Episode Summary
In this episode our host, Bret Alarcon is joined by Education Manager Zach Malloch to discuss dashboards and charts and how you can visualize your RecTrac data. The pair touch on setup steps, scheduling reports, and customizing your dashboard to better meet your business needs.
Video
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:43
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today's Zack is going to show you some dashboards and the Next Gen UI. If you have any questions during this presentation, please ask them in little Q&A section, you'll see that little Button down in the bottom, Press that and you can add, ask your questions. And hopefully, we have some answers. And please use the chat for just remarks or comments that you would have. So with that, how are you doing today Zach?,
Zach Malloch 1:12
I'm pretty well, Brett, how are you today? All right. I'm glad to hear that. You guys want to talk about some dashboards at some point here? Probably all right. Well, let me just close some Tabs. So I'm not ruining any surprises, and I'm gonna share my Screen. And I'm assuming you can now see my RecTrac We can, okay. All right. So I wanted to start just by kind of showing off some of these dashboards that I was furiously working on this morning, in so basically, dashboards are reports, they're reports that you set up to run and display within the database, rather than getting an output some like a PDF that you would take with you in print, print and, you know, put into a filing folder or whatever, they're just kind of always here always accessible, you can just jump into it. And depending on how you'd have it set up determines how frequently they update and how commonly that's going to be the case. So like, in this example, I've got Facility Reservation monitor. And as I'm looking at it, there's probably some fields that I would rather have here, like maybe the beginning and the ending time of these facility reservations. I've got my monthly membership breakdown. So we've got our past code, showing how many of each membership we've sold so far and February, I've got my GL totals for the day. So this is the beginning and ending of today's date, how's my breakdown as far as where the money is going today. And then my activity monthly bottom line report. So we've got just, you know, what are my top activities for this month, anything that occurs during this month, is going to be displayed here. So let's take a look at how I actually created these. And then that'll open up some of the flexibility that we have as far as how we go. So as I tend to like to do, I started by just creating our real super simple checklists, there's basically four components to building and displaying charts in your system. So we need to have a report scheduled and ready to pull into a chart, we need to actually have that chart configured. This is where we determine whether it's a table or whether it's a pie chart or a bar graph, or what size font we want to use for it how often we're refreshing the chart, then we're going to create the dashboard. And that's a little bit more of the arrangement, the orientation of the space, the chart is going to take up, we could potentially attach multiple charts into one dashboard. So I kind of get like a little thumbnail of each of four, nor five or six different charts. Whereas my examples here are currently just one per dashboard. So a dashboard contains your charts. And then the last piece is adding a Button to access your dashboard from menu design. So let's start by scheduling a report. And most reports in the system can be used to create charts that's not entirely 100% across the board. And it's just you know, some like, you know, how would a Facility Reservation calendar in that calendar format actually work as far as our chart goes, it wouldn't really in that case. So if I look at my Facility, Reservation report, maybe that's the one that I want to maybe adjust the one that I've got here. So I'm going to I'm going to create a new one from scratch that will maybe show us a little bit more pertinent information as far as what I actually want to get there. So here's our Facility Reservation. Here's all of our built in reports. All of my custom reports. So I'm going to go to this Facility Reservation report. And it's just going to kind of give us the summary. But this one doesn't have that beginning and ending time. So we're gonna see if maybe the Detail Report. See, nope, that one doesn't seem like it has it either. So let's customize this Facility Reservation report. And we'll just make sure that we've got the time as an available Field, because once again, all charts are based on but based on the report beginning slash end time, for facility. Okay, so this is our special reservation report that I'm going to customize. And so now we've got a report that starts with beginning slash ending, or there's no slashes in the code. So that's all we have here. So we'll just update this report. And I want to make sure, so there's my arrival date and my departure date, my headcount, maybe I do want some of these, but I don't need to worry about the days. So basically, I just want to include my beginning time, maybe I don't even need my ending time. But you know what, maybe I will add that in this case. So I'm just going to add a quick column at the end there. That'll give me the space to put in the ending time. And because we're not actually producing this as a PDF, the the orientation, the fact that this width is technically over 105 Doesn't really matter too much. I'm just making sure that the fields exist so that I can actually get to them and use them in my chart. So I'm just launching this report. Now from report output management. This is the custom output that I just created, the beginning and the ending time facility, I'm going to use all of my facility range, I want to include reservations that start and end today. So that's my, my big filter, most of my other stuff is completely open at this point. So when I hit process, anything that can be made into a dashboard or chart is going to have this toggle turned on. And so as just a real quick troubleshooting, I always recommend that we run the report by itself once before you actually schedule