Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In the episode our host, Bret Alarcon, is joined by EDU Manager, Zach Malloch, to discuss archving records in your RecTrac database. The pair touch on the performace boost this process can facilitate, the many modules avaialble to be archived, and the ways this process can set your department up for success next season.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:08
hello, and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today Zack and his cat are here to show you some more about spring cleaning. So we spoke about spring cleaning a bit last time. But we got a lot of responses. So we decided to cover it again. And we're going to be a bit more streamline this time and hopefully answer some more questions this time around. So before we start, there's that little q&a Button at the bottom, go ahead and Click that. It'll pop up a little interface to ask your questions. And we'll have answers. Or there's a little chat Button at the bottom too. You can Click and just comment along with us during the presentation. with that, Who should I hand it off to Zack, you or the kitty?
Zach Malloch 0:50
Let's see. I think I'm going to have better information about archiving. But if you need any purr questions, this guy has got it. Now go ahead and put him down. Although if he jumps on my shoulder, don't be surprised.
Yeah, also. So yeah, this is the first time we've really done a revisit particularly this quickly. But unfortunately, we forgot to record it last time, I'll go ahead and blame barrel, he's unaffected by blame coming his way. So he's a he's a safe person to go to.
Yeah, so we're talking about spring cleaning and archiving. And so kind of similar to if anybody was here last week or two weeks ago, for the first record chat of May, we kind of we're going to
talk about archiving and other modules, not specifically in activities, because I think everybody's fairly familiar with how activity archiving works. Although we might have a little bit more time to kind of touch on that in this instance, potentially. So go ahead and share my Screen.
And one thing to kind of note here is that archiving is significantly different between other modules and activity. So with activity, you're kind of taking a snapshot of what the actual sections were, and then saving them. So you can report on them historically. But you're also creating new sections as you go from that, when we're talking about our other modules, like facility or paths, we're actually archiving the reservations. So when you go into global sales, and you're looking in the purchase history, and you're seeing a ton of stuff from yours previous, that can start to get in the way of what you're really looking to, to actually interact with your customers want, theoretically, you want to get the more recent and more up to date stuff, you wouldn't be changing records that are significantly in the past. So that's kind of the important thing. So we've got these five modules right now. So paths facility, Point Of Sale Service Item, ETS Point Of Sale, inventory, and Point Of Sale tickets, where we have an archive process, and it's always in the same place. So if you go to the management piece of any of those modules, you go to more, you got the archive option, if I opened, for example, Point Of Sale inventory.
And we go to more.
And then we have archive. So you see it saying past sales, and in facility, it's saying past reservations. So it's not the facilities are archiving, it is the reservations that have happened at those facilities, or the sales for those inventory items or tickets or service items or
the passes and the past sales and potentially past visits that you're archiving. We did during the last session, get an enhancement request to include the Rental module for this. So hopefully that will be added to this before too long. But just to kind of cover my bases, let's just jump into global sales real quick. And we'll take a look at the purchase history tab. Because that's really the really the only thing that's affected by this is we're putting an archive Toggle on to those previous transactions. And an important thing to understand here is that, you know, let's say that you accidentally archive or let's say you archive facility stuff from the past year, but then there's an extenuating circumstance, a customer service issue that comes up, and you need to still adjust a fee or do an additional refund or something to an archived sale. Well, if you go to Options, once again, we're in purchase history, you go to options in the DataGrid. You go to Show Settings, and we make sure that this archived record option is visible.
Then that means if we scroll over here, and we find this by default, it's always going to be unchecked, but we can also make it checks so that we're only seeing archived records. And then when you have access to it from here, you can edit it just like a regular record. So there's not really a drawback to archiving except that you won't see it initially. If you are trying to find it in purchase history. You will have to come in and turn on or flip this Toggle basically. And if you don't want staff finding archived records if you're doing it because you actually want to hide stuff from them,
you can customize the Screen, you can turn off their ability to get to the Show Settings, you can make sure that this column is not visible. But theoretically, if you're just not telling them about that, it's probably unlikely that people are going to be just poking around there for fun.
