Table of Contents
Episode Summary
The Document Center is an integral part of RecTrac, but you usually don't have to interact with it directly. That being said, it's a very useful area of the program to know more about, particularly if you're looking for something you've previously printed or created in RecTrac. Join us for a discussion all about how this part of the program keeps all of you receipts, reports, printed memberships, and so much more, organized!
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:08
hello, and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So in today's RecChat, Zack is going to be talking about the Document Center. So you may use it all the time. But there might be some things you don't know about the doc center. So stick around and see if there's anything that you can learn. So before we start, if you have any questions, please ask them in the q&a section. That's a little Button down at the bottom. Or if you have any comments, we also have that chat down there too, where you can just make your comments. And with that, I'll hand it over to Zack, how are you doing today, Zack?
Zach Malloch 0:42
Pretty good. Bret, how about yourself.
Bret Alarcon 0:45
All right. So documents Center. Huh.
Zach Malloch 0:48
Oh, yeah. So I mean, it's something that you might use all the time. But it's also something that maybe you don't use, you could certainly go your entire RecTrac career without having to use the documents center. But we like getting into some of the esoterica of RecTrac every so often here as well. Let me go ahead and share my Screen and we'll go ahead and get into it. That's my email don't need to worry about that. There's my RecTrac Screen. So let's just dive right in. So the Document Center is where basically any documents that live inside of your database exists. So when by default, there are ways of changing this. But by default, whenever you create a receipt, it actually is stored in the database in RecTrac 3.1. In previous versions, it was stored in a separate folder. But it's actually all inside the database. The benefit of this is it's one thing to backup, you backup your database, and you have all of your receipts backed up, you don't have to backup any other doctor document directories or anything like that. Whenever you run a report, it also stores the report in the Document Center. It will also include all your brochure exports, your background checks, there's a lot of different things that end up getting stored in here. Pretty much the only time that you have to come into the Document Center. And maybe somebody can come up with another use. But when you do an export file, so if anybody's ever worked in Demo and set up rules or fees, or a new activity or a new facility, or you're working on your test migration, and you were setting things up, and then you export it so that you can import it into your, your live database, you do have to come into the documents center and find your export files. So if I did a fees export, when I hit export, it would say this will be created in your Document Center. And I actually can actually get into that real quick here, if I just jumped into that section report, let's get management doesn't actually matter if I have an end, since it's all contains. And there's activity management. And we'll just get to anything at all that has rules or fees linked directly to it. There we go.
Zach Malloch 3:03
So if I export these fees, I can choose everything that's linked directly to this activity. And it's going to have this file name, I hit export, it says open the documents center to view or download the file. So I hit close there, come back to the documents center, make sure I'm in the export files. By default, it's always going to be in reports. But then if I refresh this template, this DataGrid. Now I can see that export file, it's an XML file, so I can just grab it from here, and then import it into another database. And that would be from right here, I would just say import fees, I would navigate to wherever I downloaded that XML file and get it from there. And actually, that's another function of what the Document Center can do is anything that lives inside of the database, I can get out of the database. So XML will not open natively. So I just hit open, and it's going to prompt me to download that file, it just finished that download up there in the corner. So then we're kind of that's really what the Document Center is all about. Now, this does interact with other elements of RecTrac in a few different ways. One of them is the actual database construction. So if we go into this DB extent, check here, let's go to extent, this is technical, most of you will probably not need to worry about this. But this actually represents the physical configuration of your database as it exists on the server. It shows you all of the size. So the used size is the size that actually shows up. Actually, I'm sorry, I believe it's the file system size. That is actually what's on your disk. The size is how much of that is actually being used. We can see like in this case, I have a larger sized extent and what is going to be used inside of it right here. We get some information about whether the extents are full or how much is still available in that extent. And if we ever needed to, we could add more right from here. Now we don't really need to worry about exactly what's going on with this. The main reason I wanted to show you is the Document Center really mostly controls things that are in this blob area. And blob is really fun to say. But it also stands for binary large objects.
Zach Malloch 3:03
So a PDF file counts as a binary large object, it's the way I kind of think of it is something that exists that can exist outside of RecTrac. And be read by other things. That's kind of a blob file. So photos, PDFs, the XML files, CSV files, the rest of it is storing the actual database content. So all of your activity records, your transaction history, your household records, your family members, and all their associations with everything else. So these are obviously kind of large files. And we're getting into a variable extent here, this will keep filling up until it reaches this one gigabyte space. But because I actually have some extra room in this one, that's going to keep filling up this extent before we start using this one, which is why this is still fairly modestly sized. So that's something to consider here is if I jump into my reports, so I can just Type it in here. There's my reports. And if I want to see documents, newer than, let's say, 2017, in my database, this is going to show that I have over 1231, that's with my user. And we're seeing we're going all the way back to 2017. In this case. And so we've got a lot of these reports. Now, how useful is it to keep a report in the system for this much time? Well, that's really for you to determine. Now, if you have recently installed RecTrac, then you most likely already have a document purge scheduled event. If you don't have this, we can go or you can double check this if you go to scheduled events management, it might be called something different. But the name of the program should be document purge. So if we look at this and just Type in docu, we can see that I've got this one entry created. Now I just created this today, because I've had this database forever. And I've I don't have this set up by default, I think that we default to either 90 or 120 days back. So it'll keep between three and four months of reports and then it will start clearing them out and deleting them so that they're not taking up database size. Now we can always manually run this by going to the document purge program, it's not loading the Screen, so I will reload it. That document purge right from the RecTrac menu. And it's not wanting to load ahead and log out back in because it was working before. Just make sure that there's no session settings that are causing issues with that.
