FastTrac: Dashboard Setup
How to setup your dashboards in RecTrac 3.1
Table of Contents
Summary
Join host Brian Hatch as he breaks down how to create charts and graphs within your RecTrac 3.1 database
Video
Transcript
Welcome. In this video, we will review what a dashboard is, and give you a few different examples of ways you could use a dashboard. And then the main focus of the video is going to be how do you accomplish that? How do you go through the setup steps to create a dashboard in RecTrac. So dashboards really can be two separate items in RecTrac, they can be a table, and I'll show you an example of a table of data. So this is a table of my GL totals for the for the day, or could be a different time period. But it basically is just a straight listing. In this case of the total money I took in by GL account, basically the same as your GL summary report that you could run. So rather than going to run the report, if you're in RecTrac, you could have a dashboard set up that will show you these types of totals. So this is the example of a table dashboard. Another example of a Type of dashboard would be a chart record. So charts can be any style of chart, in this case, it's a column 3d Type chart, but it could be a pie, it could be a line, there's a donut style, there's a number of different styles you can kind of pick from. But in this case, this is breaking down all my enrollment data by activity Type in this case. So where are all my enrollments actually taking place, it could be any kind of time period that you wanted to find, right? This could be enrollments for the week, the month, the quarter, the year, you can kind of define that in here and get it really sharp looking dashboard that is always at your fingertips. And again, you don't have to go run the report necessarily, because this really is a report that you've essentially scheduled in the background to run based off of some different criteria. You'll notice the page actually kind of blinks a little bit, it's actually there's a refresh rate. So it can actually go check for new data. On a basis that you set, you'll actually schedule the report to run again as often as you need to. So for something like this, which says quarterly data, is what this report will be pulling, the report isn't gonna be running and changing, I would say more often than maybe once a day, or maybe even less, just depends on the time period and the use. So the refresh rate can be much higher in that case. Whereas if it's a reservation Type monitor or other Type of data that maybe is changing throughout the day, in a daily scenario, you might want to run every hour or every couple hours to check for new data. So that way your your dashboard stays up to date. And we'll walk through that here in the in the next segment. With any dashboard, you can choose to export. So you'll notice in the top right, I can actually choose to export it in one of these different formats. And you could pull it out and pull it into a presentation or for a board scenario or any other kind of presentation that you might need it for. One more quick example before we get into the setup would be just to show you another Type of chart. So again, you can kind of set these up any way you want. But this is a breaking down membership data at this point. And so it's taking now all the different pass types that I have in the database, and breaking down the money that came in for those pass types. And kind of a simple pie chart. So definitely very useful and kind of a powerful tool that everybody has access to as a part of, it's essentially a part of the RecTrac package. And, and these are all really just reports running in the background. So let's walk through, kind of, I'm going to walk through two scenarios. Kind of a simpler example of taking an existing report that you'll likely already have in your database, and recreating what we call a reservation monitor. So it'd be a table Type view like this showing you reservations for the current day. And then we'll walk through another example at the end where we'll actually create a custom report output. And we it could be any Type of break down the database, but we'll probably do like the cash totals for the day. And we'll set that up there will be an extra step in the process, but we'll walk through it and that'll give you kind of two looks at how the whole process works. So the first step if we're going to replace or create a reservation monitor, so basically that is what report are we starting with in this case, it's really the reservation report. So I'm going to go to Facility Reservation reports. And you'd set your criteria just like you would with any other report. So what are you really looking for as far as which group of facilities, what types, and then obviously, what the date / timeframe would be. So this is all set the way I want, I want all reservations for today. And that's how I'm going to actually schedule my reservation monitor. My next selection is just like with any report, you get to choose which output template do I want. So this is what fields are available on here for what we're gonna have access to. And I'm just going to run this in detail mode, since I know I'm going to be doing this in a table, a table can be will show either detail or summary data. And I'm just