But basically, the process is going to be the same for any of these pieces where you have basic ranges. So what am I looking for, so we can archive or we can reverse an archive, then we can get a report on it, I definitely, especially if you're doing this for like a year at once, particularly for something with visits, or something where you have a significant number of sales Point Of Sale inventory probably be like this to anything that you get a lot of transactions for summary is definitely going to be the more efficient way of doing it. In fact, depending on how many transactions you have, you might get an error saying that your report is exceeding the maximum length. I think by default, we limit PDF reports to around 100 pages. And you could certainly get a lot more than that. So you'd have to adjust that in your daily processing Profile if you wanted to include more.
So we have a range of which facilities are we wanting to archive reservations for? We can also filter by types of Type of category, how many do we want to limit? Or where do we want to have like our warning message. So you know, if we're expecting to archive a week's worth of information, and we see 1000 records, and that seems way too high? Do we want that to be a little bit of a warning message. But it's just a confirmation message, it'll say you're about to archive more than 1000 records, are you sure you wish to continue? If you don't care about that, you know, you can jump up to around 10,000 50,000. And hopefully get past it, or I guess 100,000 was the last one we had there. And then we have the dates. And these are the dates of the actual reservation. So the item date, not the transaction date, but when the actual reservation occurred.
And it's really just as easy as that you hit process. This goes through all of the transaction history, and it applies that archive, Toggle onto those. And then once again, by having that Toggle by default, you're not going to see those when you go into purchase history. So then purchase history will be a much smaller list of DataGrid options. It'll load faster. Particularly if you have a lot of history or some households that do a lot of stuff. It can take a little bit of time to load everything or you scroll down you see like the first 50 Records had been loaded. Do you want to load another 50? Or do you want to load all records? So this is just a way to help clean that up? Brett, I see a couple of couple of questions came in.
Bret Alarcon 7:45
Gary is wondering, can you archive avail? Sorry, is archiving available for visits?
Zach Malloch 7:50
Heck yes, it is. So if we go to it is still in Pass Management. We actually have the two archive options right here. So you can archive the memberships or you can archive the visits? So it basically looks exactly the same, except is it going to archive the fact that you had a membership during a certain time range? Or is it going to archive the visits that occurred within that particular time range? So yes, absolutely. Gary.
Bret Alarcon 8:18
Joe wants to know, can we schedule things like archive past reservations, then we can archive any reservation older than a year automatically?
Zach Malloch 8:28
So unfortunately, no, there's no scheduled option for these archives. And I, you know, I think that the logic behind that, at least probably used by the developers is that this is something that's happening a bit less frequently, you know, you're doing it basically at the end of the calendar year. And you want to have kind of more control over that, or at least theoretically you do. But that's
I don't know, we could definitely write it up. I don't know how much priority something like that would get. So you might be waiting for that enhancement for a little bit. Because there's a lot of other really cool stuff that they're trying to get RecTrac to do and do better for you.
So we can certainly write that up. But like I said, I wouldn't necessarily first see that one getting a lot of high priority.
Bret Alarcon 9:13
So wants to know, what are the benefits of archiving records of from modules other than the activity and lead modules to reuse the item?
Zach Malloch 9:20
Yeah. So that's, I mean, it's really just simplifying what you see in global sales, and actually potentially in reports as well. So it kind of depends on which module but when you're running report, I believe Facility Reservation
Facility Reservation reports.
