Episode Summary
In this episode of RecChat our host Zach Malloch is joined by Support Analysts, Robert Kirk and Nick Salvatori to discuss tips and tricks for a smooth transition into next season during your end of the year process. Covering topics such as Backups, Archiving, Purging, Accrual, and End of Year Reporting.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:04
And we're live welcome RecChatters there's our backgrounds as we're obviously in wintery Vermont. Welcome to the end of the year edition. Today I am joined by these people with these names Robert Kirk from support Nick Salvatori, also from support. You're one of our higher levels, Nick. So questions to Robert, he doesn't know what's going on on the right tee, right? Yeah. So today's topic is end of year figure to appropriate as this is our last RecChat before the end of the year. And we're going to talk about a couple of things just to make sure everybody's prepared and ready to go and talk about a few things that we've seen every so often that maybe people haven't been as prepared for. And we want to save everybody else that sort of pain. So I think that one of the best places to start is probably with backups. Somebody was telling me recently, a little bit of a horror story, somebody came in and they had a database go down, and they could not recover it. Luckily, they had done a live demo a month or two before and they were able to get that but then there was a month of lost data. So starting with that, we always suggest that you have an archived copy of your database, basically, once per year. But you also want to just make sure that that backup is running pretty consistently. So Robert, could you take us through how to double check those settings? And then maybe get on there?
Robert Kirk 1:25
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 1:26
And while you bring that up, also just mentioned that if you're on hosted, don't worry about this part, we take care of the backups for you. You don't need to worry about those. They're not on any of your servers anyway. But here's Roberts backup profile, we're using the new UI, obviously,
Robert Kirk 1:40
right!
Zach Malloch 1:40
And what are we looking at
Robert Kirk 1:41
This is the backup profile. So this is found in profile assignments, you can just type in profile assignments in the new UI, in the old UI of the management, system management and profile assignments to the backup profile here. So just a few of the settings, quick run through the backup folder. So where do you want your backups to be saved to the copy backups to folder, basically a dot bat file, run and copy your backup to this copy location? Do you want to compress the backup folder? Or backup file? Probably. Okay. And then the main settings here, number of daily backups to keep weekly. These are really important. So do you want to take a backup seven times a day and have you know, seven backups from one day? Do you want to keep one daily backup and then have a weekly backup. So you know, Sunday through Saturday backup and then just back it up on the week. And over here we can you know delete those dailies upon weekly backup. Same thing with your your monthly backups as well. You can have your weekly backups, your monthly backup, do you want to delete those weekly backups.
Zach Malloch 2:55
So that's one of the saving the space on the server,
Robert Kirk 2:57
yep, it's it's got the same information in there, it's going to be up to date. But rather than have you know, 45 different backup files, why not just have one monthly backup file or something like that.
Zach Malloch 3:08
So I guess from this screen, the most important thing is the backup folder in the copy to folder for what we're talking about here, if you want to go in and verify something, you'd want to go to that directory and see what the most recent date was. And that'll indicate
Robert Kirk 3:22
Absolutely, and you can see here, I don't have a backup folder here, I have not run a backup in my database. So that is poor database management right there, I actually just got a brand new blank database. So haven't quite gone through all the profiles to get them up and running yet. But this will be relative to the server. So whatever drive you have it installed on C, D, whatever that may be. So you would want to make sure that that's right there. And forward slash and just, you know, put in whatever file folders there. And then again, the same thing for the copy backup folder right.
Zach Malloch 3:59
And then if somebody wanted to double check in RecTrac, like let's say they go and look at the backups, it's not been running for a while if they don't see a recent file, absolutely. So want to double check that
Robert Kirk 4:10
so you would want to go to I don't want to save any changes.
Zach Malloch 4:18
This is Roberts first time with RecChat.