going to run this. Alright, so when running it for a dashboard, there's two main things on the Screen. So number one, you're really not running a PDF. And you're not going to be previewing anything. Sometimes just seeing the dashboard option here, people feel like they could preview the dashboards. But this is really a schedule only option. So I have nothing really that I need to preview I'm doing, I'm basically setting up this report for the purpose of the dashboard. And if I hit continue, it'll actually basically run the report and do nothing. Anytime, again, you're doing this for the purpose of a dashboard, you really have to choose the schedule option at the bottom. So that's what I'll do right now. So then you'll be brought to the schedule generator Screen, I just call mine my DB dashboard monitor. And at this point, you're setting up the timeframe that you want this to run. So realistically, if you're really doing this Type of setup, you might just set this to run kind of indefinitely, right, just starting today through whatever date period or you know, indefinitely into the future, I want to run every day. And if it's really going to be a reservation monitor, I would assume that you can actually go and pick your different times throughout the day that you want this to run. Or you can choose the time interval option. And you know, save your location opens up at 6am. And you want it to you're open till 10pm. So throughout the day, it could run every and you pick the timeframe. But the one thing to be aware of with this is it does take just like a report what it's going to take resources. So you wouldn't want this run every minute, for example, right, then it would kind of essentially get stuck in a loop and you're always stealing resource throughout the day from from other things like processing. So generally, we would recommend, you know, the, the larger timeframe the better and for that scenario. So the report takes 30 seconds to run, you know, having a run every 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes is just a safer bet. So again, depending on the purpose, you can kind of pick and choose what makes the most sense. And now I've got my schedule Step Complete. So basically have the report set up ready to go, it's going to start running in the background for the dashboard purpose. So that's kind of my first step that's complete. The next step is creating what we call a chart record. So from my menu, I'm going to type in chart and go to chart management. And I have a bunch in here already, so I'm just going to add a new one. And I'm going to stick to my naming scheme here, I'm just going to call it DB dashboard. So in here, you define the chart Type. So this is either going to be a single series or a multi series. And that's the difference between a chart or table. So if I choose single series, you'll notice the list is all the different types of chart records you'd expect. If you choose multi series, which is really what I'm doing for this example, you'll realize pretty quick, that's the one you're on because it's only gives you the one table option. So now that I've made that selection, I can put in the description or caption of the chart. So this is what will actually show above the actual table in this case. So I could give it a descriptive name just so people kind of realize what they're looking at. So this might not be the best fit, we could call it, you know, today's reservations. And then you get to set the refresh interval. So again, this all goes back to how often you're scheduling it. So if you're only scheduled to run every 15 minutes, you don't really need this to check more than every five minutes, for example, something along those lines, I'll just put in 60 here, and then the font size. So again, depending on what you expect for records, and you want your your staff to be able to read it, you might want to set the font size and kind of play around with that setting a little bit. The next step at the bottom is your chart data settings. So this is where you're going to link back to what we did in the previous steps. So that scheduled report record is going to be in this list. And you'll see I have a list of all my scheduled events in here. So I'm going to look for the what I've called it in the previous step. So my DB dashboard monitor, you can set max records to show depending on what makes sense for the purpose that you're setting up. And then when you go to add in the fields, these are all the fields that are in that report output record. So I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of clean up some of these things, I really only need a couple things, I feel like in a reservation monitor, I want the name of who's reserving it, what they're reserving, headcount might be helpful, maybe I want fees, maybe I don't, time would be important. And maybe purpose. So just kind of picking and choosing what makes sense to now display in this table. So that's kind of step two in this process. So now I have a chart record right now RecTrac knows how to display my data is going to be a table. And I'm just defining that and it knows what data to link back to. So the next step is a dashboard record. And we're going in this order because each step requires the previous stuff to be added in. So now we're