Episode Summary
In this episode our host, Zach Malloch is joined by Support Specialists, Joe Chevalier and Nick Salvatori to discuss end-of-year processes. The group touches on archiving, end-of-year reports, backups, data clean-ups, and the differences in proceses between the legacy 10.3 version and the modern 3.1 version.
Video
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:43
and that must mean that it's RecChat time. No, Darla, at least I'm not sick here right now. Thank you for your concern. But feeling better was just my little play on our theme song. So we are here to help people feel better about the urine process, hopefully. And we have Joe Chevalier. Joining us here. Hi, Joe. How's it going?
Joe Chevalier 1:05
Everyone? How exactly are we doing?
Zach Malloch 1:07
Not too bad. And we've got a couple other people helping out Kari and Mike also from support. And we have Nick joining us who will be helping on the 10.3 side of things here. Hopefully he'll he'll jump back on in just a moment. Nick, if you can hear me whenever you're ready, you can start broadcasting.
Nick Salvatori 1:28
Zach is saying I cannot start your video because the hosts. So there I just got there we go.
Zach Malloch 1:36
Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. You were away. I turned you off. And I miss you up there. My apologies. Welcome, Nick, how's it going?
Nick Salvatori 1:43
Great.
Zach Malloch 1:44
All right. So I'm sure everybody saw the poll looks like most of you have voted on that wanted to get a sense of what versions everybody's working on. And whether we're using accrual processing. So we will cover both versions. And we'll start with Nick, going over some of our 10.3 recommended year end processes. And then Joe, take over a little bit, and we'll go into 3.1. Before I hand it over to them. Just real quick housekeeping, if you could use the QA section down below to ask any questions, everybody should be able to see those questions. If more than one person has those, you can upvote them give us a little bit more priority, and should even be able to comment on those now. So if you have feedback, specifically, we can start kind of the community help sort of thing here. That all being said, I'm gonna get out of the way and turn it over to Nick, if you want to show us some 10.3 magic buddy.
Nick Salvatori 2:38
All right, I'll do my best there. So share out my Screen, right?
Zach Malloch 2:44
Yes please. To just in case, anybody's curious what those poll results were.
Nick Salvatori 2:55
Okay. All right. Can we see my Screen?
Zach Malloch 3:03
Yes, I can.
Nick Salvatori 3:04
Okay. So I think, you know, first things first, um, we do have a 10.3 period and processes document that goes through, you know, month end stuff, year end stuff, beginning of season end of season. So we'll certainly we'll attach that to any of the communications that goes out after this after this wreck chat. So obviously, for the folks that are in on 10.3 You know, everything that we're going to really talk about today is really under the period end, radio or period and Button here and, and in our Menus, we're gonna have our period processes. You know, obviously, depending on if you're a cruel or not or but we won't necessarily touch on on that Type of stuff. But you know, first thing, probably working our way from left to right, there is a Facility Reservation year end transfer. Basically, what that does is it will put your so if we use 2020 as an example, it will put all your facility reservations from 2020 into that specific year bucket. So when you're running any of your analysis reports, your those reservations will be tagged as you know 2020 reservations so, you know, those reports will work out for you. So if we come in here, actually really quite simple. You have you know, just your facility range. What months you wanted, want to Got included, and then you know, just transfer it. So nothing too crazy there. And if we go to Point Of Sale here, we do have inventory year end transfer, you know, very similar to your facility, year end transfer, again, this kind of putting those your inventory numbers in those different buckets. So again, you're using your analysis reports, you're able to compare from year to year, what your inventory was, for 2020 versus 2019. versus, you know, 2021 coming up. And this all, you know, this year end transfer, any year end transfer that we do, you know, really kind of goes hand in hand with your fiscal year end, it doesn't have to be the actual calendar year end. So if your fiscal year end is June 30, or if it's September 30, or if it's December 31. All these kind of apply to your fiscal year end versus the actual calendar year end.
Zach Malloch 6:17
So Nick, we did have a quick question about the facility transfer. Amy's asking is, is that transferring the reservations to 2021? Or just kind of putting it into the statistics for 2020?
Nick Salvatori 6:30
It's just the statistics for 2020.
Zach Malloch 6:33
All right, great, thank you.
Nick Salvatori 6:39
Wow. And obviously, there's, you know, different purges that you can do to kind of clean up your historical data. You know, that's not necessarily required to do you know, if you want to do that, you certainly can, but, you know, certainly, I would, and I think everyone at Vermont systems would recommend that you backup your database just in case you accidentally purge more than you you wanted to do.
Zach Malloch 7:16
As the saying goes Purge is permanent.
Nick Salvatori 7:22
Okay. So okay, we are moving left to right. Under Rental. Again, a lot of these are, were kind of the same thing, you Rental year end transfer. And as we move along, so there's nothing for court. Looks like there's a purge for lockers, but nothing, not a year end process. So really, the key here is your facility module, pos modules. For the most part, obviously, for activities. If you want to transfer your rosters to history, if you're not doing that on a seasonal basis, and you want to do that on a yearly basis, you know, that's something that you can certainly do. That is actually under utility. So if I go to utility and activity, I go to roster utilities, we will have am I wrong Zack?
