Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this special Thanksgiving episode of RecChat, our host Bret Alarcon is joined by EDU Manager, Zach Malloch to bring together departments to share what they are thankful for and to give some tips and tricks that may help you better serve your community.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:09
well, and welcome to RecTrac slash CatTrack. I'll give it over to you for the intro Bret, but I thought this would be a fun way to start the session
Bret Alarcon 0:19
At ease. They look like they're hungry. Anyway, welcome to today's RecChat Everyone, I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So for today's RecChat, we kinda like to like slow down, and we invite everybody out there to tell us what you're thankful for. We would also like to give you some tips and tricks, it's our giving portion of the session. And we want to share with you what we liked for tips and tricks and RecTrac. And we also invite you to share with your fellow peers, what would it be a good tip and trick for someone else, maybe you know, you have that special trick that use save up your sleeve that you tell everybody that you know, in your department? Well, now's your chance to tell everybody across the board. So before we start, we're going to do a little bit different for the question answer. We want you to put either your tip and trick or what you're thankful for, in the questions area that's a little bit easier for us to kind of sort through and make sure everybody gets heard, when it goes in the comments kind of got lost amongst the crowd. So if you do have some special comment to that you want to put feel free to use the comment section as well. With that, I'm going to hand it over to you, Zach.
Zach Malloch 1:40
Thank you, Brett. How are you doing today?
Bret Alarcon 1:42
Doing all right, busy day, but it's good day.
Zach Malloch 1:46
Yeah. Well, the intro kind of showed a little bit of what I'm thankful for. And so we adopted a stray. And on Halloween, we came back to three of these little guys hanging out. And it's the first time I've had a cat that had kittens since I was a little kid. And it's pretty awesome process to be going through. So I'm really grateful for that. And I just really like that. They're contributing. What's your favorite RecTrac trick? Trick? Just being cute. But anyway, yeah, no, Stacy, I don't think anything does beat baby animals. It was a little bit cheating. Maybe. But But yeah. Bret, what are you thankful for?
Bret Alarcon 2:42
This year, I've been thankful for, you know, staying at home and getting to you know, eat lunch with my kids, other than, you know, just going out to eat. Whenever it's just so nice being home, even with the kids hanging out with the kids on little breaks and stuff like that. And I think it's great for them to just being around.
Zach Malloch 3:00
Yes,
Bret Alarcon 3:01
definitely. The biggest thing I think I can think of this year.
Zach Malloch 3:04
Yeah, that's a that's a good one, maybe even slightly better than cats. Although I'll argue with you on that one. Jamie says that he's thankful for sets, rules, fees, and questions, go sets. Also cats are cool. So yeah, I think that's a good thing to be thankful for. We're also of course, very thankful for everybody that comes and engages with us in these rec chat sessions and in the virtual symposiums. And we know that there are so many people that would have come and see us, come to see us in person. But it was awesome to have the virtual symposium sessions and have so much popularity in those virtual symposiums in October and get to talk to so many different people. And Julia, our other EDU member, unfortunately, is not able to be here. But she wanted to share that she's beyond grateful for the openness and collaborative nature of people at Vermont systems customers included. Being surrounded by an open community has made her learning so much easier and less stressful. And she's also very grateful for the outdoors, no matter what is going on the world when I can escape to a simple walk in the woods or the beach, I am at peace. So that's a really, I think that was really great. I'm glad that she was able to share that with us.