going to dashboard management. So I already have a couple built out for my examples that I showed in the beginning of this video, I actually have a separate menu setup in my database. And I'm going to Build out from scratch, probably similar to what you'll be doing in your database. But the first pull down when you go to add a brand new dashboard record is you're always going to be the base Screen of, of RecTrac dashboards, there's really no other option there. And then you get to pick which menu you want to add this to. So you might have you know, front desk menu, a manager, menu, supervisor menu, whatever the breakdown is, you know, who's actually going to be getting access to these dashboards. And this is where that link comes into play. So in my database, I have this no charts, one set up that shouldn't have anything already on it. So it should be a kind of a cleaner look that'll match up with what most customers are dealing with. And I'll just hit continue. And that'll bring me into the dashboard record Screen. So this is kind of a particular order that things need to be added in. So I basically have a blank template in the middle area of the Screen. And if I want to add in a dashboard, I need to add in a tab first. So on the left hand side, I'm just going to Click and drag in tab. And then I'm going to Click and drag in a group to that tab. You'll notice it's red until I hover over the Tabs and I have a group. And then the third component is the chart record itself. So I'm going to Click and drag in my chart record, so it's always going to be those three. And you could have multiple charts on the Screen, I'm going to really keep this example simple. I'm just gonna have one full table on the Screen. But you could really do you know as many of these different kinds of trees as you need, right. So you wanted a table on the top and a second table at the bottom or a couple of charts at the bottom breaking down different things, you can really kind of get really kind of elaborate with these, but we'll keep things pretty simple. In the tree once you've kind of got those three components built out now can I kind of go back through the each component and kind of adjust just what we see. So I like I should put the name of it in here. And then this is where you link back to the chart record again from the previous step. So we called it the DB dashboard monitor. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick that it's now RecTrac knows those links we made all the way through and now it's making it to the dashboard record, but he's making that selection. So I'll go ahead and save that. And then the next level up is the group So I'm going to go to that advanced settings on that group. Again, I'm going to add in a label on each one. Just so there's, I have something to reference in the future steps here. This is where again, if you were going to, again, maybe split the Screen with two different tables or have multiple dashboards on the Screen, this is where you would set the height and the width, and you'd be able to play with those I, we should be able to leave those blank or as is in our example. And it'll just take take up the full Screen. So what we should see here. Then at the top of the tab, so again, this is really just the description, I'm going to put in here, nothing else that we really need to worry about. Okay, so now I've got my dashboard built out. And I'm just gonna Click Done. And the last step on this journey of building a dashboard is your menu record. So in menu management, I'm going to go to again, my Custom menu is the custom no charts. Again, this would be the list of your front desk, manager or supervisor, those types of options is probably what you'd have listed here. So I want to add this record to my custom no chart, so I'll open up that. So this is a pretty standard default point that a lot of people are gonna be starting with, if you have full access within RecTrac. For my dashboard, I'm actually there's different ways you could do it. You know, my example earlier, I have my Home tab, management, inquiry, reporting, all those options actually create separate Tabs in mind, because of a lot of different examples, I just kind of broke them out into separate Tabs, you could do something like that in here, I'm gonna keep it really simple. And I'm just going to add, another way of doing this is just adding the Dashboard right under my home area. So that's the example I'll do under here. So if I wanted to do that should be able to add in a generic Menu Group. So I'm going to take this menu group here, generic from the left, so I just typed in generic as my filter, I'm just going to Click and drag that over to home. So now I have kind of a new grouping of where I can actually apply my my dashboard. At the bottom, you'll notice the Create Dashboard Button. So once I highlight that Menu Group, I can click on that. And I'll just call this my... so my monitor dashboard record, we want to add this to my example my no charts, design. And then I get to pick which one I want to link in. So because this is my very first one for this design in my previous steps, there's only one option. But again, if you, if you were to Build out a number of different dashboards, then those options would be here, and you'd have to pick the