Zach Malloch 8:29
I kind of thought that was a period in thing,
Nick Salvatori 8:31
I think period and activity, activity roster maintenance, and then you have your roster, transfer the history all so that's going to do you know, the entire roster. Then there's also your roster transferred history individual where you can just select one individual to transfer to history most likely. In this event, you would be doing a roster transfer to history all. So in here, you're going to select your activity range. You're going to select an enrollment cutoff date. So what the enrollment cutoff date means is, let's say I forget to transfer my rosters a history for my let's say our spring season so spring 2020. And now in transferring to history, but maybe we've already started taking enrollments for 2021. So I could cut that do this enrollment cut off. Let's say we started our 2021 enrollments on October 1. So September 30, I could put in an enrollment cutoff date, and it would only transfer the people that were put on the roster prior to September 30. So anyone who enrolled after October 1 and on would stay on the roster. This next part your transfer season and year, this doesn't necessarily need to be I think there's some confusion sometimes where the transfer season of year, people try to match it up with what the season and year on the section is certainly, that probably makes the most sense. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be your transfer season, the year this is when you transfer your rosters a history, they're going to get tagged, with whatever season and year you select here. So if you ever have to go back and recover the rosters from history, you're going to need to know what the season in year is in order to recover that roster from history or recover a single individual from history. So it's kind of important to know what you're going to put in there. Again, there is some confusion sometimes, especially when you're recovering rosters from history, where people go and look in the section management and say, well, it's saying spring 2019, when it actually got transferred to history with all season 2019. So I usually go into the activity section inquiry, and then go to the roster. And then down at the bottom of the roster. There's a current year and previous year radio buttons. So if you had previous year, you'll be able to see the previous year rosters and you can scroll to the right, you'll see your your season and year on there.
Zach Malloch 11:49
This also helps with the like trend analysis reports, right Nick?
Nick Salvatori 11:52
Yes, yeah. So certainly like Zack said, if you're, you're running reporting for rosters that are put to history, you're going to want to know the season that year. So you get actual data or you get, you know, correct data? Yeah, I think on the support end of things, you know, a lot of times when people are trying to run those historical reports, you know, they might call in say, I'm not getting any data, you know, probably nine times out of 10. It's all due to the just the wrong season in year.
Zach Malloch 12:28
Absolutely.
Nick Salvatori 12:32
Then we have some toggles down here, you'll make sections inactive after transfer. That's more of a housekeeping Type thing. When sections are inactive, they're not going to show up in global sales. So you know, that kind of cleans up the global sales. Pick list when you go in there. Make activity inactive all sections are inactive. That's pretty self explanatory. Recalculate current Miscellaneous Income and Expense. Figure. So if you had done any miscellaneous income and expense postings towards an activity, this would just reset that to zero. Recalculate instructor feet. Instructor pay figures. So if you're doing instructor pay, you may want to turn that on to set that that figure back to zero for the new season. purge the answers to questions linked to rosters. Again, it's kind of self explanatory. If you have any questions. When you transfer that roster history, it will purge the answers to those questions. So I mean, that data will not be there. If you have to recover the roster. Reset section reservation number to zero. If you are reserving a facility for for the activity, it's going to get a reservation number. So this just sets that reservation number back to zero. Not really a big deal. When you go and make that reservation for that new season, they'll just update that reservation number so and then the last thing include rosters that still have a balance due so if someone owes still owes you money on a roster that you're trying to transfer, you know, if this toggle is on, they're gonna go and get transferred. Again, not necessarily a big deal, just a different process and how you would go in and make a payment to pay that balance off. So there's the previous year payments versus you know, just going to global sales or activity payments or wherever you choose to go so little different process depending if you have that on or not to make the pay that balance are there any have any questions come up Zack,
Zach Malloch 15:13
I no questions yet. I think I wanted to point out that yes, we're definitely going to post the tin three topic doc. Two, it's actually on the wreck chat from last year about this, and it hasn't really received any updates. So that one's still very valid. But there's also the option of using the f1 help in RecTrac, three 10.3. And you can just Type end of in that search Field, and that should bring up your your period and topic doc stuff, end of year help entries in that links to the topic Docs. So.
Nick Salvatori 15:46
So I think the last thing I want to just touch on is, you know, some people will run Trial Balance reports at the end of the year, so under reporting and global global financial and household trial balance. One thing that I got a question today, actually, that I thought kind of applied to this training. The question was, you know, their fiscal year ended September 30. So they want to run. And so today being November 5, they wanted to run the report as of September 30. And typically, when you come in here, by default, it's the your aging dates is negative 99999 through positive 99999. So little confusing negative numbers are in the future positive numbers are in the past when it comes to the trial balance. So in this case, to have it run as of September 30. Just in my aging days, I put 36. Because September 30, was 36 days ago, through 99999, so that should get me any, anything, any item that has a balance as of September 30 2020, on this report. So this report, again, depending on how you run this minimum balance to show will give you if I run this for negative point oh one that's gonna give me any any credits. So households have any credits on account. If I just do point oh one. So a positive balance. That's going to be anyone who, who has a balance and they owe you money. So you may run want to run this twice, once for credits once for debits. So you can you have two reports. And you so you know, who owes you money and who has credits.
Zach Malloch 18:00
And this is just one real quick clarification about this. So in 10.3, the the trial balance is kind of like it's checking the database right now. So by putting that aging date range back into the past, you're not going to see any balances that are less that have been incurred since the end of September. But let's say somebody came in, and they paid off a balance that was there on September 30. They came in on October 5, and they paid that off. When you run this report, you're not going to see that balance that's been paid off. But you're not going to see the newer balances. And I think that's the point that Nick was making, but sometimes that that little piece of clarifications kind of important.
