Has anyone come up with an easy way to enter a household, the members, create the relationship, share the address, etc.?

Question

Civicrm is extremely flexible with relationships. The downside of that is it's a pain to enter new household and their members. My users complain bitterly about how many steps it takes. Yes, there are some short cuts but it's still a lot of clicks. 99% of our households are husband wife and happen to live in the same house.

Some of the pain points mentioned are for hh to sort along with individuals in any list of contacts, you have to create the household with last name first, e.g. Smith, Barb and Steve. This means you then have to manually create the salutation manually, e.g. Dear Barb and Steve. They also complain about the address saying things like "why can't the individuals automatically inherit the hh address or if one of the ind has an address why can't the rest inherit it"

So has anyone create a form or maybe a webform that has something like this:

Contact 1: First Name, Last Name, email

Contact 2: First Name, Last Name, email (If last name same leave blank or prepopulate last name from contact 1)

Shared Address info:

Household info: Prepopulate household name from contact 1 and 2 (e.g. c1 Lastname, c1 first and c2 first or if c2 last is different C1 Last, C1 first and c2 Last, c2 first)
Prepopulate the salutations from c1 and c2 (e.g. Dear C1 First and C2 first)

Then when you save it, it creates the three contact records and the relationships, with hh having the address and the ind sharing it.

Answer 1

We have setup a webform which enables the creation (or updating existing information) of

1) a household with its own data (phone number and physical/mailing address)

2) one or two adults with their own data (defaulting to our Spouse/Spouse relationship) and makes them share the address of the Household

3) 1-5 children with their own data who share the address of the Household and allows you to choose the relationship to Adults 1 and 2

The length of the Node Export was more than Stack Exchange allowed me to paste in, so you can find the CSV here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e4vw5a9o15c1aiz/node-export-household-and-family-webform.drupal?dl=0

I don't know how this would work with importing back into your system with Node Export given that we'll have different relationships and tags and slightly different needs, but I think this will get you on the way.

Answer 2

In re-reading your question, we also came up with a jQuery solution for creating the Household Name from the names of the Parent and Spouse.

We added a class to the Parent First Name field, Parent Last Name field, the Spouse field, and the Household Name field (through the webform field UI itself, not on the Webform-CiviCRM section). (In our context most spouses have the same last name). Here's the script we put into a Mark Up field. Your markup text format input has to allow scripts:

 <script>
 $=jQuery;
 function HouseholdName(){
   var ParentFirst = $(".parent-first").val();
   var ParentLast = $(".parent-last").val();
   var SpouseFirst = $(".spouse-first").val();

   if (SpouseFirst != ''){
     $(".household-name").val(SpouseFirst + ' & ' + ParentFirst + ' ' + ParentLast);
   }

   else {
    $(".household-name").val(ParentFirst + ' ' + ParentLast);
   }
 }

 $(".parent-first").change(function(){
    HouseholdName();
 });
 $(".parent-last").change(function(){
    HouseholdName();
 });
 $(".spouse-first").change(function(){
    HouseholdName();
 });
</script>

Answer 3

Yes, you can create a webform to do exactly that. I have created one.

You just have to take the time to go through and set up the webform.