Zach Malloch 4:17
So I think we'd like to do is kind of pepper in little tips and tricks and gratitude and thankfulness is this is a very experimental session, there's no wrong way for it to go. So if anybody has anything that they want to add, please do I'll kind of started off with a tip I see Krista has one there too. But I'll get to that in just a moment. So let me share my Screen. This is probably something a lot of people are aware of. But it's one of those things that if you aren't aware of it, it could be a really nice thing to know about. And it's in sections. So I'm just going to choose one of my activities here and then I'm going to go into my sections. And let's go into I'll just do this guy So we have our custom schedules and holidays. And there's a little bit of a subtlety as far as how this works. So, if I come in here, if I add one thing, or if I add like three or four different things, if I just say like, this is going to be, let's say, Thanksgiving, and this is a holiday, and all I do is I put in the date and the holiday, maybe I put it in the beginning time, anytime in facility, that's okay. But basically, this means it's a skip date, you're not going to meet on this day. And if I hit save, that's fine to just have that there. As long as it's only holidays, only skip dates on this custom schedule, then you can just put in the holidays, if it becomes more than just holidays, if it is a custom schedule, like let's say one day of your session, you're going to meet at a different location or different time. As soon as you put an alternative to the main schedule, you really want to be building out the entire schedule in this area. And the easiest way to do that is just hit bulk create, it uses all these dates and time settings that come directly from the section as it's already set up, you hit continue. And then it's just building out the individual dates and times for everything that is included for this particular section and all those meeting dates.
Zach Malloch 6:12
And then you just come to the individual date and time that you want to change, let's say, on the 24th, we're going to be going to a different gazebo, we're not going to be a gazebo two. So we'll double Click on that, we'll choose a different facility from the list. So let's just go to room 454. For this one day. The basic thing is, if you have anything that doesn't have this Toggle, it's going to actually look at this area exclusively. And it's not going to look at your dates and times on your actual section, it's only going to care about the custom dates and times. Once again, if it's only holidays, it's only skipped dates, then it will look at the main schedule for your regular schedule. And they'll only look for this for your skip dates. But that's my little tip and trick. Somebody asked a question about that. And I realized that maybe it's not something that we run into all that often. And I see, let's go ahead and stop sharing my Screen, I'll share it again, if we need to display something. We'll get to Chris's tip in just a moment. But Donna says that she is thankful that she retired earlier this year and still able to work part time at a job in love and still get to be part of the Vermont systems and RecTrac family.
Zach Malloch 7:24
The virtual symposium this year was great since I was able to attend was wondering if anybody knows if there's an easier way to make a one day change to an activity reservation, like it was in the GUI version. Currently, I have to change the entire reservation now. So we can kind of talk about that. So I think that actually kind of sticks are kind of extends beyond what or it fits in with what I was just talking about with the custom schedule. So I think that that would definitely be a way around it. But I'm thinking that you might be talking about like if we come down to miscellaneous settings, and you see that there's already a reservation number here. So you've already built out your activity, you've already built out your schedule, and you've already made those reservations. In my experience, you really want to as much as possible, start at the activity side, make your changes here. And then there's a bulk reservation. Well, we'll fix that later. Thanks RecTrac. If we go to the activities, reservations, so here we go reserve facility. So right from here, we have the option to make the facility reservations. Or we can do reservation cancellations. So if we do the reservation, cancellations, we take it into process and override warnings. And we choose the activity that we made the reservation for previously, this will cancel it. And then we can basically just immediately go in and save facility reservations and hit process and that will remake the reservations with the updated dates and times on your activity. So it is kind of still canceling the reservation. But you can do it all as one thing rather than going in and individually modifying individual dates. So hopefully that helps Donna.
Zach Malloch 9:13
And let's see. Karissa says that if you're making a slight change to an activity section, and you want to see the change automatically on WebTrac, without having to run the scheduled events, the search index builder, just add a character with short description and refresh the page and notice how quick it is. So there's a little subtlety to what Karissa is saying there, but my reports haven't run in a little while, I need to restart my computer and get my scheduler back up and running. But so what she's referring to is on WebTrac. If we take a look at activities as a performance feature, we take the details that you put in about the activities into RecTrac and then we index those and by indexing we just basically do all the calculations for your rules and your fee calculations using the model households attached to the daily processing Profile. So we take those we do these calculations, kind of in the background, and then we store the results. So we know basically how much it costs for a resident, how much it costs for a non resident. So we can display the fees, if we have them, we can just or I don't have fees on this particular example in my WebTrac. But that indexer is a performance enhancement Type of thing. We're doing those calculations on a scheduled basis kind of one by one as you update things in RecTrac. So that we're not running the full calculation every time somebody does a search for which activities they can take or whatever. That's a big, big process saver.