Nick Salvatori 18:39
Correct.
Zach Malloch 18:41
And I wanted to so Stacey asked are more made a point here that when they were in 10.3, she accidentally transferred classes to history twice with the same season and year and it disappeared and you couldn't recover the rosters and get that info back? I don't think and maybe Nick if you if this rings any bells for you. I don't think that's still an issue. I believe if you ran it for all the exact same settings, the same dates in the same season. It just kind of combines those. So you could potentially transfer your roster to history for like 2019 and choose a 2018 date and then that historical record would have all the people's information on it from both of those years thinking that it's one year kind of combined.
Nick Salvatori 19:27
Yeah, I think I mean, the analogy I use Zack is you know, those season in years. settings are kind of like they're like folders. So they're folders in the database that have you know, just think of a manila folder. And up on the label. It says you know, spring 2020 And so that roster gets put into that folder. And then if you ever need to go and recover it, it's just in that folder in that you got to use that linking so RecTrac No Here's where to go find that roster. So I would assume if you transferred the same section, two different years, but to the same folder, it's just going to kind of combine that one roster and they would be in there. I don't know if I've ever seen where it's clear Isabel allow it. Yeah.
Zach Malloch 20:21
So I think that, we're going to have to kind of put a pin in our 10.3 discussion, we're already just blowing through our time here. And we want to certainly talk a little bit about 3.1, then we'll just kind of finish it by reminding people that that topic doc for 10.3 is pretty exhaustive with suggestions and recommendations of processes that you can kind of pick and choose from, for what your organization needs to do. And it kind of summarizes a lot of what Nick said here. Anything else? Before we switch over Nick?
Nick Salvatori 20:49
No, I don't think so.
Zach Malloch 20:51
Okay, so if you can stop your share, then Joe will be able to start his and unmute himself. And we'll switch to 10. 3.1, and just kind of looking at some of the chat. Yeah, the the 10.3 design kind of makes you appreciate the 3.1 design pretty well.
Joe Chevalier 21:09
Yeah, that definitely was probably bringing up some nostalgia for all you customers that have switched over to 3.1. So we'll just get right into it with 3.1. Can everyone see my Screen, good to go? Good to go. Alright. So similar kind of topics, we're just going to run through some of the stuff in 3.1. That's, you know, good to do towards the end of the year, and things that you guys probably shouldn't be doing, you know, maybe periodically throughout the year, not just at the end of the year. So give it a go through some of the modules and some of the tools we use to kind of keep things clean, that will your database isn't getting cluttered. Because when you have a cluttered database, RecTrac is a little bit slower, it's harder to process things. So it's just good to keep an updated list of everything in your system. So firstly, I'm gonna touch on is archiving and 3.1. So, for for 10.3 was kind of a transfer to history, and 3.1. It's an archive process. So you know, in activity section management, for example, we have all of our activities, and we have our section dates. And we have you know, our section years here as well. So as 2020 wraps up, there's going to be a lot of classes. So I'm just going to look at 2020 for right now we're going to play a year filter here. So all these classes, in theory have now wrapped up and finished, you know, we had enrollments. And, you know, obviously, you probably had a lot of cancellations with COVID, and whatnot. But it's good to basically take these classes, send them to kind of what we call a history or to archive, and then, you know, create new ones for the next year. So this does two things. One, it clears out any of the old outdated information that you see here. And two, it creates all your new sections for you. So if you're going every year and creating all your sections from scratch, you're doing basically too much work. And you should let the system do it for you by automatically creating new sections for the new year. While setting this to history. The other thing that this is going to do for you is keep your global sales purchase history a little bit cleaner. And what I mean by that here is when I go into a household and global sales, for example. Under my purchase history, you can see here, there's quite a lot of sales. So you know, I'm limited to 200 results. But the list goes on and on about what my household has bought. I'm sure each one of you have run into a household, maybe an internal household or a daily guest household in your own databases, that has so much transaction history, it's just hard to look at the current information. So when you archive a class, for example, let me look at a class here, I'm just going to filter down to my activities. Let's Click take this class classic, for example. When I scroll to the right, you can see that there's a filter here says archive record. And that's off. If I were to go to section archive and archive this class, this would actually come out of my purchase history. So you're getting an updated list of everything they bought recently, you can always switch to see everything that has been archived by flopping this record. So when you're archiving, you're not deleting anything, you're not deleting data, you're just kind of hiding it by default. So that you're always looking at a current list of you know, what's in the system. And
Zach Malloch 24:22
then especially, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off job but like, especially with like the COVID sorts of things where everybody's potentially doing a lot more registrations and smaller amounts, like the by day enrollments that can certainly fill up the purchase history DataGrid so you're just seeing those by day things and so the archive is a good way to clean that up.