And then there is a filter here, I believe once again to Yes. So do you want to include archived reservations? And so anytime we're reducing the number of records that we're reading, so the archived Toggle is an index record and it's a very quick
thing for the system to just exclude anything that has the archive Toggle turned on. And then it will only try to run reports based on things that don't have that archive title turned on. So it's kind of a performance based thing. But then once again, if we're talking about working with customers and looking at their transaction history, like right now, I've limited to 200. If I keep going down further, well, I've only got 193 records in my transaction history. So that's not too bad. But if I wanted to see anything that was like, let's just say from January 1 of 2002, or newer,
you know, that filters down so I only have 37 records here. But you know, I had to put in that filter to say only show me stuff from this year, if I had run the archive, by default, I would only load things that are more recent than whenever the last archive was run, or at least for those modules that are trends. So it's,
it's a performance thing, it's also, I guess, you could think of it almost like a minimalist Type of thing, I tend to have a fairly minimalist philosophy when it comes to RecTrac, trying to get RecTrac to do as much as I need it to do, but kind of only what I need it to do. So you know, having five years of history and purchase history, when you're very, very unlikely to have any transactions that you need to go back and actually edit more than, I don't know, whatever makes sense for your organization, six months, 12 months, 18 months,
or even maybe two months, depending on how busy you are. And for certain things. It cleans up this DataGrid it makes it faster to to load, it makes it faster to up there we go with all of our results. And as to how to filter from when I was doing the archive. See, I've got 461 results to filter through here. But if I started archiving things I've actually have archived particularly the past visits.
Because these, you know, especially for people that come in and use your facility, often you're very likely to have a lot of past visits throughout the course of the year. And whether you need all of these to show up every time you go to purchase history or not is kind of that question. And you know, Kristin did point kind of touch on the fact that for activities and for League, it doesn't another piece of it not only archives, the enrollments but it also creates the new version of those activities. And the reason that that kind of diverge is is activities are a little bit more likely to change from year to year, or maybe one year, they're canceled the next year, they run the you know, in being able to report on everything about the activity as it happened previously, you know, the, maybe the description of the section changed, maybe some of the rules changed having everything archived, so you can go back and see what the activity was like previously, or the league was like previously, you have a little bit more of a benefit to doing that. Whereas like facilities, it's a building and that building is likely to be the same thing over and over. So the archive only deals with reservations for those buildings, or whatever the facility actually happens to be.
Any other questions at the moment Bret?
Bret Alarcon 13:10
that's it for now.
Zach Malloch 13:12
Okay, so there is a kind of touching on that, actually, that's an excellent segue. So thank you, Kristen. actually meant to do this during the last session, but we didn't quite get around to it, let's say, for your facilities, you are retiring some stuff, and you're not going to be using them any longer. Well, we have an extra status here. And that status is deleted. And it's kind of the same thing, where if I default, actually sorry, if I refresh my DataGrid by going into the defaults,
you notice that deleted is not included here, there is no DataGrid that in the default VSI Screen design is actually going to include deleted records and I say deleted with quotes, it's not actually deleted from your system. It's just flagged as deleted so that you don't see it without specifically looking for it. And if you are getting to the point where you're adjusting some other stuff, don't use this one, because that will be like a permanent delete. And actually, the system will tell you, you can't delete it if there's any history related. So, but I can change the status to delete it. And that's as easy as just going right here, changing that status to deleted or if I have a lot of records, I can go into bulk changes. Once again, this is all modules and using facility as an example. Look at status. There's record status, I add that to the list of things that I want to change. I move that to say deleted, and then anything that I select up here. So whatever I have highlighted at this moment, I have five items highlighted, I can see those just by themselves. And if I hit process, it's going to make those five items switch to a deleted status. And once again, as long as it's just the status that we're calling deleted.
It allows you to hide facilities that have reservations, anything that's been retired from use. Or maybe you had duplicates, maybe you had extra facilities set up and like you had
pool and then your splash pad, but somebody had it under Park splash pad, and you realize that you're needing to clean it up, that was kind of confusing, you decided to just keep one, you can set the whichever one, you're not wanting to use any longer to a deleted status. And that will hide it from daily processing, it will hide it from file management, it'll hide it by default from reporting. And it just effectively deletes the record, but it gives you an undo option if you ever needed to retrieve it. Or if you wanted to specifically target deleted statuses, then it would let you run those reports and get the information back so frequently in RecTrac. Delete is a permanent thing, or especially the word purged is a is a pretty important one.