Zach Malloch 10:41
So what Karissa was saying is, if you wanted to see if something's updated, let's say, maybe you find an activity that you haven't, that that's displaying something a little bit incorrect on the web, maybe the fees aren't exactly right, or it's not showing the description that you have, sometimes the process of indexing the database gets, kind of paused, the search index builder stops running, or there's something that gets kind of stuck in the queue for that. And we kind of miss this thing. So if you do any change to the section, that is basically what prompts RecTrac to re index that item. So if we just change the description, if we call this basic flat, dash dash water, or basic slash flat space, water, like anything, even if it's a change in the description, or the comment, that will initiate a re index, and then in the next 55 seconds or so, assuming that your scheduled events are running, it will update. So that's that, I think, is what Karissa is going for there. So just a real quick thing, if you're trying to force an update, just change almost anything as small as it might be about the activity that will prompt that reindexing. Thank you very much for that, Karissa. And I see that Edie is thankful for the peer created RecTrac User Group on Slack. And I've actually been meaning to join that to kind of have an observational role. But I'm very excited to see what you guys are coming up with over there. And actually, Eddie, I'll ask you, and I'll ask anybody else if, if anybody has shared any tips or tricks on that board, if maybe you could bring in a few over here, and we could share them with larger group. Bret, did you have any tips or tricks to share? You're muted right now, by the way.
Bret Alarcon 12:29
Yeah, I'm thinking and thinking and I know there has to be a bunch that I can think of a one put on this. It's just like,
Zach Malloch 12:37
there's so much to RecTrac. What's a tip?
Bret Alarcon 12:42
I. Yeah, I guess I guess the biggest thing is, if you really learn how the deep dive into any of the data grids that might make your life much easier, just customize the data grids and building your own data grid that makes sense to you. I know that RecTrac has a lot of fields that people might not even use, maybe you know, like the subcategory or things like that. So if you just hide those or move those and just just get a data grid that looks right to you, I think that might make other people's lives easier. And I know that it can be you know, time consuming to go through. And it's hard to find the time to do something like that. But honestly, if you take the time now, it might save you in the future.
Zach Malloch 13:29
Yeah, I've always said that. If you have one area in the entire system to really get to know, data grids are kind of the one thing that will significantly boost your your RecTrac knowledge and consistency with everything. So yeah, and Kristin is actually adding on to that, because she's very thankful for the templates and the DataGrid. And I think those are also a very useful thing and potentially an underused thing. Let's just talk about that for one second. So I'll share my Screen again here. Look, I have a DataGrid already up. So the neat thing that I like about templates. And this is something that some people kind of are maintenance. Sometimes, if I go to Options, and I go to shows settings, I can of course configure what columns I see I can change the order that they're going to be in and everything like that. But when you create a template, it also saves all of the filters that you have configured up here in the DataGrid. So like just for an example, if I put in, C center as my location, and that's filtered. If I go and I show settings and I create a new template. So we'll call this C center. Create that as a template and close it.
Zach Malloch 14:42
So if I go to my defaults, I have everything here. If I go to my template for C center, it applies that filter as well as any of the other configurations I've got. And when you're creating these templates, you can make them available for everybody or just for yourself. So yeah, very, very useful things and part of That DataGrid kind of capability. So very good place to invest some skills. And we happen to have a couple of I think pretty good RecTrac labs or one really good RecChat RecTrac Lab about the DataGrid. So if anybody's looking for a little bit of us being silly and talking about DataGrid, so you have that as an option also. And then I see some other stuff coming up. And actually, Bret, I was going to mention that, I think Julia sent something to both of us, and I think she had a tip or two. So if you wanted to look at those emails, and maybe have another moment, you could bring those up.
Bret Alarcon 15:37
Gotta see, whenever you're ready.