Joe Chevalier 24:41
Yep. This ties in really good for for other modules outside of activities as well, because households, they buy a lot of activities, but you know, they might be buying, you know, longer facilities or stuff like that where you have, you know, even more reservations that need to be archived. So we'll just start an activity and talk about Section archive. So if You go to your menu and you Type section archive. And again, I am in the new UI, you know, it's very similar in the old UI to get to Section archive, the path would be management, and then activity management, and then period and programs. And then section archive. Many of you probably know, the basics of archiving, it's just good to, you know, run through it, again, make sure you're using it the way that's best for you. But the biggest piece here is the range of sections that we're including. So it's a begin and end range. So you're just saying archive everything through these activities. So normally speaking, if I'm going to archive, let's say, one class, for example, let's say I'm gonna archive this Minecraft, I have four sections of them. Right here, they are a 2020 class that have already happened. So they're ready to be sent to history to lay the base for 2021. So I'm going to select my begin section range of, you know, Minecraft, 01. And then I'm gonna select my end section range of Minecraft, 04. So by doing that, I'm going to be archiving these four classes here. Everything down below in the wildcard are filters that limit your results from this range. So if I have it blank here, it's going to look at any year, any season and archive any of these classes, if I have, let's say, classes from 2019, and 2020, in here, and I just want to archive 2019, and leave 2020. And tax, I would put a year filter of 2019. And if I want to drill down even further, maybe I want to only archive a certain season of 2019, I can say, you know, archive, just the fall season of 2019 for these classes. So if you're including a large range of let's say, all your activities, instead of doing activity one by one, you can do an entire range and a season in the year. In one swoop that way, you're you know, you're running, archiving, you know, maybe a few times as opposed to 100 times per activity. So, on the right hand side, we're going to say create new sections, or we're going to say do not create new sections. Or in some scenarios, if you have an open enrollment program, where the it's kind of a, you know, continual program, and people are constantly enrolling, we can use this keep enrollment date, or create new sections based off the enrollment date. And basically, that says, if you're enrolling after a certain date, put them in the new class for the new year. Kind of a special use case on that. Most commonly we see people using create new sections, or do not create new sections for my case, I'm gonna say create new section. So I know that, go ahead,
Zach Malloch 27:41
We did have two real quick questions related to those filters. Joe? The first one, Stacey asked Ken, do you have to actually make a selection for the beginning section? Or can you just do like the blank to 9999 for the ending section as your range?
Joe Chevalier 27:56
Yeah, you should be able to do blank through 999. If you want to do for an entire basically season or year, you can just defer to these filters. And then you leave this blank. And then you could say, you know, you could either select the end section or you could throw a bunch of nines in here. So if I do it this way, and I say process, I'm not going to actually process this, but it's catching 33 sections. So 33 is actually the entirety of my 2020 classes, which you can see matches activity section management, and question. It's so efficient to do it that way.
Zach Malloch 28:33
Yeah. And then Megan was asking if you have to choose the season, or can you just do the year,
Joe Chevalier 28:37
right. So you do not have to choose season, and you actually year is also not required. But I highly recommend it though, because what happens sometimes is people do arrange, and it's including things that are currently ongoing, so they accidentally archive them. So at the very least I suggested doing a year, if not both, just to double check yourself to make sure you're archiving exactly what you want there.
Zach Malloch 29:02
And just one other real quick piece here, because we just came from the 10.3, where the season and the year were used to kind of define those folders like Nick was talking about in 3.1. We don't use that logic we're actually taking leaving the activity entirely together. So in this case, those are just filters, they're not actually like tagging the information in any way.
Joe Chevalier 29:23
Exactly. Over on the right, moving in to the new section process is you want to basically, you know, advanced the dates on the old class, when when you're creating the new class. So normally speaking, let's say I'm retiring a 2020 class here, and I'm creating them for 2021. Over here, I'm gonna say add the year and one that way I'll go from 2020 to 2021. You could do other options. For example, your archiving may be something from July and you want to you know, create something for Three months away, you can say add three months. And then I'll change your beginning end dates by you know, you know, three months in advance or something like that. And that ties in directly to the date changes applied to the fees and rules that basically is just going to make it so that if you have a registration date that says 2019, and move it to 2020, you want to make the sections inactive, which is kind of a choice you have to make on your own. Sometimes it's good to do that. So you go review all the information, set them to active once you've kind of verified they're accurate. And then do you want to make you know, the activity itself inactive at the activity level, if all the sections themselves are inactive, and then removing,
Zach Malloch 30:40
I'm going to just jump in again real quick, Joe. So we are already at our half hour mark. So we're going to keep going for a little bit. And we'll try to get to some of these questions coming in. But we absolutely understand if people can't stick around beyond this point. We are recording it as we do with all of our RecChat. And they'll be posted to the RecChat archive, so anybody has to go, hope you're going to be safe and well and stay strong. And we'll just keep going with this and get to some questions as as we go for those that can stick around. Thanks very much, everybody. Back to you, Joe.
Joe Chevalier 31:12
Sounds good. Alright, and then the last Toggle here remove custom schedule and holidays. This is so that if you've built out a really custom schedule in 2019, and you're making one for 2020 miles, we'll delete the 2019 dates so that you have a fresh base to start in 2020. So just going backwards, one step here, I'm going to select my range again for just these Minecraft programs here. And just show you one archive. And then we'll start moving through the rest of this pretty quick here. So I'm going to say add a year. And I'm going to put one here. And then before I processed this just so you can kind of see exactly what this is going to do. I'm just going to filter down my classes here. So you can see right here from my minecraft classes, these all say 2020, they're going to be included. So as soon as I hit process, it's going to find four classes with a bunch of enrollments included. I'm going to say preview the report and hit continue. So as soon as the archive process finishes, it's going to throw me a report to say what was sent to history and what was created. So once that report pops up on my Screen, I know I'm you know, ready to move on. So there it goes. It's archived everything great. When I go back to activity section management, you'll watch when I refresh this data grid, these are going to change to 2021. And the enrollments are going to drop down to zero, because we've created a new section so I'm gonna hit refresh. Those ones disappeared, probably. Because my might have an interesting status on those,
Zach Malloch 32:53
Stacy's saying that it might be your year filter, potentially.
