GDPR. The update adds them to your choir's existing permission groups in a sensible default split — you do not have to reconfigure anything. The "Contacts" menu item sits in the ensemble admin area, between Cashbook and Public Website, and is invisible to members without view rights.

Every action — create, change, delete, import, export, GDPR disclosure — is written to your choir's security log. Anyone with admin access can later trace who touched which contact and when. That is at the same time the basis for the records of processing activities that GDPR requires non-profits to keep.

Speaking of which: if a person whose data you store in the contact list asks for disclosure under Article 15 GDPR, the detail page has a one-click button that bundles everything you have about that person — the contact itself, every linked invoice, transaction and event, every entry in the security log — into a file you can hand over. The disclosure action itself is logged so you can prove that you reacted within the legal deadline.

Help Section Expanded

Both features ship with full documentation. The help section has a new "Contacts" chapter with ten topics — overview, create, edit, archive, tags, import, export, donation receipt, external event guests, GDPR. The event guides were extended with the new scope chooser. The AI assistant in Chorilo cites the relevant help pages when members ask.

Why These Two Together

At first sight, editing rehearsal series and an address book have little to do with each other. In practice they belong to the same maturity step. Chorilo is increasingly becoming the only tool a choir uses to run its administration — which means it has to cope cleanly with the reality of recurring planning that constantly needs small corrections, and with the many people outside the membership who keep showing up in invoices, events and bank statements. The two new features remove two of the most common reasons a board or treasurer would still reach for Excel or shared lists. Both are live in the productive release, do not cost any additional licence on top of the subscription and respect the roles your choir already has set up. You will find the new "Contacts" menu item in any ensemble you have rights for, and the series scope chooser appears by itself the next time you edit or delete a rehearsal in a series.