That will just make it so you can never report on something any longer unless you restore a whole database. And that sort of whole big thing that you really want to avoid doing as much as you can. So the deleted status is the option of doing a delete but having an undo capability because you can always come in here, find everything that is just deleted, and then change it back to active and you undo it.
Let's see I see a couple more questions coming in.
Bret Alarcon 16:28
Yep. Jamie wants to know, let's say you archive facility reservations, more than a year old. If you then run financial reports such as VSI cash journal for a period of the last two years with the revenue from the archive reservation show or is also there's a hidden also.
Zach Malloch 16:46
So I believe that
I don't think that there's any archived filter for the cash journal. So I believe that all revenue would show based on the transaction date, it's it's really more of a specific module reports like the Facility Reservation report, the passive visit report where you would potentially have the archived record options. And one of the things that you can kind of take with you from this, if you don't see the option to include or exclude archived records, and it's usually its own filter, then it's not going to be affected by that Toggle at all.
Yeah, so like the cash Journal, the GL distribution report, whether it's cash journal, or the dynamic piece does not have an archived piece, because the archive isn't necessarily part of the I guess it is kind of part of the transaction, but it's not going to be a part of the GL distribution side of the transaction, if that makes any sense.
And I believe also the actual I think it was past visit I was looking in before.
So past visit reports.
And I think that here, there was also not specifically anything about the archived record. So it doesn't matter whether they're archived or not, it's just going to show you visits that occurred within a particular time range. And you know, it's kind of a maybe it makes sense if we had the exact same logic all the way through. But in this case, because you know, visits or kind of visits or visits or visits, we, we aren't specifically labeling and extracting the, the archived piece of that for but for the facility module, we are.
Bret Alarcon 18:33
Kristen wants to know, is there a way to inactivate system codes?
Zach Malloch 18:38
Let's see.
I don't think we really have
necessarily a status on these guys.
Yeah, so not really, you could potentially kind of get a similar results of what we're talking about if we included permission of deleted and then made it so people don't, by default, have access to see things that are deleted. But then if people have the admin permission, because you're administrating the whole database, you wouldn't be able to see the deleted permission stuff. So yeah, not specifically a way to retire system codes. Unfortunately, Kristen,
Bret Alarcon 19:26
all right. Jeff wants to know, is there a way to purge or archive questions, question answers, so that we could delete a question off a module rather than it just having to make it inactive?
Zach Malloch 19:37
Yeah, so there is this history purge. And you notice that this is protected by an access code. You can't really get to it unless you're on the phone with somebody or if you happen to be as privileged as we are to be working here for Vermont systems.
And actually, this I don't know if 100% for sure if this actually purchase question.
answers. Let's see if we have anything.
Question management merge statistics in inquiry.
Now, I don't think that we have a way of specifically archiving these pieces.
And we don't have the way that we don't have a deleted status for questions. It's just active or inactive. So yeah, jet. I think that that's going to stick around with just the active inactive piece for now.
Bret Alarcon 20:36
That's it questions for now.
Zach Malloch 20:37
Okay. Well, then, I guess we can touch really briefly on the activity section archive.
Last time, I pointed out that we did have a whole conversation about that I think it was back in, we have a rec chat from Wednesday, June 30, of 2020. Brett, let me know if that sounds right. Or if that sounds way off or not.
Activity,
spell things properly. So activity management, and then we go down to more and we go up, it's actually going to be in Section management. So we'll just look at this for one item to be the same thing for anything, basically.
So actually, I see another question that came up that maybe is a little bit more pertinent about households.
Bret Alarcon 21:29
Do you want to do that question now?
Zach Malloch 21:32
Yeah, let's do that. Remember this?
Can't remember the name of the programs? Now? I remember that this came up last time we talked about it. And
see, it's not just part of household management, if any of our attendees can remind me of exactly where that is.
Bret Alarcon 22:02
what are you looking for, again?
Zach Malloch 22:04
inactive households, because you can basically make households inactive, it's not a purge. It's not an archive, but it can flip them to the inactive if they have not had a last active date, within a certain timeframe.
Bret Alarcon 22:23
Well, Gary said household status update. That sounds very likely.