it to be a dashboard or a chart, because if you run the report and you get nothing on it, then your dashboard is not going to have anything on it either. And that could just be the way that you set your filters or the way that you've set your data. So you could be expecting it not to actually function, but it is working. So let's do that. So we do have some data in there. So now I'm going to process I'm going to turn off my PDF option, I'm going to turn off P preview and just turn on this dashboard chart or table by turning this on and scheduling it. That's what makes it available for us to pull through. Now we've already done some scheduled events stuff through through RecChat and through the virtual symposiums. So I'm gonna go fairly quickly through this, but this is basically how frequently do you want this report to run? How often do you want it to update in the charts in RecTrac. So this is reservation monitor two too. And so the dates that we're actually going to run it through, so just give us a bit of time there. And then I will choose all of my weekdays. If this is just me, and I'm an admin person, I'm working in my database, only on weekdays, then I would probably turn off Saturday and Sunday. One thing to remember is because this is a report running, it is going to take up resources on the server when it runs. And if you tell it to run every five minutes, that's an extra report that's being run on your server every five minutes. So it could take a bit of resources. And that's when we come down here to this time interval. We tell it that I want to start at 8am. And I want to run until 5pm each day. And I want it to go every five minutes. I'm running it as my user. This is really mostly coming comes into play when it's about permissions sort of stuff. So which areas can actually see in the database, which facilities should I be able to run reports on and now I've successfully scheduled that report. So Check mark going number one now we're getting into chart management. So to do that, let's open up charts management. And so I've already got a few I've got one for each of my existing dashboards and one chart for each of those. I'm going to Click Add to create a new one and this will be my reservation reservation monitor two. So single series table versus multi series single series gives you the option of doing these as graphs. And it's basically just picking two pieces of data. So what's measured over what else, so your x and your y axis, basically, when you're doing multi series data, then you basically only have a table as your option. And because the Facility Reservation, we want to get that detail, we want to have all those different columns, we're doing this one as a table. So that's what we are calling this chart reservation monitor to put my chart caption down there, I'm going to tell this to refresh every 60 seconds. So it's running once every five minutes, it'll refresh every 60 seconds. I mean, technically speaking, I could set this to 300, it wouldn't really affect the way the system performs. But in my testing earlier today, it was nice to be able to have this update a little bit more frequently. So that if I needed to, I could go to schedule events management, I could force the process to run it in a particular point and let it go from there. While I'm in this, I'm also definitely going to increase my font, eight point is a little bit too small for me. 12 is roughly the I believe it is the font size that I've got here. So that's comfortable for me to read. If that's too small, we can of course, bump it up pretty easily, just by changing this, and you can change this after the fact also. So now we're choosing that report. So I've got my reservation monitor to is the report that I scheduled, it's asking me the maximum number of records to show I want to show as many as I actually have. So I'm going to increase that for a little bit. And I'm going to pull this over. So I want to get that reservation number, I want to get the person's name, I want to get the I probably don't necessarily need the class location and code if I have the full name of the facility. But I don't have that. So I'm just going to take a few pieces out here. So let's get rid of the total, we'll leave total do maybe we want that probably don't need the ending date or the beginning data, since this is just showing us stuff that's actually happening today. And let's see how that looks if we leave it. Alright, so now we just created our dashboard. Next step, we're done. I'm sorry, we created our chart. So our next step is dashboard management. So dashboard. Now you're going to have one dashboard record per menu design. And so this is kind of what we were saying these prior prerequisites, we have to have a menu design created for this to work. And you're going to Build all of your dashboards in here. And this is where we're going to actually configure them. So I already have one created. If I needed to add a new one, all I'm doing, there's only one record to choose from, it's just like menu design. And I'm choosing which menu design I'm attaching it to. So I did it for this front desk menu. So I'm just going to double Click on that rather than create it since I've already created it. And so this by when you first start out, there'll be nothing in the center column. So we'll have to add each of these three items for each dashboard that we create. And we could technically add extra charts. So what that looks like is I'm going to pull over my generic tab, I'm going to pull my generic group into that tab, you notice I can't drop it unless I'm putting it into a tab. And my cat wants to get out. So I'm gonna let her out this door real quick. We go. So there's my group. And then the last piece is the chart. And once again, I can't drop the chart anywhere unless it is actually going into this group. Now we're going to start editing this, the chart is the most important piece to edit. So when I go to my advanced Field parameters, I'm choosing the chart that I want to use in this case, it's that reservation monitor two that I was building out. And then my label, I'm just going to use this for my label. I'm going to go up the levels here a little bit, I'm going to do that same consistent labeling for each piece.