one that applies. So making those three selections, I can now hit create. And that'll create more or less apply that dashboard to the group, but I just put it in here and I'm gonna go back and update my group, just so I don't have that generic Menu Group label there, I'm actually just going to switch that to... So it looks a little bit better todays reservations. So update on the left, and I can just hit refresh in the middle. And I'll see that. So that is the last step. So now everything is kind of in place. Again, I shouldn't be able to see results. If I haven't made any mistakes along the way here. The last piece I would just recommend, and I'm going to do it here just so we don't have any stumblings the schedule event, depending on how you scheduled, you might have to actually go run that manually if you want to obviously verify your results at this time. So if I go to scheduled events management, so our very first step was scheduling the report. So it may or may not have run since we created these other steps. So I'm going to come in here, find the scheduled event looks like it did run at 7am. So it might have already populated with data. But I'm just gonna hit Run now again, now that all the components are built out. It's going to rerun the report in the background and ensure that I have my data populating in my in my chart or or dashboard record and then to test this out. So I have a another Window here. RecTrac open. So since it's tied to the menu, we would have to log out log back in or In this case, you open up a new tab and log in. So when I log in, I'm going to start a new session in my case, and I'm going to choose that no charts setup that I've kind of used throughout this process. And I continue and I log in. So in my menu in the top left, I'm going to Click on that, and I have my menu items, that was the last piece I created. So there's my monitor dashboard. And if I Click on it, I have a, again a really simple table, and I've only got my two reservations in here. Show me maybe the critical information that I think, you know, maybe my front desk staff need to see or want to see. And just a really simple, you know, place without any filters without any extra steps, it's just kind of they'll now have access to Click on that. And every 15 minutes, if there's any changes or additions, every 15 minutes, that scheduled event will run, the chart will refresh, it'll grab that data and your staff can kind of rely on again the table to get that information. So that's a full walkthrough of how to add a dashboard. So we did that rather quickly. And for the sake of the video, but we were successful, that's always a good sign, I wanted to show one more example. And again, this might be a little bit more advanced. But I know people do use other types of dashboards kind of custom report dashboards. So I'll create one of those. In our next example here. Okay, so let's pick out of the example of I'm curious are from my position in the organization, I want to know where the money is coming in for the day, because I need to monitor when cash might need to be picked up that kind of thing. We could set up a dashboard that automatically displays all the money that came in for the day. And we could break it down any way we want. But let's just say we break it down by user. So I can immediately kind of go to a dashboard that updates as often as we needed to, that'll show me where everybody's kind of cash totals are for the day. And I could then make the determination if I need to kind of go around and maybe do extra cash steps. So how would we do that? One way we could do that. And this is the example I wanted to kind of highlight is we could actually create a custom output. And this is just kind of a great example of some of the flexibility we have. So I'm going to come in here from scratch. And I could really do this potentially with an existing report. But again, this is a good example of what I could do, truly from scratch here. So if I said I want to just do a DB dashboard for cash totals by user. And then what do we what Type of report Type are we getting into. So in this case, I know it's a GL distribution reports, this might be a little bit more advanced, if you look through the list, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you could pick the base date that you're looking for. So I'm just creating this report header as my very first step, and then I'm going to then create a I could do a table or a chart. So I want to walk through an example of a chart record. The caveat with a chart record, if it's going to be that that column pie donut style is, it does have to be a summary breakdown of the data that you're working with. So you can't display any type of detailed data, it's automatically only looking for a subtotal. So I'm going to take my new output record that had just created, go to the summary output tab at the top, and I'm going to update output at the bottom. And this example, I'm gonna keep again, really simple and just show you kind of the the power that we have in here to make these kinds of things, I'm going to add in a second column of data. So I have to kind of blank columns at this point. And I have the option now to again, pull in the fields that I really, really want here. So one thing I know I want to do is