Pathfinder SGC: the definitive guide

If you've just taken over as director or secretary of a Pathfinder Club, sooner or later someone will tell you: 'that has to be in the SGC.' The SGC — Club Management System — is the official system of the South American Division of the Adventist Church, online since 2015, and it's where member registration, annual insurance, the 5-star score, and registration for official events all happen. This guide brings together, with official sources, everything a leader needs to know: what the SGC is, who can get access and how to request it, what changed with the new system launched in December 2024 — and, with the same honesty, what it doesn't set out to solve in the day-to-day running of the meeting.

What the SGC is: the club's official system

The SGC (Club Management System) is the official, unified, multilingual (Portuguese and Spanish) web system used by the Pathfinder and Adventurer Ministries across the entire territory of the South American Division (SAD) of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It has been online since January 26, 2015, with restricted, secure access for club leaders. In short: it's where your club's official record with the church lives.

Who runs the system: the SGC was developed by RDORVAL Soluções em Tecnologia, is hosted at the Adventist Institute of Technology (IATec), and its rights belong to the South American Division. The same ecosystem includes the public portal Find a Club (clubes.adventistas.org), the Events Portal, and the Virtual Card — all connected to the same database. As of 07/02/2026, the portal showed 121,886 users with SGC access across South America.

The official access address is sg.sdasystems.org, which goes straight to the login screen (/cms/login.php). One heads-up that saves frustration: old addresses that still show up in search results, like sgc.adventistas.org, don't currently work. Bookmark the right one.

How to get access to the SGC (and who can log in)

The most-searched question has a short answer: only the club director or secretary can complete the online pre-registration. The official form ('New administrator user registration') is at sg.sdasystems.org/cms/registro.php and states plainly that only those two roles can fill out a pre-registration. You need to provide the Conference or Mission, church, club, role, name, national ID, and email, have a birth date confirming you're 18 or older, and create a login and password. And the request isn't approved instantly: it's reviewed and approved by the Conference or Mission selected on the form.

If the pre-registration gets stuck, or if the club's situation is unusual (change of leadership, a newly founded club, lost access), the SAD's official guidance is to contact your Field's Pathfinder and Adventurer secretary's office — the Conference or Mission for your region. This has historically been the process: back in 2015, at launch, club passwords were handed out by Field secretary's offices at in-person training sessions. And since 2023 there's dedicated support: the official document OMD 019-2023 allows each Field to designate an SGC Coordinator to assist the PA secretary's office and support clubs with system-related needs.

What about the Pathfinder, the counselor, the parents? They don't do pre-registration — administrative access really is restricted. What a member can have is the virtual card (the record of classes, honors, and events), whose access credentials are set up by the club itself: just ask the club leadership.

The new SGC: what happened in December 2024

If you searched for 'new SGC,' here's the full story. Between 11/27 and 12/01/2024, all databases were migrated and the systems went completely offline — SGC, S-JA, the Find a Club portal, the Events Portal, Project Forms, and the JA Virtual Card. On 12/02/2024, the new SGC went live, according to the announcement on the official Telegram channel, signed by the system's webmaster, Rodrigo Dias Dorval.

The official presentation came a few days later: the Desbravadores DSA Facebook page invited secretaries and directors to a livestream on Sunday, 12/08, at 9 AM (Brasília time), broadcast on the Desbravadores DSA YouTube channel, to showcase 'the new features and updates.' The livestream is still available on the official channel and is the most complete material on the new version — worth watching before exploring the system.

What exactly changed? Official sources confirm the complete database migration and the relaunch as a redesigned version; the detailed list of new features was presented in the livestream itself, not in a public document. One practical tip that hasn't changed: the official SGC Telegram channel (t.me/sgcbr) is where announcements about maintenance, outages, insurance billing, and ranking closeouts are posted. If you're a secretary, it's worth following.

"12/02: Launch of the new SGC."Official SGC Telegram channel, November 2024

What the SGC does for the club

The official list of functions, published by the SAD, covers the club's administrative backbone: member registration, medical forms, Classes, Honors, Units, assets and equipment loans, scheduling, documents, treasury data, Annual Insurance, online reports (Ranking), online event registration, and member transfers between clubs.