Bret Alarcon 14:16
Hey Zach, real quick. For how you got to the dashboard update. Did you just use the menu and search for dashboard?
Zach Malloch 14:26
Yes, yeah, it's a little bit the the name of it is slightly confusing because like this one has dashboard charts slash table maintenance. But in that, that one we have to just Type in chart to get to it's just labeled as chart management. So that's why I kind of did it as this checklist and these are basically what you're looking for in the menu. Okay. All right, so I'm in this area. Now if I did want to try to fit multiple charts into one location I would be going into here. And I'd be kind of changing my width and my height and potentially the number of columns that I'm using. So it falls under menu design and Screen design concepts as far as that goes. But as it is, I'm just going to leave it with what I have right there. And so now I've got this extra piece for reservation monitor too. It's got a tab, a group and the chart itself. So now I'm down to my last step, which is adding it to my menu design. So I'm going to go into menu management. And so this is my front desk, my fd menu design that I'm working with here, I'll hit change. And so we have to give it a group. So I just grabbed, you Type in generic, and that gives us kind of our base components. And I just grabbed a group, right here, a Menu Group, and I put that into my home area, I can put this anywhere I want to if I would prefer to have it in management, then I can drop it there. And we'll just call this dashboards also. And so with this Menu Group highlighted, I Click down here at this create Dashboard Button. So I'm going to Click on that. And now my option is going to be creating the label telling it which design I'm doing this for that's front desk, once again, in which dashboard, this is the reservation monitor to and we'll just call it reservation monitor to also and I'll create that. Now because this is a menu design edit, I do have to log out and back in before actually see that if I just Click over here, and I open up management, I don't have anything extra in here at the moment. So let's log out and back in. One other thing to note real quick, I don't think there's too many people out there that do this. But if you do tend to use the ZZZ account to login. And it's probably more something that's more common on the support side. But the ZZZ menu is set to a fixed menu, which means that any edits that you make to them in your design will not apply to the ZZZ user. So if you're trying to test this out, and you're doing it through this easy user, you're going to get some frustration, which is why I added a second user to my database. That's not the ZZZ specifically. So now if I Click on menu, and I go down to management, I've got my dashboards also. And if I Click on my reservation monitor to there's my report, now I'm getting some duplicates on this, it looks like it's maybe doing the way that I have the report configured, when I get multiple lines per something like that, it's probably because my G or my reservation report has, it's the way the reports configured. And once again, almost everything about the dashboards and the charts are based on reports. So if there's something that is not set up properly on those, then that can be a problem. And usually, the issue comes when we're pulling data from different tables. So this is all SAdetail. And so this is an FR facility, that's code that should be okay, that should be a one to one that should be a one to one, the reservation fee and the reservation number. So yeah, I'm not seeing specifically what is causing that triplication there, but it would be just the report management piece of it. And so that, you know, I can I can certainly go through, I can make another couple of dashboards. Once again, most of this is going to end up being kind of report configuration. Oh, there is another small component of this I wanted to show you is once you have your dashboards created, you have this little box and this is going to be on all of your dashboards. You might have to scroll over by default on I guess your charts, anything that's designed as a an actual like, graphical chart. And when you Click on this or just hover over, I'm not even clicking, you can export it as an image file, you can export it as a CSV, which you could then pull into Excel. So it's also very quick and easy access to get to some of these pieces that you have in your database. Once again, reports it's quick at your fingertips way to get to your reports. And one thing before we open up questions I see there's a couple there. But next week, the virtual symposium is going to be focused on a deeper dive into dashboards and charts. I'm trying to see if we can get Brian hatch. He's our expert at this but he has something kind of scheduled on Thursday. stays so that most of the time, he's not going to be able to join us until that training is done. But for anybody that is hoping to get more detailed into this, maybe get some more specific questions answered or take what you learned here in RecChat. Do some work this week, and then ask questions to follow up and verify your knowledge next week, when it's possible to do these kinds of like nested trainings, RecTrac on wet RecChat on one topic, and then virtual symposium on the same topic, deeper dive a week after I like doing that. And so that's what we're planning to do this time. And now we can open up to questions.