I want to break down the total money coming in for the day, right based on my example. So I'm gonna actually take the net amount and pull that over here. So the total that came in for the day is going to be the net amount. And now I have to decide how I want to break that net amount down. So I should be able to go to the User name Field. Again, if that was how I wanted to break it down. You could break it down by drawer, you could break it down by GL, you could break it down any way you want. So that's the great thing about this. I'm gonna add Username in my example. and added as a column, I'm also going to add it as a sorted Field. So, if I want to do my subtotal breakdown by user, then it has to be a sorted Field. So I'm adding that down here, just by clicking and dragging. And then the final step in this custom output is I need to go to the net amount and tell RecTrac that I want to break down by that. So I click on the little pencil next to that Field, it activates the bottom part of the Screen. And it tell RecTrac that I want to basically sum the total net amount totals by Username. So now RecTrac knows that the two columns are related. And that should give me the exact breakdown that I need. So now that I have this, we can kind of pick up with the same steps from the first example, it's now that I have a new output record, I close out of this and start fresh. So now we can pick up and run the actual report. In this case, it's a different report. So it's a good example of some variation here. So this is actually our GL distribution report. So I'm gonna go to that Screen. And I'm going to walk through this fairly quickly, just to show you steps again. But you know, once you're comfortable with the steps, it can go pretty pretty quickly when you get to that point. So the GL report is going to come up, I get to again, choose the filters, that makes sense for the scenario I'm doing. So I'm gonna go ahead and make sure I have default settings just to kind of reset everything. So I don't run into any issues with a filter. And from there, I'm going to reselect, the, I'm going to run this for all users wide open just for today's date. And those are really the only two filters I'm going to use. You know, if you're really doing this, in your example, you might actually just choose cash, I'm just going to run it wide open for all pay codes. And then what the next step will be choosing all users, just for today is often pretty low numbers, but it'll highlight breakdown. And there's only two filters, I'm going to select in the bottom left, I'm going to choose my new output record, which is my DB dashboard. Cash totals by user ID, so what I did in the previous step, and there is no detail but I'm going to choose summary, again, it has to be summary, if the purpose or the goal is to Build a chart rather than a table. So now that I got my report set up the way I want, I'm just gonna hit process. So again, is really the exact same steps at this point that we did on the on the previous example. So I don't need a PDF, you could run it and it might be a good example, you might want to run it to see the breakdown. So it's definitely probably recommended when you are starting from scratch or something like this, make sure the PDF looks good before you go through all the other pieces and the PDF gives you the breakdown that you're looking for. So in my case, that yeah, that's basically what I was looking for, right, the total amounts for the day by user. So that mission accomplished there. So now that I know that I'm gonna hit process again, I'm gonna turn off PDF, and I'm gonna turn off preview. And I'm going to turn on dashboard. And again, has to be scheduled in this case. And I'm going to give it a name, dashboard. User, let's copy that, and I'm gonna need that step after this. So this one again, would run probably, definitely, again, I would assume, probably every day of the week, again, you get to set these parameters. And then again, pick the times the fixed times or the time interval, for whatever makes sense for the scenarios, 8 to 8, again, being aware of how long it takes takes seconds to run, you're a little bit safer. So you could go with something potentially a little bit lower, but I'll stick with five minutes in this case. So every five minutes between eight and eight. The report is now scheduled. I'm just gonna go ahead and close out of that screen. So the next step is going to be the chart record. And I have all my existing examples. So I'm gonna add a brand new chart, kind of copy and paste my name from the scheduled record in here. So this is where it's slightly difference is going to be as I'm going to do single series, which is that chart type record. And now I get to pick again, what what type of chart makes sense. So we'll just say, a pie 3d to give us something different to look at. What's it going to say as far as a caption above it, so this is now total dollars by user. So put in day only something like that, again, you get to set the refresh interval based off of whatever, however you scheduled the previous step, I want the text so I can see it 12 works. So now at the bottom, this is where it does differ a little bit as far as before we edit the table breakdown where you could add in the fields that you want, it's a little bit