Zach Malloch 15:39
Awesome. Yeah, Jamie is offered another tip. When experimenting with report templates, make a clone first in case you need to abandon or go back a step. And I'll expand that from Jamie's point too. That's a really, really great one is RecTrac makes it very easy to clone. So you get an exact duplicate of something, whether it's a report template, and activity and activity section, a facility a pass or whatever, or your entire database. When you do a live Demo copy, you're literally cloning your entire database, making an exact copy of it with different coloration in the Demo site. But you can do anything you want to to a cloned record, and then delete it basically. So you don't have to worry about interfering with anything that people are actively using. If you're in your live database, and you're doing a cloning, like let's say you clone a section and you're just experimenting with it, you do you want to be kind of careful. Because if it's WebTrac section, you might clone it, and then that clone might show up immediately on the web, for somebody to potentially register for this test activity that you're just playing around with. So you don't want to be a little bit careful with some records on that side. If you're in the Demo database, those rules kind of go out the Window. Theoretically, none of your customers should have any access to your Demo database ever. So you don't have to worry about actual transactions happening there and interfering with the way that you're testing stuff up, testing things out. But very, very good point, Jamie. And that can apply even beyond that.
Bret Alarcon 17:06
Anything that pretty much involves some sort of template, great idea to make a clone first in case you mess something up.
Zach Malloch 17:12
Yeah, exactly. All right. So let's see. So Sonia has a question for us and for the community. Can the brochure modules or activities by category, then start date and start time basically like all of our art classes throw together, but then listed by the start date? So actually that question, Sonia, depending on your brochure interface, that is something that is potentially different between many of our customers, starting with way long ago, 9.4 9.5, a six, whatever, like long time ago. And for a long time, we've been doing kind of custom activity brochures. So it's not only the way that it formats, when you run the report to get the brochures in a way that you can basically send to your publisher, they can fit it into your publication. But it also includes the details of the program that you use to run those brochures. So what filters do you have? What sort options do you have? And all that sort of thing? That might be something that we need to have you talk about, potentially, with our developers updating it so that you can include those filters or those sorts of options? But I don't think there's a real simple, programmatic answer to your question, unfortunately, without looking into exactly how your brochure is working. So I would just send you to support, start a support case with them and ask them if they can show you how to do that. They'll take a look at your account, see if you have a custom brochure and work through that with you or they'll be able to to facilitate you talking to development to to get an enhancement to the way your brochure works.
Zach Malloch 18:57
All right. How do you delete reports that you have created. So this report output management would probably be where I would send you to begin with. So I'll go ahead and share my Screen here again. And if I go to report, so if you go to just report output, or a report, report output listing, you won't be able to delete things from there. That's kind of the difference between management and listing is the ability to edit and delete things. So if you're just going into output listing, you'll see all of the templates that you've created, or the other people in your department have created, but there's no control over those. If you go to report output management, however, anything that counts as a custom report, so anything that's not a VSI standard, you can highlight and you can go to more and then you can delete it from there. So hopefully that helps you at least just report output management rather than listing is the key for that. Bret, let's switch back to you if you have a tip from Julia or anything else,
Bret Alarcon 20:07
yeah, let me get Julie's email up. All right, Julius, that might be helpful for customers as to have a full understanding of what they want to do and why, from a business standpoint. So what is your goal as a customer, and what is the big picture, understanding your goal can guide you to towards the appropriate help and or can help support point you in the right direction. For example, if you might ultimately want to reach a goal z, but to do so you also need an understanding of x and y, if you lack understanding of x and y, start with help there before delving into z. So yeah, it sounds like she says, you know, just kind of take things one step at a time and make sure you understand not only what you want, how to get to where you want to go.