Robert Kirk 4:20
This is not my frist RecChat! So we want to go to scheduled events management here at the bottom of the screen. And generally it would be named something like backup or DB backup. Hopefully, you know something similar to that. I obviously don't have one scheduled, you can do a backup on demand from the backup profile. So if we slip back in there, you can do a backup on demand. But in that scheduled events, you will see the last time the event ran and the process ID that it ran on so you would know the time and the date that it ran and you should be hopefully seeing that run daily, weekly, whatever that may be in your your backup profile
Zach Malloch 5:04
settings. Okay. And Nick, could you run us through that real quick on your side too. So Robert, go ahead and stop sharing. And we'll have Nick take over. Now big screen again. So hi, everybody
This is Nick's first time with RecChat.
Nick Salvatori 5:27
All right. So in 10.3, similar to where Robert said, you know, profile assignments, but in 10.3, we called it device assignments. So in 10.3, as you can see a lot of the same settings that you you saw on in 3.1, but obviously, in the 10.3, look here, so we have our backup folder. And you see on mine again, this relative to the server server, like Robert said, and so I'm going to see VSI backup, we have the Compress backup file, the copy backups to folder and we also have the number of daily, weekly, monthly, and the Delete daily upon weekly, delete weekly upon monthly and delete monthlies upon yearly. So same settings, essentially, just a little different look. From here, we can also backup the database now, just like in 3.1. And we can also schedule it from here as well once we have it all set up. Now, if you want to check to see if that the backup is scheduled, and is running, if you go to a period end system, and that is going to be your schedule, events, maintenance. And then once you're in here, there'll be a backup, or whatever you call it in here.
Zach Malloch 6:58
We're not good at scheduling our own backups. But yeah, so the recommendation that we have is that you would go in, you'd find one of your backups, the backup is a full image of the entire database. So if you ever lost your database, you just restore completely from that backup. So generally, you would be asking IT or if you are in IT, you go to that folder on your server, and you just name it something archive 2019 and put that somewhere else, some people used to burn it to a DVD or something, there's probably a better option than that right now. But just put it somewhere else. So if the server goes down, you can still get that backup. And if you need to reinstall, you can get right back to the date that that backup was taken. So that's maybe one of the most important ones as far as being prepared for any sort of disaster type things happening. But there's also more kind of procedural stuff. So there's the the topic of archiving. Robert, what would you add ...
Robert Kirk 7:57
Absolutely so archiving, a very nice process that we have in 3.1. Lots of modules can be archived most common are probably activities and leagues, that basically allows you to use the same code over and over year after year. So you can get that year over year reporting. You know, what did activity 11111 section one, how did that function, you know, from the last five years, and you can kind of get some reporting numbers that way. So we will pop on a share here. And the process is pretty simple new UI, we'll just type in archive. And we'll want to go to section archive. So here you would choose your begin and end sections. You could use a section wildcard if you wanted, you know, star one for anything that had a one ended in a one or something like that. You could you know process. As long as you have a begin and end section, you could process the archive, no problem. Everything else below here. So are category season year and section types, those are going to filter out results. So if you want to, you know open your your section from the beginning to the end, and only archive things that happened in 2019, you would just put 2019 in there. If you just wanted to filter down to summer or winter, if you were doing this, you know, more quarterly rather than at the year end. You could certainly do it by season as well. And then category and types you can filter so if you want to do just your basketballs or something like that. Our options over here we'll run through these quickly we have create new sections. So this will allow you to basically not have to make a new section the section one will will be there with the next year incrementally done so for archiving 2019 classes they would be set to 2020. Create new sections or keep enrollments based off cut off dates. So this is if you're, you know, have a class that just keeps rolling through and you want to save, you know, every quarter, we're archiving the people that signed up the last three months, you could do it based off a cut off date that way, or you could not create new sections, maybe you're getting, you know, a new activity scheme, numbering scheme, and you don't want to make any new ones. But you don't want to, you know, do a code conversion, you would not create those sections. So there's a few other options here for our new section dates, add days, months, or years to it. And you know, the value there one day two day, and that would change the dates, on the sections on the new SEC on the new sections for the year. Do you want to apply those date changes to the criteria? So if you have Yes, date based criteria, do you want those additions to be there on those those rules? Or fees? And do you want to make the new sections inactive? Almost certainly, yes, you're probably not using them for a bit of time. Generally, you're doing this at the end of a season. So you're probably not using it till the next fall or the next spring, whatever that may be. So let's make those inactive. So no one inadvertently registers for that. And if all those sections are inactive, do you want to make the activity itself inactive? Probably a good option if if all the sections are inactive to actually inactivate the activity as well.