Joe Chevalier 32:56
No, I they were 2020. And I added a year of one good point, I had a filter, she said right there 2020. So now they've moved to 2021. Good catch, Stacy 2021 is here. So I did set my enrollment counts to zero, set my dates ahead by a year. And then also set my year here to 2021. So this is good to do in your systems. It's also good to just go into activity section management and review inactive, or sections that need to be deleted and just clean up any clutter that you find. And that goes for every module. So moving through the other modules that have archiving processes, we have Facility Reservation. So if you go to facility management, under more, there is an archive past reservations. This is not deleting information. It's just saying archive any reservations from let's say, you know, beginning of the year till the end of the year for these facilities, and when you hit process, it's not touching the facilities itself. It's purely archiving the purchase history so that the updated purchase history list is everything that's current. So I wouldn't necessarily archive everything from this year. But you might archive everything from two years ago so that you're looking at you know, two years of history and purchase history or something along that line. And that goes the same for past memberships, past visits, leagues, pos Inventory Service items and tickets, all of them have their own archiving process. What I suggest doing is either typing the word archive to see the different ones that pop up, so we have section and league archive. If you don't see it here, it means it's within the module. So if I go to POS ticket management first, for example, under ticket management, I can basically come in here Click More and say archive past sales. This is not going to send the ticket itself to history. It's going to send the ticket sale to history. It's the important difference there. So I'm just saying archive any sales between, you know this date and that date. This is not make or break for the system. It's just keeping your databases clean. So if you have any questions about archiving, you know, supports happy to feel those questions, or you can drop them in the chat, we're going to move on to just some other little topics here. One of them is accrual processing. For those of you that are using the accounting system of accrual based versus cashed, where there's a kind of a process you need to run to basically say, as you've provided a service for someone, the money is slowly becoming revenue. So there is a process called accrual processing that you need to run to make sure that you are actually you know, accruing the revenue in the system. And the important thing here is you're including the modules that you want to include. And then your begin and end accrual dates, what I suggest is for your end or beginning date, you put this way out all the way in the past, even to 2017. If you have to, basically through today, or whatever date you're accruing on to basically catch everything that's happened since this day, so that you are now moving money out of unearned into your revenue accounts to make sure that your finance and numbers are lining up. If you don't know anything about accrual, you can probably just, you know, ignore this, it's probably doesn't apply to you guys. But it's just something you want to make sure you do. And the important thing is that you set your date back here. Further back, you know, you don't want to go past today on your end accrual date, because you don't want to accrue money for things that haven't happened yet. But setting this date out far back is pretty important here.
Just a little bit on reporting, because obviously reporting is a big topic where you could spend hours on it. But I would say for end of year reporting, one thing I would suggest doing is going into report output listing and just run through some of the reports we offer. Some of the statistical examples would be good. For example, activity statistical, there's definitely some different reports, you can see trends throughout the years. So you can compare yourself from this year to last year. And just get little bits of data that are important for you know, year end things. Usually totals are kind of requested by, you know, higher ups in the parks departments. So basically take what they're looking for, and just kind of shopping in our report lists to see you know, what might be good for you guys towards the end, you know, outside of just you know, your typical GL, and of your reporting needs, just look at the statistical ones and just see if there's anything that might be good for you guys to kind of start tracking as organizations here. So I'm not going to go into any of those reports too in depth here. But if you have any questions on something you need, specifically, you know, support, we'll be there to help you. One thing I'm going to touch on here, some processing things, a lot of you guys have generated a lot of credits and debits from COVID Troubles throughout the year, I just want to make sure everyone knows how to refund a credit and utility that might be good for if you have a lot of credits in the system. So I'm gonna touch on that real quick. If a household has a credit, for example, I know that this household here has a credit balance, you can either use that credit balance of $80 to pay off items, whether they have another existing balance, you can use that to pay it off. Or if somebody comes in and says hey, I need that you know money refunded, you do have the option with nothing in your shopping cart to proceed to the payment Screen. And you can refund this credit out manually by saying use or refund the credit. And I'm gonna say use or refund credit here and then I'm gonna highlight my available credit and either say refund all credits or selected credits. And then this is going to give me the ability on the payment scheme payment Screen to say how I'm going to refund it. So I'm refunding now, as a particular pay code, they back to their card, or I can choose refund finance, which a lot of you will do, which will you know send a refund out for finance to cut a check. Another utility you might just want to be aware of that exists in the system is our bulk refund ability. So if I Type the word bulk here, there's some different bulk utilities in here. What I want to be under is the bulk
Zach Malloch 39:21
on right at the bottom there, Joe.