different here, you're still going to pick your scheduled event record. So that is my DB. Dashboards in my example. But then you need to tell RecTrac. So again, my really simple example, there are really only two columns on that report, which one is going to be my label and which one is going to be my value. So I have to tell RecTrac, that, so in this case, the label is the user. And the value that's getting broken down by users the net amount, so pretty simple in that custom report scenario. So I'll just save that. So now my chart is built. So I'll go ahead and close out of that screen, and I'm going to do my dashboard. And I'm actually just realized I'm in my limited menu one. So I'm actually going to switch over... Switch over to this Screen, some I'm going to add in my new dashboard record. Let's say we call it the same thing, just so don't get confused. So now I'm doing, I had the wrong Screen open sorry. Open up dashboard management from scratch. So I'm going to be adding this again, I'll just add it in our example, I'm gonna add it to our it might seem no charts, Screen that we did before. So I'll go ahead and open that up. And right now I'm going to, there's different ways we could do this right, we could add it as a separate dashboard altogether, we could add within the dashboard monitor is kind of like a secondary thing underneath that Screen. So there's different ways to approach this. You only you only have one record in here. So basically, I'm gonna go and open this back up, per menu design should say. So let's add in a brand new one. So we know this is a reservation monitor, let's add in another kind of tree of the same, the same path. So let's tab group chart, not sure why we don't order those differently. But so put them in based on the reverse order on the left. So now you have that little tree. And now you're going to kind of backfill from there. So I'm gonna go to my chart record, link back to the chart from my previous steps. So this would be the chart ID from the previous one. And then I'm going to use the same name throughout, just so again, we don't get confused ourselves here. I'll save that. And then I'm going to make sure I update the label and the other parts of this tree, because that's going to help me in the next step. If you don't, you'll actually end up with a blank and the next step, which is going to be a little bit confusing. So make sure we backfill the labels. Alright, so now I have my second dashboard. So my two separate dashboard trees I've gotten clicked on here. And now that those are built in, they're both built under my no charts menu, it's gonna lead me to the menu management step itself. So I'm going to go to my no charts menu record, open that up. I'm going to go ahead and add in I'm going to keep in the same place on our home. So before we did today's reservation monitor, I'm going to add in a new option under home for this, so I'm going to add in a new generic Menu Group to home. And then I'm gonna highlight it in the in the middle column. And again, create Dashboard Button. And we'll go with the same description for now. Which dashboard design am I going to link it to I want the no charts one. And now when I Click on this pull down, you'll see the different options right so the the one from the previous step, the first kind of tree I built out, and then there's the second one. So I want in this case the second one so I'll create that. And just so I don't have a kind of a generic Menu Group label in my menu, I'm just going to update that with my label. So everything is now in place again. As far as all the infrastructure, the one thing I'm going to run is, again, a scheduled event just because it might not have run yet. If I wanted to wait a little while, and it would run based on the parameters, but just to make sure. And you do want to run so it hasn't run yet. In my case, you do you want those other components built out, before it actually runs, because it does populate some things if it ran before. Those other components were built, you might have to run now again anyways. So that's actually populating right now, I can go back to my other tab. So in this case, again, you're not automatically going to see anything in the menu, you are forced to add a new menu item, we do need to log out and log back in. Then I'll start a new session for no charts. And if I go to my menu, I now have the dashboard, GL by user. So I probably want to rearrange these a little bit. But that's exactly what I was hoping for her there. And you get a breakdown, again, in a chart style this times rather than the table. And you get my breakdown as far as the dollar amounts that I that I'm showing here, I should expect it's breaking down by percentage. So I could if that's what I wanted, I could go with that if I want to go back and and adjust one of my earlier steps, I could I could do that as well. And something like this, maybe it even makes more sense to actually have it in a table or some other Type of chart. And we could go back and and make those adjustments, kind of run it again, log in, log back in and kind of get comfortable and kind of play around with what might work and then kind of apply it within your database. So hopefully these steps have helped and you're able to Build a dashboard in RecTrac 3.1