In practice, this means the SGC is the official source of truth for who is a member of the club. It's this database that validates, for example, registration for camporees and other official events: the Events Portal requires registrants to already be registered with a club — and the SGC is what confirms that. Transferred a Pathfinder to another club? That's there. Updated the medical form? Also there.

The access structure mirrors the church hierarchy: in the official launch description, there were six levels — SAD, Unions, Fields (Conferences and Missions), Regional, District, and club leadership. Each level sees and manages what falls under it; the club handles its own piece.

Annual insurance and the 5-star score: the two big commitments

The Annual Insurance is contracted within the SGC. According to ARM Sul-Americana, the church's official broker, when club members are registered in the system, 'coverage is requested automatically.' The policy covers reimbursement of medical, hospital, and dental expenses due to accidents, as well as accidental death and disability from an accident. Billing is done through an accounting debit sent to the entities — there's no public per-member price list. The insurance operates in batches with specific windows: once Batch I of the year is closed and billed, new enrollments go into Batch II. That's why keeping registration data clean is ongoing work: insured members need to be registered and active in the system, and anyone who has left the club should be deactivated.

The 5-star score, meanwhile, is the official club evaluation: from 1 to 5 stars based on the management and organization of the secretary's office and treasury within the SGC, on a scale of up to 1000 points — 5 stars for those above 800; 4 stars from 500 to 799; 3 from 300 to 499; 2 from 150 to 299; 1 up to 149. The official site is careful to note that 'everyone can be 5 stars' and that individual club scores aren't published publicly. Ranking closes on December 31 — leaving everything for November tends to hurt.

The 1000 points are spread across 15 criteria, all filled out within the system — notice in the table that even the secretary's frequent logins earn points (a minimum of 48 logins per year). The scale is large: the 2024 ranking counted 4,516 clubs, 11.6% more than the 4,043 in 2023.

The 15 criteria of the 5-star score, totaling 1000 points. Source: clubes.adventistas.org (About club classification).

What the SGC doesn't cover day-to-day

Here it's worth reading the sources honestly. Neither the official functions page nor the 15 score criteria mention tools for the weekly running of the club: real-time meeting attendance, communication with parents and guardians, a photo board or gallery, gamified honor quizzes or study tools, a schedule shared with families. The scope described is administrative — secretary's office, treasury, insurance, reports, assets, registrations. That's not a flaw: it's by design. The SGC organizes the relationship between the club and the Conference, and it does that as the official system.

Official materials confirm this division of roles. The Unit Corner, for example, treats each Pathfinder's attendance and progress record as an item kept by the counselor — without citing any digital tool for it. And the 'Model Secretary's Office' tradition is still alive: packets with 20 manual forms (registration form, outing authorization, monthly report, individual financial record) are still distributed in PDF, and free attendance and class-tracking spreadsheets have been circulating among clubs since 2013.

In other words: the official side is handled, but the rest of the week — telling parents about a schedule change, storing camping photos with permission, reviewing an honor with a quiz at the meeting, organizing a fundraising event — lives in spreadsheets, paper, and WhatsApp groups. Each club invents its own system. That's exactly the gap the next section addresses.

SGC and Desbravai: each in its own role

Desbravai doesn't replace the SGC — it doesn't even try to. The SGC is the church's official system: it's where the club's official records, annual insurance, and official event registrations live, and that doesn't change. Desbravai handles the rest of the week: the day-to-day that today lives in spreadsheets, paper, and WhatsApp groups. The two coexist: the official stuff in the SGC, the day-to-day in Desbravai.

In practice, Desbravai offers, for free: member and leadership registration organized by units; a club registration link (a public page with a form — interested people fill it out and become a lead for the club); a schedule with the club's own events and integration with external calendars; a photo gallery with consent controls (LGPD/ECA, Brazil's data and child-protection laws), where photos of minors are only included with authorization; a Bible and honors quiz with a live presentation mode, Kahoot-style, for use on the meeting's screen; and fundraising events from end to end — digital menu with QR code, ordering, PIX payment, kitchen and pickup, with inventory and cash-register control. Everything works on phone and computer, right in the browser.

And even before creating an account, anyone can use the map with more than 14,000 clubs (the SAD's official database) and the catalog of more than 500 honors — with official requirements, a study guide, a quiz per honor, and a printable version with a blank test and answer key. In Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

An honest comparison (July 2026): whatever is the SGC's job stays in the SGC. Official functions per adventistas.org; Desbravai features per the live product.