Joe Chevalier 39:23
There it is household book, refund finance. And what this is going to do is go search for any credits in the system. If you guys made a decision that all credits are going to be refunded as refund finance. I can select a credit date of saying when was the credit created. So like for example, I'll do August 1, until today show me any credits that were created between this time range. I'm gonna say Display households, here's all my households with existing credit balances and you can see how much they have. If I want to refund a number of these I can highlight these people. Choose some refund settings here if I want to email receipts and I I can say process refund finance. And this is going to basically create receipts for all these three people and refund their credit balances out as a refund finance scenario. So I could go to Document Center now, and look at some of those receipts that were just created. To show that they were actually refunded moments ago here. So just popping one of these open, you can see that I was just refunded as refund finance. So that's a good utility. If you guys have a lot of credits, and you don't know how to handle them, and you want to get them out of the system, it's good to do that ties in a little bit to our trial balance report that we touched on in 10.3. If you just Type the word trial, or go to report output listing and find that household Trial Balance report, this report is designed to show you anyone in the system that may have generated a credit or a debit balance over the last few years with being a patron of yours. So the important thing here is you might want to start by clicking default settings to get back to our base Screen. But you're gonna say, you know, use household number range of blank to 999. Same run this for all the households, or you could Toggle that off and choose which households you want to include. I'm going to run it for all households, the trial balance as of date, you can say, what's their balance as of a certain date as of January 1, or as of today, what do they owe me, or what are they have as a credit, the minimum credit or minimum balance is a negative number saying how much you're going to be showing in the credit world. So if I don't want to show credits, I could put this as zero. And my case, I want to see both. So I'm going to leave that at negative 99999. Basically just putting a high threshold for, you know, any outrageous number that might be in the system. What's in there, too many in there. Don't make them negative. The Max balance is basically how big of a bounce they might owe you. The important part here is choosing your trial balance Type, I would suggest at least starting with a household net balance summary, which when you run that, and I ran out a second ago, which takes a sec, so I'm just gonna pull that up for us here. This is basically just going to break down each household what they owe, you know, what they have for credit, very, very simple, just kind of a summary of each household. But if you want to get into more detail, you can change your trial balance option here on this report to something a little more in depth like detail, which breaks down each item they bought, and what the amount owed are with credit balance tied to each one of those items is. So I would definitely run this report in your system, it'd be curious to see, you know how much you know, money is kind of out there either, you know, ready to be received, or you know, potentially to be refunded, and credits and whatnot. And it's good, good way to help clean up your database. And that ties into some household cleanup thing, you know, we're talking about cleaning up household balances and whatnot, but just cleaning up your households in general, many databases that when I get in there, and I do a household lookup, I see tons of blank households, which a lot of those were just mistakenly added in and can be deleted by going to household management. You can delete households as long as they've never done a transactional history with you. So if I highlight somebody here, I can hit delete, if it lets me delete, great, if not, it's going to tell you, hey, this person has some history, so you should not delete them. But if it's a blank show of a household with no purpose, you can just delete that household and move on.
I would talk about also running the household duplicate report. So if you just Type the word dupe or go to your report, Apple listing and then search the word dupe, we have a duplicate household listing. Remember in the new UI, if you liked this report, you can start this and add it to your home Screen, which will show up right here on the home. So you can Build out a custom list of things you use. The duplicate listing report is basically a way to say show me any households that might have a duplicate phone number. So if two households have to share the same phone number, this will print a report to basically show you know that these two people appear to be similar, you know, they might not be 100% match. So you have to kind of review each household kind of individually. And then from there, let's say you have two households that were incorrectly created accidentally, and they are exactly the same. You can go to household transfer merge. And you can combine two households into one or you can move one member to another household. And we do have another RecChat. If you guys are interested in learning more about this, that goes through some of this stuff would be good for you guys to use and familiarize yourself because realistically, probably every household or every database is going to have duplicate households and you're going to have to use the system point to keep them clean, and it's good to stay on top of those so you're not you know, grinding through 1000 households to clean up as opposed to to a few that about does it for, you know, very, you know, setup or cleanup of households and transactions. I will talk briefly about your backups, I would make sure that each one of you verify that you have a scheduled backup running to make sure that your system is backed up. In case of an emergency, let's say your server crashes and they didn't have an image of your server. Saving a database backup is really important. That way, if you lose some amount of data, you're not losing a year of data, you're losing maybe a few hours of data. So in scheduled events, management, that's where you can go to see if your backup is there, I would just Type the word backup in here and you should see a database backup running on a schedule, you you may want to go on to your server and verify that this path does have the backups there, this is going to backup to your server. So if you have your it go to the file location there VSI three, backup, you just want to make sure that you're seeing some nice backup files in here. So in case of emergency, you have something to revert back to. Also good to do before you update to a new version just to make sure everything goes good. If you don't have that, you can go into your Profile assignments. And there's going to be a backup Profile in here, you can Click Update. And these help the helps pretty good about what all these settings do. If you have questions, you can contact support. But it's good to make sure that we're scheduling this backup to run once a day, if not two times a day or more. As long as your server has room to handle more backups. Document purging slash history purging is something to consider always to keep your database you know not getting massive document Purge is basically the process of purging the PDFs out of the system, for example, you might have a pull that up here. So you ran a report back in 2013, that's a PDF still sitting in your database. And the history is all built into the database. So that PDF file is just taking up space at this point. So what I could do here is go and you know, purge certain types of documents like reports, for example, I want to you know, purge all the reports through 2018, which is not again, deleting the ability to pull that information. Again, it's deleting the physical PDF in the database file. This is used to help keep your databases really concise. So you know, we've seen it take 100 gigabyte database down to 50 after a dumping load of of the system. So it's definitely something to consider. Be careful with this. If you've purging something. As Zack said, It's permanent, there's no recovery unless you roll back to a backup. So that's another reason why you want to make sure your backups are accurate.
