Developer Diary #16; The Overseer

09/10/26

This one has been a long time coming, and it is the largest single piece of work I have ever put into The Working Tools.

This release is all about one feature: The Overseer. 

Introducing The Overseer

Every Lodge and Chapter on The Working Tools already keeps its Members, meetings, Candidates, welfare and accounts in one place. The Overseer brings several of those places together into a single view.

It is built for two kinds of user. The first is the Provincial team: a Provincial Secretary, Almoner, Treasurer or DC who currently has to ask each Lodge in turn for the same information, usually by email, usually more than once. The second is the Brother who is Secretary of several units, perhaps a Lodge, a Chapter and a Mark Lodge, and who is tired of switching between them to answer "what have I got on this month?"

Almost all of it came directly from you. A few Provinces & Districts we have helped me scope this with wish-lists of features, followed by requests from senior members of various orders, and those documents have shaped almost every screen. Thank you to everyone who has given up their time to talk it through with me.

If you have two or more units on your account, the Overseer appears as an extra row in the Switch to menu. Clicking Enable the Overseer explains in plain language what will be visible and to whom, and nothing is created until you confirm. Once you're inside, the top bar turns burgundy and a gold Overseer band replaces the Unit name in the menu, so there is never any doubt about whether you are looking at one Unit or all of them.

The dashboard

The first thing you see is the whole group on one page. Across the top, a row of tiles picks out what needs attention: units with no meeting in the next 90 days, Members missing an emergency contact, overdue Almoner reports, open welfare cases and, if you choose to switch finance on, outstanding dues. Each tile takes you straight to the detail.

Below that sits every unit with its next meeting and member count, a combined calendar of every meeting across the group (colour-coded by unit), a search across all of your units at once, and every Candidate in the pipeline grouped by stage. There's also a private calendar link for Outlook, Apple or Google Calendar, which carries the meetings but never any Member names.

Nine roll-up reports

This is where most of the work went. Each report draws directly on the Unit's own records, so it is always current, and nobody has to fill in a manual return:

• Members: the full membership across every unit, including the Brethren who belong to more than one. The Overseer matches the same Brother across units automatically where the email address is the same, and suggests likely matches on surname and date of birth for you to confirm.
• Demographics: age profile, years in Masonry, rank profile, and who has joined, resigned or passed away over any period.
• Attendance: attendance rates per unit, the monthly trend, and Brethren below a threshold you choose. Units that don't record confirmed attendance show as "not confirmed" rather than as poor attendance.
• Welfare: open welfare cases, disbursements, emergency contact gaps, and forthcoming anniversaries and significant birthdays.
• Forms tracker: for the Almoner's meeting report (or any recurring form), which units have submitted, which are outstanding, which are overdue, and every report flagged as critical. 
• Finance: income, expenditure and net position for each unit, bank balances, outstanding dues and overdue invoices, with pie charts per Unit and a charity roll-up.
• Candidates: every Candidate by stage, with proposer, seconder and who recommended them.
• Ritual: ceremonies worked, ritual competence and who has performed what.
• Compare: pick a measure and see every unit ranked side by side. One screen that answers most "which Lodge needs a bit of help?" questions.

Every report can be filtered and exported to Excel or CSV by anyone whose role allows it.

Provincial roles

One of the first requests I received was simple: a Provincial version of every office, seeing the same things across all Lodges at once. So that is how access works. You invite each Provincial officer by email with a role (Administrator, Secretary, Treasurer, Almoner, DC, Charity Steward or Viewer) and each sees their own office across the whole group. Welfare is only ever visible to the Almoner role. Being a Delegate of a Unit gives no access to the Overseer on its own, and you can remove someone at any time.

Tools for the Provincial office

The Overseer is mostly about seeing, but a few tools let you act across many units at once:

• Group Emailer: write once and reach every Member, selected units, or every holder of an office across the group. Every Almoner, every Secretary, one send.
• Alerts: be told, straight away or in a daily digest, when a Member resigns or passes away, a Candidate is added or moves on, a meeting is created or cancelled, a form is overdue or flagged critical, or an invoice runs overdue.
• Tasks: a Provincial help-desk. Log a request (paste in the email if you like), assign it, set a due date and track it through to done. Tasks assigned to a Unit's Secretary appear on that Unit's own dashboard too.
• Documents: upload a Provincial notice once and place a copy in every Unit's Documents section in a single action.
• Provincial Contacts: keep one list of the Provincial team and publish it into every Unit as contacts, with the "receives Summons" setting carried across. Change a phone number once and every Unit is updated.
• Templates: publish a standard Summons layout, email template or meeting planner to the Unit you choose. Each Unit gets its own copy to adjust locally.

Anything the Overseer places into a Unit is written into that Unit's own activity log, with the name of the person who did it.

Your Lodge stays in control

I want to spend a moment on this, because it is the part I've thought hardest about.

Most Units pay for their own subscription, and nobody at Province owns their records. So the Overseer is built so that a Unit chooses to share itself. The owner of the Lodge's account opens Data Sharing in the Unit's Settings, ticks exactly what to share (Members, contact details, events, attendance, Candidates, finance, welfare, documents) and generates a one-time key to pass to the Province. Everything starts unticked. Group emails to your Members are a separate tick, off by default.

A shared Unit is only ever read, never written to. The Unit can see which group it is shared with, what that group can see, when they last looked, and an access log of who viewed what. It can stop sharing at any moment, and it stops on the very next page load.

If your Unit is ever asked to share with a Province and you're not sure about it, you don't need to do anything. Nothing is shared unless you choose to share it.

Smaller changes for every Unit

A few pieces of the Overseer needed changes at Unit level first, and these are available to everyone now:

• Recommended by on Candidates, so you can record who brought a Candidate forward, alongside the proposer and seconder.
• Two new Member types, Provincial Officer and Guest, which behave like Visiting Officer.

Bug fixes & ongoing work

With something this size I fully expect a few bugs to slip through the net. I've spent the last few weeks testing every screen against a full set of realistic test Lodges, and found and fixed a fair number of rough edges along the way. There are a few more on the list, mostly small, and those will be ironed out during the early period. Please do bear with me, and tell me about anything that looks wrong.

Documentation

A dedicated Overseer section is being added to the help centre, including a plain-language data protection note that Provinces can hand straight to their Data Protection Officer. As always, the documentation should be your first port of call.

What's coming next?

For the next few weeks, the Overseer will be in the hands of a small number of Provinces and multi-unit Secretaries. I'll be asking each of them to feed back to me: what did you look at first, what surprised you, and what did you expect to find that wasn't there. Their answers will decide what comes next, before it opens up to everyone.

If you run a Province, a District or several units yourself and would like to be part of that early group, please get in touch.

A few ideas are already on the list for later, including text message alerts and links with Keystone, but I'd rather hear from you first.

As always, thank you for supporting The Working Tools. The system continues to grow because of your feedback and real-world use. If you know a Secretary in any Order who might benefit from what we're building, please do point them our way for a free trial.

More soon.

S&F,
Karl