Zach Malloch 8:21
There we go. So we can choose specifically what sort of documents and generally speaking, you can pretty much choose everything other than receipts. Receipts are the ones that you're really wanting to keep. You know, whatever your tax basis is, we usually recommend that you keep it around those lines. If in doubt, ask finance what you want a record of your financial transactions in a PDF format to cover and even if you purge your receipts, you can still run all of your GL distribution reports your cash Journal reports, you just will never be able to reprint a receipt that's been purged. So that's a huge Asterix on this. Now, if you already have something configured, you're most likely going to have it basically like this. And we can see all the different types of documents actually, probably you would not want these to be cleared. Or you might want these to be on like a two or three year basis depending on what Type of documents you might linking to and households or family members or teams or to staff. Those tend to be things that you want to keep around a lot longer log files, gift certificates passes. These are the PDF version of the pass, you can always recreate it by just reprinting a pass for a customer. You can rerun your reports at any time you can rerun statements, you can reprint tickets, so these are pretty safe to clear out on whatever frequency you wish to do. So by default this is set to be today's. So if we are going to do today's reports, we can just leave it as zero. So then whenever this runs, it deletes all reports in your database that have been run. And so that means you're always going to need to rerun reports if you want to get something again. You can not use your documents in To find previously printed reports, because they're all going to be purged. More commonly, we'd see something like 120. And we put a negative sign in there. And then we would process this and schedule it. Actually, I think because I have statements included, yeah, it gave me that extra Field that asked me to export files. And so I couldn't schedule that. As long as we're ignoring receipts and statements, then we can schedule this and we can run it with whatever frequency you would want. And once a month, once a day, whatever the case might be a follows the exact same scheduling logic that reports do. So if you know how to set up a scheduled report, you know how to schedule this event. And then that will just keep the database a little bit more manageable as far as size goes.
Zach Malloch 10:43
Now, as far as like, if you're actually on the IT side, and you're looking at the server, the physical space that database takes up on the server is not going to change after this, it's just going to grow more slowly after you run this because it's not having to create more database extents space just to store more and more documents as you go, you're you're clearing a lot of that up. And the way I often try to, I think this is pretty good analogy. Imagine you have a house, and you have enough possessions that you fill up that house. And so you need more space. So you put on an extension to the house. And now you have more room to put more stuff. Well, if you clear the stuff out of that room, you're probably not going to demolish that room. So the floor space of your house is still larger than it was beforehand. It's just you have that empty space. So you can fill it up with more things before you didn't need to make another extension here. So hopefully that analogy works for people. Now, the, as far as that use case going back to that. And of course, if anybody has any questions, please let us know. So there's our family member documents, we can go to all document types. And you know, of course, once again, if we go back to like, let's say 2020. Here, we can see 1500 different types of documents between receipts and records and exports and template design studios for your passes, and all that sort of stuff. And we can also decide whether we want to see things that are just run by my user. Or I can expand this and I can see things run by any user in the database. So maybe I'm looking specifically for things that were done on the web. And we want to set it to, there we go. So we actually have a much larger base. So out of 27,000 records, only 44 of those in my database were generated by the www user. So it's a way to really quickly filter things down potentially, by the way that if you're looking for something that one particular user in your database has done, there's way to do that you can also individually delete documents. So this PNG file, I guess that's probably a recorded signature or something along those lines. If I wanted to delete something specifically, I can highlight it, and I can delete it from here. In this case, it's saying it's part of the link documents. So yeah, this probably relates to a receipt. So we're not going to be able to delete that one. But if we went to reports, and probably my www user doesn't have any reports and the DataGrid is just taking a little bit of time to reload. Because we're querying for so much time here. Theoretically, you wouldn't have this many things. I had somebody run a household roster at one point.
Zach Malloch 13:33
So I could manually delete this one file if I wanted to. Now, of course, there's potentially an issue like if you have a lot of your stuff locked down. So you don't want certain users at the Senior Center to see the stuff the aquatic users are doing. And vice versa. Maybe you wouldn't want somebody to be able to switch to all users from my users, maybe you always want to just make it so they can only see their stuff in here. Or maybe you want to make it so they can't delete records in the documents center. So you might not be surprised to find out that we have permissions that control that. And permissions are generally controlled via the permission Profile. So we jump in here, and it's going to be on our third tab. Once this loads up. And then under our override permissions, if we scroll down a little bit, we have our document user access allow override, and we have delete other's documents allow override. So can you see other people's documents and can you delete other people's documents? So if you can't see them, it doesn't matter what you have for the deletion? If you can't delete them, or if you can't switch it. I see a question came in from chat Terra is asking Will the purge clear inactive households? And no it will not the document purge will not clear inactive households So this is only dealing with the documents the things that you can find in This Document Center. Now, if we wanted to go into purging old households, we do have a household purge Button, separate topic, but this is how you would do that here. And we can do it based on inactive dates, or we can just say purge all inactive households based on the respective dates, so they don't have to be have been manually flagged to be inactive. And then they'd have to fall within these dates. So hopefully that helps with that. Any other questions coming in? So far? Bret?