Zach Malloch 11:29
And Robin had a quick question. So if we had days set, and we added 366 days to that, that would add one year in one day to all the dates associated with the sections, the begin date, the ending date, the end, if you have that toggle turned on all the criteria if you had like a registration date or transaction date attached,
Robert Kirk 11:50
yes. yup. A year and a day there.
Zach Malloch 11:55
And then she had a follow up question, would it change the dates as well as the year column in the data grid? So the year column in the data grid is kind of just automatically done.
Robert Kirk 12:04
When you do the archive, it's going to automatically increment that year column for you.
Zach Malloch 12:09
Right! So the the strange thing here is that you could potentially have a date that says 2019, but you consider this a 2020. Class?
Robert Kirk 12:17
Yes.
Zach Malloch 12:17
So if you archive that and added 365 days to it, it would make the begin date that was 2019 2020. But then the class date of 2020, class year will go to 2020.
Robert Kirk 12:28
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 12:29
And so that the the year in which the class occurs is really more of a almost like a bookmark for us to go back and find the historical records, it doesn't really have anything to do with when the class actually happens, or how people register for it.
Robert Kirk 12:41
Exactly.
Nick Salvatori 12:43
2020 is a leap year, though,
Zach Malloch 12:45
That's true, I have to consider that. So if it's if it's something after February, then that date might change. Whereas if it's before February, again, be careful of that. Alright. And, Nick, we have something similar in that in 10.3.
Nick Salvatori 13:01
So 10.3, we had, it wasn't a section archive, it was a roster transferred a history. So essentially, it does the same thing. It's just not as fancy, where it's not archiving the entire section, like it is in 3.1. It's just archiving the roster. So essentially, it's kind of based off of the season and year of that roster is kind of archiving that in will say a folder in the database for that season and year. So if we are in 10.3, we would go Period end, activity, activity roster maintenance, and then we have activity transfer history all or individuals. So the difference between the two is where if you're doing activity transfer the history all of you can do a range of activities where if you're doing an individual potentially, you're just doing essentially one individual from a roster potentially. So if I go to roster transfer to history, all so we have our section range, we don't have all the filters that we have in 3.1. We do have an enrollment cutoff date, and that is fairly important. So you the date that you put in to the enrollment cutoff date will essentially anyone who registered before that date would get transferred to history anyone who registered after that date would not so for example, if you forgot to transfer your rosters in history and you already started taking enrollments for the new year, so you can say okay on we started taking enrollments on December 19th. So you can change this to December 18th , and so anyone who registered prior to that date would get transferred the history, and everyone who registered after that date would stay on the current roster so. And that, that functionality is in 3.1, as well. We also have the transfer season in year. So that's kind of the flag that the roster gets flagged as when it gets put to history. And then we have, you know, the different toggles here, make sections inactive after transfer, make activity, the activity inactive. If all sections are inactive,
Zach Malloch 15:37
a lot of that mirrors what's in 3.1,
Nick Salvatori 15:39
correct.
Zach Malloch 15:39
Now, I noticed in the in 10.3, we don't have the ability to automatically advance the dates right from this area. So if you wanted to take advantage of some of those automated features, we need to go to something like the bulk Act Section field change to get that. Cool. All right. So that is our transferring the history components. In activity. Definitely the most common one, if we see somebody's question come up, we can certainly go into some of the other modules. But I know, we wanted to talk about a little bit of just kind of housekeeping sort of things that we do. Robert, you were talking about accrual.
