FastTrac: Activity Code Considerations
Implementation Training: Things to consider when coding your activities
Table of Contents
Information:
Join Brian Hatch as he reviews different strategies you can implement when coding your activities within RecTrac.
Video:
Transcription:
For the activity module, we have to initial lists that we need to populate the activity codes. And underneath them the activity sections. The activity codes represent the group or parent of an activity. Everything underneath that activity is going to represent the sections or the individual rosters for that program. So in my example, here in the spreadsheet, we have a fitness program for Zumba. And that's the main activity level fitness 001. And when I go to the section level tab at the bottom, I see that I have fitness 001 is actually two different rows of data, or two different sections or sessions. I have O1 and O2, so Zumba Tuesday and Zumba Thursday. So the combination of the activity code and the section code represent the unique value for every roster. So you can have as many different sections underneath any given activity code as you need by recommendations typically to have those be numeric. So 01, 02 gives you plenty of room to all the way up to 99 sections underneath one individual activity. The activity code can actually be represented with numerical or alpha characters. And there's a wide range of variety for what those can represent. Generally speaking, you're going to want a different activity code for every different description, brochure or web description for a program. To highlight that, I'm going to pull up my website. And I'm going to Click on search and aquatics. So here are two different activity codes, one's aquatic 001, and then ones aquatics 003. And you can see there by default on the website, they're naturally collapsed in the description is kind of grouped by that activity code. So if I Click on that activity code, I can see the sections listed underneath it. The same goes for aquatic 003. So every description again, going back to that every time that a description changes on a program or group of sections or sessions, that's typically going to cause you to come up with a different activity code, if this is the view and the breakdown you're going to want your customers to see. So that's the two different levels, we're going to need to establish as the main activity code. And then the individual sections or sessions underneath those activity codes. And we're going to kind of show a couple quick different examples from a couple of different Demo databases. So here's one database, I have both levels open, I have the main activity level open at the top activity management, and then have the section management level also open. So the main activity codes are listed here. So you can see in this customers case, they went with a character based activity code. So they have a prefix that represents I belief it's active adult. So all their active adult programs start with I believe it's a and then from there, the rest of the code is more or less an abbreviation or some sort of abbreviation of the actual description of the program. So not much beyond the prefix, they only established essentially a prefix and then just different abbreviations. And that's what they'd say to work best for them. So this is one example of how an activity scheme could be laid out. Another example, well, let me switch over to the section management side. So those same activities break down into different sessions or sections. And you can see in this example, there section part of the code is actually numerical. So for the most part, it's three digit 00. In this case, one and up. So that allows there sorts to automatically kind of sort. In the right order, they have a lot of different sections underneath the program. And the combination of the two, right the character based in this example plus the numerical base section, represent the entire section or roster as a whole. So when you go to enroll, you're enrolling in the activity code section combo, and that's what makes it unique. So this is one example of an activity coding scheme activity code and section code scheme. Another example is a numerical based one. So in this Demo database we have their activities are broken down with numerical values, a two segment numerical value so for this customer, they decided that whatever the first four digits represented, was important to them. They actually ported this over from their old system. So they already had a coding scheme. And they said that it was working well for them. So they decided to just keep that. And when they moved over RecTrac, we just kept that same scheme. So they have a two part coding activity code scheme. And then underneath it, there sections are strictly numeric starting 01, and up. So you have the kind of flexibility to go one way or the other numerical, or character. And obviously, everything in between, if you wanted to go with a character based prefix, and then numbers as a part of the activity code, you really could do that. There's some flexibility in there to kind of hopefully, get a somewhat simple scheme, that's going to work for your organization. A lot of times, we see a lot of thought and a lot of effort going into a numbering scheme. And I seen it several times where people have made it much more complicated than it probably needs to be. So keeping it simple to start might be the early suggestion. And the good news is we can adjust these. So if you initially Build out and come up with a scheme that you think will work, and if you Build out 50,100, 200 programs, and you realize that it might not work for you, you can use our code conversion program. And we can actually dump out those records in Excel. And we can just switch it from what the original code was what the new code is going to be. And we can kind of pull that back into the system and it can bulk convert them all. So it's not a huge lift to, to convert those after the fact if if we find out that the initial scheme isn't going to work well. And the last thing I'll mention is, for the most part, the coding is really representing the initial sort, everywhere in RecTrac. So I'm in activity management, section management right now. And obviously, my coding is with the way this DataGrid is actually sorted. So on this numerical system, I'm starting with the lowest and going up to the highest from there. So the idea is that we want to naturally have a sort, that just kind of makes sense. We have all the different filtering in RecTrac, and every single data grid with every coding scheme, where you can really break things down and filter things down a bunch of different ways. If I only want to see a certain season, for example, I can actually do that. In some season codes. If I only want to look at a certain Type or subtype or category, we have a number of different tags that we can tag to these activities that also give us breakdowns and allow us to kind of slice things up, which we can do in these different filters. So there's no outside of the initial sort of, you're going to be able to kind of get a lot of different breakdowns, regardless of your coding. But we just want to make sure that whatever you initially pick for a coding scheme gives you the sort that makes the most sense by default. So you don't have to do another sort or have to do a filter to get what you want. And then it's also on the web as well. So the website by default is going to sort by activity coding. So when customers filter down certain results, those results then kind of sorted by code by default. So a couple of different considerations. Hopefully this allows you to start to populate these sheets and establish an activity code and section codes that are going to work well for you in RecTrac
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