Zach Malloch 20:55
And actually I'll add a little piece to that as well. You know, from Bret and my time and support queue and taking calls from everybody. The sometimes being very clear on your end result, rather than what you think the individual steps are, can be very useful. Very frequently, we'll have people call in and say, oh, I need to change this criteria on this one thing. And I need to do this other piece. And it can be kind of confusing to start out with. But if you start from the point of what you're trying to accomplish as your end goal, then a lot of times that makes us eat makes it easier for us to consider all of the possible options and capabilities that the system has and point you in a direction. So sometimes when you have an idea I want to do, and we'll use the algebra that Julia was talking about, I want to do Z. And you just say I want to do z, then we can pick from all the other letters of the alphabet to try to get you to Z. But if you want to say I need to do q, r, s, t, u and v in that's all you're telling us because you want to get to z, then like we can spend a lot of time trying to work a very specific scenario out where if we really understood what your end goal was, we might have been able to think of something that would be a little bit more expansive, or a little bit more simple to create. So that's my little thought to that.
Bret Alarcon 22:19
I'm sure everybody's been there, just in life in general, just you know, trying to figure something out by you know, diving right in and just doing what you think is right. But then someone comes along, it's like, Oh, why don't you just do this? And then poof, everything's just so much easier.
Zach Malloch 22:35
Oh, man, I'm waiting for somebody to poof make the rest of my life. If anybody has that capability, let me know, please. Kristen has a tip here. When making questions to use for a set or especially for report output, add a prefix related to set to easily find it when assigning it to that set report, question or answer. And I like this as a tip very much for the entire database. So when we talk about whenever anybody here went through their implementation, if anybody has the activity module, which I think everybody I mean, it's almost a universal module with RecTrac, there's very few people who get it without the activity module, we talk about the importance of a numbering scheme, having some sort of coding that makes the numbers mean something to you. So when you create a new activity, you know what number to use, you're not just randomly assigning the next, the next one to it. So in that case, we're using like, the season kind of works as a prefix for the activity number. And then the group or the category or the Type or the location is another piece that's encoded into that. So Kristin is suggesting is just extend that idea of making kind of representational pieces of your code. So that it's easier to find the things and make sure that you're you're picking and selecting the right items. And I think maybe Point Of Sale items, inventory stuff is one of the the more broadly used areas for this Type of thing. Like if you have a concession stand at the pool versus a concession stand at the golf course versus one at your restaurant or, or snack bar at the senior center, you might have a different prefix for all of those, you might have Coke, but Coke is going to exist to all three of those locations. And you need to track the inventory separately. So you'd have an abbreviation or a prefix that would represent each of those locations. You know, what things are associated there. This is kind of an extension of that as well.
Bret Alarcon 24:24
Yeah, the Army does heavily prefixes, and every single prefix pertains to, you know, certain location or certain item. And actually, it comes in super handy when you're doing it. Like say, a new site opens up, you need to Build inventory for that site. Well, the first thing they do is pretty much clone, the closest thing that might be related to that site, so clone all the inventory, give it a new brand new prefix, and then can just go through and start easily building their inventory from there and then just deleting whatever they don't actually have.
Zach Malloch 24:58
Yeah, so I kind of have followed roughly that idea when I was building out some of this stuff. And I do so much in my database, I don't really keep consistent with almost anything. But we see that we have kind of like a 35 prefix for a lot of different things. And so those are grouped together. So you see them together, we have aqu for aquatic stuff. So these are all aquatics related, go down to general stuff down here. But it makes it very easy to filter and to sort. So you find the things that are all associated with each other. So the more we make the codes for items, be the questions, sets, fees, rules, inventory, activities, facilities, courts, anything in RecTrac. If we can make their codes mean something, then those codes are going to be kind of the primary and initial thing that we use to group things together, no matter where you go into RecTrac. Of course, we all have ancillary things and extra pieces, categories, Type subtypes, and sort with those sorts of things as well. And I certainly recommend you do but the idea of kind of database organization is kind of the, the broader point where we're getting to here and how useful that is.