Bret Alarcon 20:37
Alright, so some people were thinking maybe had to do with the trees. Kristin said that you have different facilities for the same reservation number for your report. So that's probably why you're seeing the three listings. And Laurie also says three different facilities. So it's not a duplicate.
Zach Malloch 20:55
That's a really good point. And so then, so what I'm doing is I'm just running the report again, as its own. So yes, they are all different facilities. So then probably, I want to Well, I do get the listing, I do get the notice that there are different facilities. Yeah, so so that's all right, I guess they're all part of the same reservation, it just so happens that I, in my testing, randomly did three reservations for two different households. And thanks, everybody, for being my extra set eyes on that.
Bret Alarcon 21:35
All right. It's Frank's wondering if the numeric fields are also are left justified in the dashboard.
Zach Malloch 21:45
Yes, and honestly, I don't know, if that's something that we can adjust. It does come from all the report stuff. So we might have some let's try just fee amount. Or no, I had total deal was the Field that I left on there. And on the advanced, if we align it to the right hand side, once again, I don't know if this is actually going to do anything. Now go to my scheduled events, I'm just going to manually run this reservation monitor too. So it should have that updated information at this point, we'll close this. And it's under management. It certainly hasn't changed anything here yet. Most of that formatting control that we have on it is for the PDFs. So I think you know, think of this more as the the CSV where it's really just the data and then the the chart and the logic inside of RecTrac is really what's responsible for for how it's being formatted there.
Bret Alarcon 23:07
Giovanna wants to know our dashboards offered at no additional cost.
Zach Malloch 23:11
So dashboards are built into RecTrac. Everybody that currently has RecTrac 3.1 has the ability to Build these dashboards, it's definitely a different, a little bit of a different process in the old UI, I would recommend that, you know, don't, if you have dashboards in the old UI, when you switch to the new UI, it will automatically translate them over and that wasn't always the case. So if you migrated a long time ago, and you are if you switch to the new UI, oh, actually, no, I think that. Yeah, it's still if you as long as you upgraded recently to one of the recent new UI versions, then all of your old dashboards should have come over to the new UI, they'll just be you know, the buttons that you you access through here. But yeah, it's free, it's included. The the training time, if you need specific training time would obviously be something that would be caught, we'd have a cost we get a quote to you guys. It this wouldn't be considered just a normal support topic, unfortunately. Because there's a little bit moving around, it might take a little bit longer. And of course, everybody knows that supports kind of being slammed these days. But hopefully, the this walkthrough will serve as that sort of at least an initial step to get things configured. So yes, everybody watching this right now owns this logic, as long as you're on RecTrac 3.1. And using the Next Gen UI.
Bret Alarcon 24:40
Jen says she's had a little bit of trouble finding the dashboard update. How do you get there manually with the menu?
Zach Malloch 24:47
That's a good question. I don't even know that I've done it manually, but I would guess it's under management and probably system management.
Bret Alarcon 24:57
I don't use this anymore
Zach Malloch 25:01
And then would it be
Bret Alarcon 25:10
if you go to it and then do the little AI info on the tab, does it still give you the path?
Zach Malloch 25:18
Find out in my old UI... All right, so it's under report management. So that means we should be able to get through it, management / Reporting group,
Bret Alarcon 26:11
I'll try and pull up my name is to see if I can search for it.
Zach Malloch 26:17
I mean, if you're on the new UI, I don't have a particular reason that I would ever tell you not to use the filter.
Bret Alarcon 26:24
Yes, she said that the filter wasn't pulling up the results.
Zach Malloch 26:28
So if the filter is not pulling up the results, then it could be a menu design issue, that your fields might just not be included. And that could be a result of doing some custom menu work before the dashboard and chart logic was added to the Next Gen UI. So I would recommend that you start by going into menu design, through menu management, finding your menu design here. Dashboard management, dashboard management
Bret Alarcon 27:04
is the Okay, so that's under Yeah. So Paul, how to write management system management report management?
Zach Malloch 27:13
Yeah, for some reason, I don't think I had a report. Yeah, I didn't have a report, grouping under my management, Oh, yeah. Then then system management, then report that that was the problem. Okay. So management, system management, then report management, and there's chart and dashboard. And if they're not here, if it's just report output management, that just means that you're a little bit outdated. So if you come to menu design, you can search for dashboard management, and then you can drag it over, you can drop it wherever you need it to be. So actually, in this case, this was just a random one that I had opened. And dashboard management did not exist in the menu. So I just added it over there. In this case, you can also do this update fields. And this would potentially add any missing menu items that have been added, since you created your Menu Group. If you're a database administrator, and you want to have all those options, it's not a bad idea to do something like this. Just make sure that you're getting all of your, your fields and then you can choose kind of individually want what you want to allow for your your staff to have access to.