Zach Malloch 22:32
Also, status change. Yeah, perfect. Thank you, Jerry.
So this is basically it's kind of the same thing is almost the same thing. It's questions, it's really similar as far as the RecTrac logic goes based on it. So based on the last active date, in the last active date is going to be like the last time they had a transaction with you. So if people have not had a transaction, since, let's say, May 1 of 2021, we could say only do this for residents only do it for non residents. Or if you have other categories, you can do so as well, you can have it also inactivate family members or any teams that are linked to it. And when you hit process, this just changes any households that match this status or match this lacks last active date or before
and makes them inactive. And once again, that's not that's nothing that's going to prevent you from getting to those households. It's just that by default, whenever we load a household DataGrid, whether it's household management household inquiry, or in the global sales lookup Screen, it's going to default to not display inactive households. So it's a way of also hiding it unless you specifically change some of your filters. So it's not technically an archive, but it serves a similar purpose.
Right,
or just popped up, Gary, definitely. We're very, very close with that. And that's kind of the nice thing about Menus, you only have to get kind of close to it. You can find it from there. But you do have to remember that first bit.
Bret Alarcon 24:07
marks asks we're looking to offer all our employees a 50% discount all recreation activities, what is the best way to set this up? We would also like to restrict the discount to only activities no POS sales or facility equipment rentals.
Zach Malloch 24:22
All right.
Well, that's a that's getting a little bit outside of the scope. We can come back to that if we have time. I see a couple other questions coming up that might
Bret Alarcon 24:35
sir Joyce wants to know can you delete inactive households?
Zach Malloch 24:39
So not really,
we have you know, anything that has history. We're not really wanting you to delete. So the inactive status is really the way to go with that.
I kind of opened up this history purge
So this is a way that you could kind of target things, you know, once again, we'll get an override. But we could go through this and like, for the various modules, we could turn them on. And we could then delete the history associated with things, but then that does remove it from any reporting capabilities. And that's why it's such a protected area. So yeah, unfortunately, not really a way to delete households, although,
depending on the reason, sometimes they household merge, can do something similar. Like if it was a duplicate household, or even in the case where sometimes we have,
you know, I would love to have a little bit more elegant way of dealing with this, we have some enhancements written up, but we just haven't gotten to those yet. But, you know, in the case of like a deceased family member,
you know, having a different status that would hide it in more cases would be great, we don't really have that right now. So what we often do is we'll suggest that people merge people out of one household and into another household so that then they don't exist in the previous household any longer. We can also do that with entire households, if we merge two households together, the household you're merging from will not exist after you do the merge. So there are certainly conditions where people might think that deleting a house is the best process, but maybe the merge would be a good way to go around that as well.
And, let's see, I think that we can do this really quickly. Tina, I see that you're asking about
archiving passes, and past visits. So that's right from Pass Management. Actually, all of these archive options are from the management Screen for each of these modules. And we can archive either past memberships or past past visits, right from their past past visits, easy to say.
And then let's see, Missy is asking if a if a household isn't inactive, and we try to add a new house, will it find them and not allow it? I don't actually know that off the top of my head.
But I think that we would still do a
household or a duplicate check in that case.
So let me just
use my address here. So we've got a couple of people that are all this are all attached that address, it looks like this is definitely
the household that's inactive. And we'll just temporarily make these guys inactive.
So I have no households, no active households.
Now I just still have some people that are
maybe it's because their family members rather than the households,
we could do it. I mean, I think it would be pretty easy to do a test like this, it's just going to take a little bit of time to, to pull this.
I'd like to kind of get to some of those other questions.
But let's see what else we have.
Bret Alarcon 28:12
Paul came in Section archive question. So you can skip it if necessary. Why is there both a new section date year option and a new section year option?
Zach Malloch 28:24
Right. So that kind of gets into the details of the the activity module and
or an activity section or it's a separate program for activity? That's right.
So Section archive.