Bret Alarcon 26:02
And suffix is to Army does a lot of suffixes. So like if they have, you know, five different types of burger you have burger o one, O two, O three. So the benefit of that is you suffixes, then you can start creating next categories of pizza. But then if you ever, if you have burger going pizza, in your inventory list, and you ever have to add another burger, luckily just put oh seven on the end of the burger, and it just fits right in with all the other burgers. So Sunday. Yeah,
Zach Malloch 26:31
and exactly the same thing with activity, you know, if you have activity, moving from one one to is your prefix for something and you have a lot of different activities under that, you could have theoretically 999 activities under that prefix. And then you have 114, you start making some stuff for that you realize you need to go back to the one one threes and add something in it then is still associated with those areas, because you still have room to fit it into that grouping. So yeah, some really good database configuration tips there will certainly take anything else that you guys have. One other thing that I like to kind of point out with reports, especially it's kind of my my pet tip, although we we definitely covered it during the virtual symposiums very recently. But if I run one of these reports, this is all about the the report dates. So normally, kind of the most direct way to get into using dates for anything is just using these actual dates and you choose a calendar. And so this is a fixed date, this will always be 716 1985. Anytime I run it anytime I schedule it or whatever. It's always referencing that particular date. I like However, any of the other things down here, which I consider to be relative dates. So if I say today, well, that changes based on when I run this, if I run it, today, it's going to run for November 18. If I run it tomorrow, they'll run for October or November 19. Today changes based on what date you actually run it. And we also have the ability, if we use positive numbers, we're adding to this. So this would be today plus three, or I could do today minus two or just today minus one to get that yesterday value.
Zach Malloch 28:14
So if I'm always running my cash journal the first time when I come in in the morning, maybe I just have it set to today minus one and then whenever I run it, it's always running for the previous day's events. So I can kind of review it and see what's going on, it becomes hugely or maybe even paramountly important when you're scheduling reports. So you're not always getting the exact same report, just showing you one day's worth of information, sending it to today will always be whatever the most recent days information was. So that's kind of a last tip that I'll just throw out there that I think most people have probably had, but it extends to other things. So like if we choose beginning of the month, if that's a zero, then that means the beginning of November, if there's a one, that means the beginning of December. And if it's a negative one, that means beginning of October. So it's applying that calculation to now this month variable. So yeah, just another quick one right there. And that brings us basically to the end of the session. Edie I just signed up for your Slack. So I'll be able to take a look at that in a moment and see what you guys are doing over there. I encourage anybody else to to do that. If you want to get a little bit more of this community goodness that we've been so lucky to develop here in RecChat, and the virtual symposiums and everything.
Zach Malloch 29:34
Kim is asking what is Slack? Slack is a group collaboration chat. And it's almost like a little forum Type of thing, but also has chat. It also has document management. It's basically an online community so people can ask a question. You see the question there and anybody that's interested in responding to it can respond to it, and collaborate. So it's a collaborative communication learning tool. If you have Microsoft teams to a lesser extent, Facebook workplace, or I guess now it's Meta, whatever. There's there's other tools that are like this. Slack was one of the first ones that came out as a big like team collaboration, chat. Oh, and Joelle is saying that the state of Illinois users have one is well, Debbie runs that one. And we can consider connecting with them to add to that as well. So maybe Edie or somebody that's involved with the slack could also talk to Debbie from Bolingbrook and see if we can consolidate or maybe we'll just have a regional and then we could have a battle royale at the end of the year or something like that. See who's got the most slack information. But I love that also, that's something I'm very grateful for is our community here that contributes and makes suggestions and talks to us and gives feedback and helps each other out. So that's a really great place to kind of in this. Any final thoughts Bret?
Bret Alarcon 31:06
That I can really think of, I just hope everybody has a good Thanksgiving and enjoys, enjoys the holidays.
Zach Malloch 31:13
Yeah, if you're traveling, be careful. If you're not traveling, be careful. Everybody, just be careful. There's a lot of things going on out there. We're still in a pandemic, a lot of people don't really seem to act like it. I'm not going to get too political with anything. But get your boosters and be careful if you lean that direction. And just stay safe and keep your people safe. And we'll talk to you after Thanksgiving. So Happy Holidays. enjoy time with friends and family as much as you can. And we'll see all of our friends and family here the Thursday after So, we'll see you in December. Thanks all
Bret Alarcon 31:49
Take care, bye.