Bret Alarcon 28:27
So Jen and Stephanie, hope that helps you. And thank you, Paul, for pointing that out. Yes. Is it possible to use the sample or to get the sample dashboards saved as sorry, save the Vermont systems Demo so we can pull from it? Also, how do you copy a dashboard from Demo to live version?
Zach Malloch 28:50
So I actually had been talking to Brian about this, I haven't really done too much as far as exporting these components. So I don't know that there. See what happens if we go to dashboard management, we highlight that. So we do have the ability to export. We don't have the ability to export the actual charts. And so that's, that was kind of my question for Brian. And I'll certainly circle back around with him. And possibly we'll have an answer for this next Thursday. You basically be exporting the report output that has the fields that you want. If you don't already have it in your database, you need to schedule it in your database, because your criteria is going to be different than other people's databases. And you need to schedule it with that chart toggle turned on. We could import the the dashboard figure components here but this doesn't really have like if we don't have The charts already created and it's not going to pull in. So I think it's one of those areas where there's not a lot of a benefit right now that I can see from doing an export import. I think it's basically just going to be recreating it in whoever's database needs it. But once again, I'll double check with Brian, I'll see if there's an easier and more efficient way to do an import slash export process. And as far as the sales Demo database, I could certainly make a request to the sales administrators to add something like that in there to kind of demonstrate some of its capabilities. You know, InteliTrac is obviously the the most direct competitor to this InteliTrac has some pretty sizable benefits, but also expenses that come with it. Whereas you know, charts are something that are just built into our current logic.
Bret Alarcon 30:51
Thomas whants to know, is it possible to have a Facility Reservation report per building, if we only have one cache group that all the buildings use? So if you title them building a building B, would they close all that aren't for their building?
Zach Malloch 31:13
I'm not sure if I'm exactly following that question. But it sounds like you're wanting to filter down what people are seeing. So the that's that's just in the report setting. So like, when I'm getting ready to schedule my Facility Reservation report. Let's see Facility Reservation report. So I could certain and we already have an output that's like a location, reservation schedule. But you know, something just like this. But then I come into my range, and I can use a location. And so I'm only including stuff that is at this particular location. If I put that as my beginning and my ending value. Now this would then become a Facility Reservation monitor just for this one location. All right, is that possibly what you're asking about?
Bret Alarcon 32:14
I'll leave that one open. And Tom, if you can get back to Oh, Tom says that works. Perfect. Cool. All right. Can you show the Word doc that has the four pieces of creating the dashboard again?
Zach Malloch 32:25
And then this is this will all be up on the RecChat archives before too long. And I brought up the questions I see Lori's question right there. So if anybody does want to do the virtual symposium, if you want to do it as a one off, it's, I believe, $50 for the session, but you can then share that link with everybody in your organization. So as many people as you want to participate can or you can schedule or you can subscribe to the entire year, which is 12 months to virtual symposiums per month except for November and December because of holidays. That is $600 per year. But once again, it's all people in your organization. And if you're going to attend to every symposium, it's roughly half the price is doing the per session stuff. So it's $50 per month, rather than $50 for one session. And you get the archive, so that you can watch the recordings as often as you or anybody in your organization would want to. So once again, just send out an email to sales@vermontsystems.com. Let them know that you want to participate in the virtual symposium on February 18, I'm sorry, February 11, next week, and they can get you in for that session, or they can register you for the entire thing. And it seems like there's a lot of people that get a fair amount out of those sessions, and especially having the archive in the library to to look back over. Once again, it's going to be a deeper dive, it'll be an hour long session. And we'll have more time to kind of play with specific configurations and potentially get to a particular person's goal state, depending on how it all works. Well, that kind of coincides with clearing out a lot of the questions with the time of day that it is right now. Any closing thoughts from your side, Brett?
Bret Alarcon 34:27
No, I think you pretty much nailed it.
Zach Malloch 34:29
Thank you very much. So yeah, we'll do it. We'll do it again next week with a little bit more in the way of examples a little bit more in the way of answers and a little bit more depth in what dashboards and charts can do for you. And ready to take it out whenever you are
Bret Alarcon 34:45
Brett. Alright. Thanks, everybody.
Zach Malloch 34:47
Thanks all for participating.