So the year is really
I always think of it kind of as a bookmark. So it's kind of the season and the year they get assigned to an activity. And the reason it doesn't always match the actual section dates is because you know, maybe you have something that starts in December and ends in January. And then there's going to be some ambiguity as far as what year do you consider that to be a part of so every time you've ever created an activity section, you have to put in the activity. And then you have our I'm sorry, you have to go to you have to put in the year. And then you also have to put in Section dates. And so the years just really kind of this year plus this season are kind of pieces that make this unique. So if you ever creating a new activity, if you're cloning activity, you have to have the code, the section the season and the year.
It's really just kind of a bookmark to cover those cases of potential ambiguity. The other piece when you're doing the archive for sections is that you can add dates, so you can add just a straight year. So if this happened on May 19 of 2021 then we want it to happen again on May 19 2022. But may 19 of 2021 is a different
Day of the Week. So maybe we want to add just a particular number of days to this.
So if we know that this is 364 days, we get us to the same day of the week. And we actually want it to occur on May 18 of 2022, we can just figure that out, and it'll automatically adjust the section dates.
But yeah, this is, I just think of this as a bookmark. Think of it as a file folder, which you can only choose one folder for the year that you're putting something into, and does this count as a 2021 or 2022 class, even though it kind of spans both of those potentially
make some sense.
Bret Alarcon 30:42
And just help mark out, say, Mark, we have something similar on our system, if you want to email me, we can discuss it outside of this, and it gives us email address and the answers.
Zach Malloch 30:54
Yeah, so just real, real quick to Mark's question. And then we can kind of wrap up here. But for the 50% discount, the the key is basically tying the the households you want to get that discount to something that we have a criteria for. Most commonly it's going to be, you can have a household feature, you could have a household fee code of employee, or internal staff or something along those lines. And I've also occasionally done it with a membership Type. So maybe you'd have an employee membership and kind of the benefit of the employee membership is by default, you can have it expire every year. And so you have to kind of renew it to make sure that everybody is still an employee. And let's say you forget to take it off with somebody after they're let go, or they quit or whatever.
If it's a feature, or if it is a fee code, then that employee could still get that discount until and unless somebody remembers to go and remove that from their account. Whereas if it's a membership, you know, however many months you want to make it by default, it will automatically expire at some point and then theoretically not be renewed if they're if they're not still an employee for you. So, yeah, that's kind of the the key thing, if you have some way of identifying all of your employee households, then it actually becomes pretty easy to create a discount that would then key off of just that, that piece. And by going into something like module management, you could link that discount right at the activity enrollment level. And then that would apply to every single activity section that you have in your system, but not to facilities not to passives, not to inventory items.
Bret Alarcon 32:38
And Missy, I just set it up on my system, I set up an inactive household. Then Chris tried to create a new household with the same information and it definitely does spot it as a duplicate household.
Zach Malloch 32:50
So awesome. Thanks for having him back with that one. Bret.
Okay.
Bret Alarcon 32:58
Tish has a question you mentioned two weeks ago, you had an activity archive meeting, I didn't see it in RecChat or knowledge base, or what I look for that particular tutorial.
Zach Malloch 33:11
So let's just see now if we go to the rec chat archive, and I think once again that it was something along
let's see,
January 30, not June 30, January 30th 2020, the activity archive slash transfer to history. And you can see we went a little bit long with that one. So it should be a fairly good discussion. Also, there is a topic doc about this. So if I go to activity section archive, and I Click on one of these little eyes, if I scroll back up to the top, there's a topic doc for archiving. This is this probably should just say activity archiving, because that's what it is. So then it talks about archiving sections and our cut well also does the X there and takes you all that through that whole process.
So January 30, of 2020 is the RecChat. And then there is a topic doc if you just search for archiving in the help.
Welcome Tish, and that brings us just past. Thanks, everybody for sticking around. Good information, different information, although we definitely covered some of the same things. And we did hit record on this one. So this will be available by tomorrow, I guess, Brett, for anybody that wants to review it to do so. And we will see you in the next RecTrac
Bret Alarcon 34:46
Thanks everyone.
Zach Malloch 34:48
And see you later.