Households is your people directory in Lazarus — the single place where every guardian and student at your school lives. Once a family is accepted through an enrollment application, this is where you manage them going forward: their profiles, their household, their emergency contacts, their notes, and their billing. This guide orients you around how Households works before you start using it day to day.
Where Households Fits
If you've worked through the enrollment application guides, Households is the next chapter. Accepting an application is what turns an applicant into part of your school, and the contact and student information from that submission flows straight into Households. From there you continue the rest of your workflow — classrooms, tuition, and billing — using the data the family already gave you.
Households is also the home base of the whole admin experience. When you open Lazarus, the app takes you here first. You'll find it under Households in the left sidebar, and the page opens with two tabs across the top.
The Two Tabs
Everything on the Households page is organized into two views:
- Enrolled Students — Your roster of students who are actively enrolled for a school year, each with their tuition plan status at a glance. Select a student to see their enrollment and tuition plan detail. This is where you spend time once families are enrolled and you're managing tuition.
- Everyone — The full directory of every guardian and student in your organization, whether or not they're enrolled. Select any person to open their household and dig into profiles, members, applications, and billing.
The Enrolled Students tab answers "who's enrolled and how's their tuition looking?" The Everyone tab answers "tell me everything about this person and their family." You'll move between the two constantly.
What a Household Is
A household groups the people who belong to the same family — the guardians and the students they're responsible for. It's the unit Lazarus uses to keep a family's information together, and it's what ties tuition and billing to the right people.
The important thing to understand up front is that you don't build households by hand. Lazarus assembles them automatically from the relationships between guardians and students. When you link a guardian to a student, Lazarus makes sure they end up in the same household — merging or creating households as needed so a family stays together. The household even names itself from the guardians' last names. The next guide, Understanding a Household, walks through exactly how this works.
What You Can Do Here
Within a person's household detail you can:
- View and edit profiles — Update a guardian's contact information or a student's details, and upload profile photos.
- See the whole household — Every student and guardian in the family, with each student's status for the school year you're viewing.
- Manage emergency contacts — Add the people a school should call in an emergency, on each student's profile.
- Keep internal notes — Private, staff-only notes on a guardian or student that families never see.
- Track applications — See which applications each person is tied to and their status, or send a new application.
- Handle billing — View a household's tuition plans and installment schedule, see invoices, and create a new invoice.
Key Concepts to Know
A few ideas come up throughout these guides:
- Guardian vs. student — Every person in Households is one of two types. Guardians are the adults; students are the children. They have different profile fields and different actions available.
- Guardianship — The link between a guardian and a student, such as mother, father, grandmother, legal guardian, and so on. Guardianships are what drive household formation.
- Automatic households — Households form, merge, split, and name themselves based on guardianships. You manage people and their relationships; Lazarus manages the household grouping.
- School year scoping — A student's status and a household's billing are shown for a specific school year. You'll see a school-year selector in a few places so you can look at the right year.
- Status — On the Everyone and Household views, each student carries a status for the selected year — for example Active, Enrolled, Waitlisted, Applied, Accepted, or Inactive — pulled from their enrollment or, if they're not yet enrolled, their application.
How the Rest of This Series Is Organized
The remaining guides go deeper, in the order you'll naturally need them:
- Navigating People & Households — Finding people using the two tabs, the type and status filters, and search; adding a new student or guardian.
- Understanding a Household — How households assemble from guardianships, how they're named, and what merging and splitting mean in practice.
- Guardian & Student Profiles — The detail panel in depth: profiles, photos, emergency contacts, internal notes, and applications.
- Enrolled Students & Billing — The Enrolled Students tab and the Billing tab: tuition plans, the installment schedule, and invoices.
Ready to find your way around? The next guide covers navigating people and households.