Robert Kirk 16:18
So hopefully, accrual is being run, not on a yearly basis. But whatever finance deems acceptable. But again, we're in the new UI here. So we can just type in accrual. And we'll have our accrual processing here. So basically, this would move money from unearned revenue to earned based on our settings and static parameters. So if you are running this, you know, at the year end to to capture everything from the previous month, and maybe anything that might have slipped through the cracks, something that would backdated or something like that our modules to include so activities, past rentals, so on and so forth. Our rental options here, we do have a little bit of filtering for this. So rental classes to include and then the accrual options throughout item dates or based on the begin date. So that would be if you use the rental module, begin accrual date. Generally, you're going to set this back and to an actual date. I believe the default is 7/01/1985. And the end accrual date, so the day that you are running accrual through when do you want the post date to be? So do you want it to be the end date? Are you running it on the 31st? And you want it to post on the 31st?
Zach Malloch 17:50
So this is the date that's associated with these transactions?
Robert Kirk 17:54
Yep. Do you want it to be based on the begin accrual date, the current date or a specific date, which we'll bring up our calendar picker, so maybe you're you're running it on the 30th. And you want it to post on the 31st? Something like that. So if we don't have accrual setup in my database, but
Zach Malloch 18:17
do not interrupt you, Robert, but I think that the most people are probably using accrual apps already. Hopefully, you're already running accrual. But the part that might be a little bit different here is that begin date. That's that's something we always recommend. But it's not always so straight or is a lot of people just do it for the dates are actually doing so the beginning of last month to the end of last month.
Robert Kirk 18:41
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 18:42
The problem with that is that sometimes corrections can happen in the database, sometimes you get on the phone with us and we need to post date a transaction. So if you post something and you haven't run accrual for that exact date, and then you never go back and include that it will never get carried over
Robert Kirk 18:56
that it's just going to be sitting there and an account and not be posted to revenue. So, you know, kind of having that begin accrual date way back in time is going to catch any of those transaction fixes that we do make,
Zach Malloch 19:08
just make sure everything does get accrued at some point.
Robert Kirk 19:10
Absolutely. Okay. And then basically, you can run this as a journal, either in summary or detail, see what's going to be accrued and then when you're ready to post accrual, you would just toggle that on and that would actually move the money in the database.
Zach Malloch 19:26
And we did have a question come in since you have 3.1 open right now. Can you archive facility bookings?
Robert Kirk 19:34
facility bookings? We go to facility management and we go to more. We do have the archive past reservations option, archive records or reverse an accidental archive process Currently Not an Option for activities,
Zach Malloch 20:04
there is an individual way to do it,
Robert Kirk 20:05
there is no no bulk way. You know, you can get a report. And then you can choose your facility range, type subtype categories, kind of filter those, and then choose the begin and end dates. And you can archive those past reservations as well. Tickets has it past visits has it generally helps clean up the data grids a little bit in purchase history,
Zach Malloch 20:27
right
Robert Kirk 20:28
You know, speed up loading, you're not going to see things from three years ago or last year, you're gonna, especially with those big multi day reservation, folks, for organizations, cleaning those up on a yearly basis is probably a very good idea.
Zach Malloch 20:41
Yeah. Is there something similar in 10.3, Nick?
Nick Salvatori 20:44
Yeah, there is so. So again, under period end facility, there's the facility reservation here and transfer. So again, doesn't have the same bells and whistles as 3.1, we just have a facility range, and we have the months that you want to transfer and then you would transfer it so
Zach Malloch 21:15
and so the the main thing was, this doesn't really affect things like reporting very much, it's really more the Cancel Changes in 10.3, or purchase history and 3.1. And cleans that up, because you're very unlike or theoretically unlikely to go back and cancel a facility reservation from last year. Ideally, that's already happened, and it's closed. So ...
Nick Salvatori 21:33
it does potentially help with analysis reports and stuff,
Zach Malloch 21:36
like trend analysis that have stuff. Okay, great. Well, speaking of reports, what are some reports that we recommend people do towards the end of the year, but you guys fight for that one
Robert Kirk 21:48
Nicks sharing so I'll let him start this one off.
Nick Salvatori 21:51
Certainly in 10.3, you would maybe want to run a trial balance report, you know, both for debits and credits and see, you know, who has debits, so who owes you money and who has credits for who you owe money to. So under report and global global financial reports, there is a global household trial balance. Certainly you would want to that's a nice windows 10 feature there. So you would want to run this again, if you want to run it for a credit. So you would run it exactly the way that I have it right here with a minus one cent. If you want to run up for your debits. No, you can just do a positive one cent and then you would get your your trial balance, you can select what modules you want to run it for. You know, it's not going to hurt anything. If you're including all the modules in here. Even if you don't have, say the rental module, you're not going to get any rental balances or credits there because you don't have that module, so it's not gonna really hurt anything.