Unknown Speaker 48:02
So there's a number of things here, for example, gift certificates from 2016, you might not need that PDF anymore, it's not deleting the gift Certificate, just the PDF. And that goes along to with history purge. This is not archiving, this is purging, this is removing the old data from the system. So if you only need, let's say, five years of activity information, you know, we could purge all the history through a certain date. It's unrecoverable, you cannot pull the receipt, you cannot pull the transaction, you cannot report on it once that happens. So it's something you should not do lightly. Some of our purchases actually require a password from VSI to kind of confirm you're making the right decision. So if you're considering this or you want to clean some data up, you know, reach out to us, we can help you up with that. And the last thing to just on your servers, like I said, making sure the backups are clean, making sure you have adequate disk disk space moving into the new year, so that you're not you know, running up against you know, two gigs of data free, which might crash your database if you do some big transaction or something. One really particular thing under VSI, three, Progress, DC 1117 work. This is all just log files created throughout the year. It's completely not needed. So if you want to clean up a little server space, and keep your files accurate, you know, you could delete this entire folder. It's purely log files that are no longer needed. And if anything is in use, you could just override that for those files. Just do a nice thing to help keep your database clean and whatnot.
Zach Malloch 49:41
So just anything to clarify that if you actually delete the folder I think that could potentially cause some issues you're just talking about the contents of the folder
Joe Chevalier 49:50
Correct. You do not want to delete the folder itself. I have a feeling it might lay back down if you delete the folder, but everything in here including the folders can be deleted. and it's going to recreate anything it needs for you automatically. So don't delete the root folder, delete the contents within the root folder. All of this will be recreated once the deletion is complete, it is in no way going to affect your system, other than cleaning up some server space. Let's see any questions that were popping up?
Zach Malloch 50:25
Yeah, so a couple I wanted to go back to related to the, the activity transfer, and then maybe we can do a couple others but and so we had two variations of this question. And it's related to automatically updating the section dates and times. And so Stacy was curious if there's any leap year logic, obviously, if we have a different number of days per year, then just adding a year by itself isn't really going to do too much sure to get it matched up. And then the other side of that question somebody asked, I think was Gary about the day of the week, you know, obviously, the the days of the week might not be the same. If you are, you know, November 6 this year as a Friday, but it was a Saturday or Thursday last year, for example.
Joe Chevalier 51:11
Yeah, absolutely. Just to start on kind of the dates and how they change, you know, year to year. Archiving is not an absolute perfect process in terms of creating your section for the new year, it's kind of lay the base, then review, which is easier than creating from scratch. So after I archive, the one thing you're gonna want to go do is still touch each section to make sure that information is right, or their price changes, or their date changes, or their receipt, document changes, you know, all the stuff that you normally would be looking for. But in the next year, so Minecraft was laid down for 2021. Right? So it was 515. Last year, that's a Saturday, this class should start on a Monday. So I'll come in here and change this to the 17 to account for the new year. So we move it by a calendar year of one. So it's not perfect in that sense or.
Zach Malloch 52:06
If you could go back to the section archive, I wanted to show a couple other things because we do kind of have a way around this. So you're if you add days, right, that's kind of your option. And of course, you know, normally a year is going to be 365 days, but then that's when you run into those issues. So if you brought up that calendar in 2021, and you realize that last year was 15th was a Monday and this year, it's going to be the 17th, that's a Monday, then you could potentially say well, I want to add 367 days. And so that date option value, you put 367. And as long as the section date option is add days, it's going to add two days more than a year. And it's going to advance both the beginning and the ending date by that many number of days. So that's kind of a way around it. That's also you know, so leap years that works, you just have to kind of do that little bit of math to determine and as long as it should be the relatively the same day. And so like, you know, the 15th to the 17th to make sure it's still Monday would be the example of doing that math for that one thing, and then it should apply to everything in that range. The other thing I wanted to point out is or I think you already had it done, but that apply date changes to criteria, directly linked fees and rules, that same deal. If you do 367 days, and you have a rule that has a registration date on it, or if you have a rule that has a particular aging date, or age by date or something like that, it'll update those criteria to which could potentially save you some save you some work.
Joe Chevalier 53:37
Yeah, and that's a good point. It's just make sure when you're doing that, that the new section date option is working for the entire range of programs you're archiving for, you know, if there's a black sheet between these programs, you know, maybe that one program you do this for and then go tweak it after. Or you know, you do a couple of different ranges with a couple different runs of different settings here. So yeah, you could it is something you want to kind of think from a high level before you hit process. Think it through everything in here, you know, what's the best way of kind of manipulating these settings to make it work for you? And then I will yeah, one more thing else mentioned here is all the help here is pretty good about explaining what these settings do. If you don't see the Help under support here, there's a little Toggle for enable in app help. That's going to turn those little help bubbles on and off. So make sure those are on when you're running, if you have any questions.
Zach Malloch 54:30
All right. And so while we're still in the Screen, Jut was curious if you could give an example of how we would use the wildcard in here.
