We are migrating our homemade contacts-management software under CiviCRM and Drupal and we have some questions about the use of households.

In our current software, we have less than 10 % of our contacts which are identified as being in couple.
We need this household notion for:

- grouping the contributions by household for statistics purpose,
- optimizing the management of addresses and snail mail,
- and in 3 or 4 % of the cases, to connect children with a household.

In the forums, some advise to create a household for each single individual so as to homogenize the management of the contacts and so facilitate the lists report. Others say that the simple management of the relationships can be enough and is simpler to manage.

(A very interesting post but may be not up-to-date : https://www.civicrm.org/blog/eileen/households-%E2%80%93-a-bit-of-an-audit)

We are afraid that the first option increases the problems of duplicates : duplicates for the contacts and duplicates for households, and of the blow more time consuming for merging. And the merging will be more complex to.

Same thing for creation, even if solutions to automate seem to exist : https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/6595/has-anyone-come-up-with-an-easy-way-to-enter-a-household-the-members-create-th

In the light of your experiences of using Civi, do you think that, for our case, setting the option to manage households is a good solution or should we simply manage relationships?

For those who took the option to manage households, what types of complications did you meet and how did you solve them?