Zach Malloch 23:12
Now, I think that one of the things I have noticed occasionally with this is the determine minimum balances by either total or module. So you've got it set to total right now. And I've seen not often but sometimes people might have a $20 amount due in an activity, but they might have a $20 credit and passes and so those two $20 kind of cancel each other out and they might not show up on the report if you would just by total. But if you do separate it by module to get a little bit more of that detail and you can find the people that might need to have a credit applied to debit to wash that out. We did have another question come in for camping reservation so rental that were never checked in or out is there a way to blank it return or change the status on those items
Robert Kirk 23:54
10.3 or 3.1?
Zach Malloch 23:57
Deborah, is this 10.3 or 3.1? I believe that there is so I think this is a little bit dependent on the way your rental items are set up whether you have auto return turned on for that and I they are on 3.1
Robert Kirk 24:15
So you can do a bulk change or rental status change basically depending on how you are set up. Im going to need you to unshare here. Look back into mine
Zach Malloch 24:33
and our time is just flying today.
Robert Kirk 24:38
And we will go into status change. And we can choose our rental item range or they set up for auto returns print those details on Do we want to run it for only in use items for auto returns? Do we want to change our pending reservations to in use? And we want to print the details for that. And in our additional criteria down here, do we want to include our quick rental items? So are our basketballs that are gym that we don't charge for, we just say, Here's swipe the card, rent this out? Do we want to, you know, include those only? Or do we want to print those pass's details or tomorrow's pickup details. So it's certainly an option to kind of run through. Just like in 10.3 way you have range and browser for your options, you can use a range here on the right hand side, or you can select the individual rental items that you kind of want to run your status change for. So
Zach Malloch 25:52
right in front of that, is that that auto return option? If you have that toggle turned on, it would be dependent on the rental items also having the corresponding?
Robert Kirk 26:02
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 26:03
Alright, we did have another quick question come in. So when cloning and 3.1? What does the let's see, actually, I'm sorry, I'm gonna go to the question, cloning and 3.1. And you select criteria, what does enrollment count or control do? So, Gene, I think you're talking about just regular activity section clone. Are you talking about the archive where you create the new sections? See if we get any clarification there is my understanding is that Max counts? Doesn't really Yeah, so we're in Section clone right here, and Max sequence and minimum sequence, that's not really an enrollment count sort of stuff, that's the number of copies of the item that you're going to get. So you might get a 01 to 02 to 03 to 04. But if your Mac sequences of three, then it would never go to 04 At that point. So Gene, that helps, please let us know, as we're going go, I do want to kind of start the wrap up. Obviously, we have a lot of information that can be covered. But Nick, there's a really good document in 10.3.
Nick Salvatori 27:17
So I will share my screen because I have it open here. So we do have a year end topic doc for 10.3. So when it does go through each module, it tells you kind of right now we're seeing what to do at the end of the season, tells you what you should do, what's required. And what's optional. So you see, we already talked about, you know, the section transfer or the roster transfer. So when we get to the past module, what you know, you know, what's optional, again, or what's required. So this document will run you through anything like that, you know, month end transfers, season end, and year end transfers? Yeah, we spoke about some of them. You know, if you're doing instructors, you know, running the year to date, instructor pay initialize transfer rosters history. On facility, we talked about the reservation year end transfer. Certainly the key to is if you're running, if you're using POS, and you're using POS for tracking your inventory, you want to make sure you do your year end transfer for for your inventory there.
That's that's a pretty big one. And that's
Zach Malloch 28:50
kind of the inventory valuation and right year to year comparison.
Nick Salvatori 28:53
Yup, Yeah. So that, you know, your inventory valuation report keys off of those, those transfers the month end and the year end, so that's certainly important to do.