Joe Chevalier 54:38
Yeah, so wildcard instead of using a range of programs, or in I guess more conjunction with a wildcard is a way of saying include every program that starts with a certain activity number. So what some people do is they say, you know, include all activities and again, I don't see a ton of people using wildcards but This is what I have seen, between all sections, you know, include everything that starts with the number two, which is basically a way if you group your activities, numbers, by different seasons, let's say one is spring to summer three is fall fours winter, you can kind of instead of using the season, you can say archive all my winter programs. So it really comes down to how your activity coding scheme is set up this activity code.
Zach Malloch 55:29
Yeah, and just I want to add a little bit to that one, too. But you can actually kind of expand the power of how the wildcard works by using Asterix, so if you use Asterix in front of the number, so what Joe has there is it's going to say archive everything that has a two in the second position of the activity number. And so if you're not trying to do it by your first digit, if that's your season, and you're not trying to archive everything for that season, but if your second digit is maybe an age category, or a department category or something like that, right, then you'd be so if you had Asterix three, then these activities would be included because three is in that second position. And so the Asterix kind of opens up that that wildcard functionality a bit. And you can do that same logic actually applies when you're running reports that have wildcard fields and things like that.
Joe Chevalier 56:21
Yep. Very, very good point. Yeah. And that's basically any wildcard in the system works that way. You know, you're saying starting with this, or if there's an asterix, you know, this and then starting with that number, the second number, and you can see that here as well.
Zach Malloch 56:35
And Darla was curious if there was a tee time purge or a tee time history purge.
Joe Chevalier 56:42
Okay. Yep. So quick, quick mention on golf here. Towards the end of the year, that kind of consideration is is your golf course closing is already closed, whatnot. Some things you might want to do in there are purge some tee times. So like, let's say you're closing on December 1, you'd want to make sure that there's no more tee times for December 1, or your you want to make sure WebTrac is turned off. So under Golf Management, tee time purge would be the place I might, I might start. And that's going to purge any tee times that don't have any bookings over the date range you kind of want to purge for so you would select your golf course, you would choose the date range that you're purging through. So let's say you're done for the season, starting on December 1, I could choose December 1 through you know, starting at, let's say my first tee times at 7am. Purging through you know, even up through the next year, I'm not sure depends on how you created your tee times. But you know, through the next year at you know, let's say 10pm, just so you're catching everything. So that'll shut down all the tee times. And then after the fact, you could go and do a tee time generation. Go back to the golf module here. Management golf. Let's see the generation so it may be you're looking forward to the next year and you want to start maybe generating tee times I'm not sure really how old early the golf pros decide on their tee times. But under Golf Course Management, you can choose your golf course, and then do the generation for the golf course. To tweak those, we don't really have any archiving utilities that I'm aware of under Golf Course Management, we don't have really anything to archive them. They're just kind of part of the purchase history at this point. But if that becomes an issue at some point, you know, it might be something we could add to the system. So if you can make a case for it, you know, we can leave it to development to add an archiving. I know that they are working on some sort of archiving process for Trips right now.
Zach Malloch 58:50
Yeah, that's a that's a specific response to the COVID. Because a lot of people are using Trips to get those lucky individual registrations out there. So Stacy did have a follow up question about the wildcard so it was if you if you're using the Asterix, do you have to spell out the entire length of the number and or just can you start with like just Asterix three and leave it as it is in the second part of that is the answer, you can just do the beginning part of it, you don't have to go beyond the part you're trying to highlight. But you can go further if you wanted to. So if you wanted to find something with a three in the second position and a five in the fourth position, you could have Asterix three Asterix five, and then stop there. And it'll only get things that that match that format. So anything can be in the first position any can think can be in the third, but the second and fourth have to be three and five. So I think that's a that's getting us to the end of our questions, Joe, and we're definitely over. Thank you everybody that has stuck around with us any closing comments?
Joe Chevalier 59:53
I would just say for those of you that, you know are are not seeing the new UI currently when you're logged in. It's worth reaching out to your it or to our support to maybe help you guide you guys to get to the new UI, you know, you might be seeing this old RecTrac Screen, probably sometime in quarter one of 2021. We've, we've delayed it a lot, almost a year at this point, but the new UI will become required to switch to sometime in 2021. So what we want to do is get you guys updated to the latest version, get you on the new UI get familiar. That way, it's not a light switch that gets turned on one one day in 2021. And you're not ready for it. So if you have any questions reach out to support, if anything you saw looks different than what you have, just let us know.
Zach Malloch 1:00:36
There's also a knowledge base, if you wanted to do that, switching to the Next Gen UI. I think that you know, in our user groups, we've been doing some polls to see how many people are using it, and around 75% of our 3.1 customers roughly are already in there and using it. And I think that the people who switch over generally, generally like it. So Melissa's question were on the calendar year. So q1 would be the first four months of, or first three months of 2021. And you know, that date hasn't been firmly set at all. But we've we've certainly been looking towards it. Right now everything's being basically developed in parity with the old UI and the new UI. But that's kind of limiting what we can do with the new UI. So once we switch over, then that's when we're gonna start adding more of the workflow improvements and making RecTrac a little bit more efficient. Whereas right now, the new UI is largely just a different look and feel to the database rather than material changes to workflow and processes. So I think at that point, we're going to go ahead and end this. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on this. This longer RecChat. On a very, it seems like it's been a long, couple of days here too. But stay healthy, stay safe, stay calm and collected very much appreciate everybody's attention and participation and questions. As always, we'll get a response doc together for this and post this with the recording on to our rec chat archives within the next few days. So thank you very much for attending, and we'll see you all later. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Joe.