CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm testing CiviCRM for a Women's shelter. I'm trying to figure how to streamline entry of a new family coming to the shelter. To enter a family with a mother, two children and a case-related male (father/partner/husband/ex/...) seems to take at least 30 different page opening or closings. This takes about 10 minutes to enter maybe 2-3 minutes worth of typing, depending on connection speed. Something like this:

1 Open Household (HH) create
2 Save HH create
3 Open Indiv create
4 Save Indiv create: Mother
5 Click Relations
6 Click new relations
7 Save Mother-HH rel
8 Open Indiv create child 1
9 Save child 1 create
10 Click Relations
11 Click new relation
12 Save child1-HH rel
13 Click new relation
14 Save child1-mother rel
15 Open indiv create child 2
16 Save child 2 create
17 Click relations
18 Click new relation
19 Save child2-HH relation
20 Click new relation
21 Save child 2-mother rel
22 open indiv create related male: father/husband/boyfriend/partner
23 save related male create
24 open relations
25 click new relation
26 save related male-mother rel
27 click new relation
28 save related male-child 1 rel (if related)
29 click new relation
30 save related male-child 2 relation (if related)

Has anyone created a page form that would let one enter all the info at once and do one save? (Once 'save' was clicked, the page would presumably have to do multiple queries to create the users in order so the relations-creations would have the right clients already existing.)

It would also be good if certain HH info (address, phone, ...) could be pre-loaded as the defaults in the creation of the various individuals, at least for the head of the HH (presumably the mother in these cases).

If not, what might be the best way to create such a form or something that is more efficient? I'm thinking maybe an import process where the info would be entered into Excel/LO Calc and then imported via a script. It looks like this would take multiple imports to get the relationships, so it's probably not the way to go for entering one family.

Or am I missing some way to do this that's already there?

Thanks.

Thanks for the suggestions and offer of help. I'll plunge into the api etc and see what I can figure out.  I figured there had to be some kind of step-wise process involved.