Zach Malloch 29:02
Okay. Well, we're getting towards the end of things right now. But if there was one thing that you could suggest, Robert, we'll start with you. One thing to make sure that RecTrac is in a good state, and you're ready to go into the next year. What was your recommendation? Do we maybe haven't it covered
Robert Kirk 29:22
that we haven't covered? Just like we talked about for 10.3 actually, you can run your your year end reporting your trial balances. So you kind of know what you owe. There is the bulk household refund finance. So if you want to get all those credit balances that you owe folks, in a refund financial check, you can run that through the period and just search for it now. But it might actually might be under household options. But that's a that's a good option kind of you know, gets those credits reset to zero so the next year going forward, but I would say archiving is probably the biggest thing you know, really helps clean stuff up and get stuff You know, saves you a lot of work for next year setting items up,
Zach Malloch 30:02
especially if you use those extra date options.
Robert Kirk 30:04
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 30:05
And Nick what would be your plea, make it a good 2020
Nick Salvatori 30:11
10.3. If you're going to purchase things just be very, very careful and
Zach Malloch 30:17
purge is permanent.
Nick Salvatori 30:20
Make sure you're on backup before you do it. Just in case you purge more than you want, you'd be able to go to that backup and restore that. Certainly, if you are questioning something, certainly you can call and have someone help from here and be safe.
Zach Malloch 30:39
Okay, great. So we're going to come up with a document. Nick had a question. So where can I access the 10.3? Recommendation doc?
Nick Salvatori 30:48
Ah, it's I'm assuming it's on the FTP site somewhere?
Zach Malloch 30:54
Well, I always in so if you're in 10.3, and hit the f1 key, that should bring up your browser help. And if you just type in end of in that search area, you should get right to it. We'll also be posting this as part of the follow up, who always takes some of the questions that were asked, and will consolidate them and we'll post it and we'll just have that doc for 10.3, linked right under there. So you have access to it, I don't think we quite have one for 3.1. But there's a lot fewer things you need to do 10 10.3 relied on something called buckets, where you have pieces of the database that kind of get updated as they go. Whereas with 3.1, we're really more looking at the individual records. So it's less dependent on some of these other processes, though, you know, the archive stuff, certain things like that are definitely still important. So Rick, hopefully that helps you out there. And so some of the another question came in does the 10.3 doc apply to 3.1. And certainly some of the reports that you have there, if you want to run them, although that is kind of where 3.1 is also a little bit more flexible, where you can kind of run things a little bit more historically, then you have that capability with in 10.3. And one of the main differences between the section archive and the section transfer to history is in 3.1 is actual full copy of a section so you can run reports on it at any point you want to. And if you've archived eight times for eight years, you can get exactly the same data from the first one as you can from the last one same reporting options. Whereas with 10.3, it's really just the roster and not the whole section with the beginning dates and ending dates and all that stuff linked to it. So less stuff to do with the 3.1 side. And what bulk Credit Balance Report did Robert show, so I don't think Robert showed it. Nick was showing the trial balance, household Trial Balance listing, and you can run that for either everybody owes credit to you, or anybody that owes debit, or that has a debit that owes is owed to you, I reverse that you owe money in the case of credits, and they owe money to you in the case of debits. So that's what those reports will show you.
Robert Kirk 32:55
We also do a little trial balance in 3.1, as well, right.
Zach Malloch 32:58
So you can just go to your household reports. And you'll find it there. And then the other thing that you were mentioning was the bulk refund finance, that just takes any household that has an existing credit balance where you owe them money. And it sends that over as a process that would then need to go to finance and then you'd cut all these checks to your customers and mail them out. But then that clears your credit book for the end of the year. Check with your local laws about things. Okay, so we went slightly over apologize for anybody that has been held up at all. Thank you all for attending the last rec chat of 2019. We'll see you in 2020. We've got a couple of special things planned. And we will not be having a session next week the day after Christmas for the week after that the day after New Year's so we will be back January 9. Thank you, RecChatters for an awesome 2019 And we'll see you soon. I should really have that in the meeting thing queued up right here, but it's become tradition at this point. We'll see y'all later.
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