Bret Alarcon 15:37
None more? None. No more at this time.
Zach Malloch 15:41
No more at this time. Okay, so the other thing I guess we will talk about with the documents center, we'll go back to kind of discussing the reason that you would use it, let's go back just one year. So we're not dealing with so much content, we'll just switch to all document types, we'll still be a fair number of documents, keep it active just being mind user. And then we will clear this filter once it's loads. So 675 documents that's more manageable as far as things go. So the first thing as far as filtering things down, like if we're looking for something in particular, well, why would we come in here to look for something, and the basic reason is, it is probably going to be a time saver, to come in and grab a report that already exists. As long as it's easy to find, rather than rerunning that report, especially if maybe you have end of month sort of stuff. And you're running a report from the beginning of like a GL distribution report from the beginning of the year through the end of October, or the beginning of the year, through the end of September, the beginning of the year through the end of August. So those reports will all exist in here. And because we're telling it to do such a wide date range, it can take a while to run those reports. So if you ran it, and then somebody says, Hey, can you send that to me, and you realize you didn't save it, you never emailed it, so you don't have anywhere outside of RecTrac to get it. If you know when you ran it, you can come in, you can filter this down. So you're only looking at reports. And then we can filter this. So we're only looking at GL distribution reports. And or maybe we put in the dates. So let's see if I want something that contains 12 As far as the number of months. And so that's set to contains rather than greater than or equal to. And so now we've got a filter down there 262 records out of 567. If we wanted to look down a little bit further, we've got some stuff. We'll say 501 is actually what we're looking for. So oh five down to one. And so now that's filtering it down even further. So I'm only seeing my, my stuff that's contains that detail.
Zach Malloch 17:57
So if you can easily find the reports, then it is faster to just come in here, and you open it and it'll just display the report, you don't have to send anything to the server, I obviously have a lot of these that are blank, because I don't use my database for transactions every single day. But you don't have to send the report to the server, it's not going to take up any resources on the server while it's processing. It's you can just go and have to wait for it to turn chug through and grab all the data that you're requesting here, it's already been done, all you're doing is having the database look internally find that document and then present it to you. So that's the main thing that I think people would be using the documents center for. Of course, if you are doing this and you want to look for receipts, we'll get rid of that contains because receipts don't have dashes in them. But you can see receipts all have a very similar format, where we're patting the numbers. So we've got 1-234-567-8910 spaces 10 characters to create your receipts from. So as long as you either have the receipt number, and you have this set to contains. Or if you want to Type in the entire thing, you just need to make sure that you have enough leading zeros to make the entire number 10 digits long. And then you can find the receipt, although probably receipt reprint is going to be your more accessible piece, especially if you have like front desk clerks, it makes a lot more sense to have them get that dedicated program. So they're not going to have to worry about switching their document Type and typing something in manually. They're more going to just do it by the date or just putting in the receipt number, whatever that is or looking up the household or using the filters down here. So probably it's easier to do a receipt reprint directly from here rather than the documents center. But just wanted to kind of expose that part of the program to everybody and share what it does and Maybe give a little bit of information as far as why it might be useful or when you might need to run it. Or if you do end up needing to use it as some sort of utility. Now you just have that in the back of your head that oh, there's this other place that I might be able to go and work things out. Let me just check my crib notes here, exporting, grabbing reports, finding receipts, permissions, DB configuration, automatic purges. Yeah, I think we've got basically what I wanted to cover here. So this can be a short and sweet session for sure. If anybody does have any questions, this would be an ideal time to ask them. Or if you have any comments, have you actually used the Document Center before? If so? Did you use it for any reasons that I didn't cover here? That'd be kind of a nice thing to talk about with everybody.
Bret Alarcon 20:52
We just got a question. Can I manage the receipt reprint Screen to always preview?
Zach Malloch 20:58
That's a good question. I kind of think we probably could. Well, let's ask. Let's see if anybody else has any other questions, please bring those in. But I'm gonna guess this is a processing Screen.
Zach Malloch 21:22
So we're gonna go to processing Screen management, Click Add. And let's see if we get anything. Yep, receipt reprint is right there. But continue. And let's see if we can control those toggles preview receipt.
Zach Malloch 21:41
Value. toggle that on to check selected. Now this is on my new rack ms design, and I need to double check to make sure I know which brand design I'm actually attached to. So I go custom person and see RecChat Ms. I don't think I have a custom version of this. So it should load. I might need to clear some cash. Well, let's see what happens. Look at that preview receipt is defaulted to be turned on. And actually, I mean, I think that you were asking Angela, if I remember, if you could do it as a default. But if you want to say always, then you could make this non updatable. You can even remove the print and the email receipt fields. So they can't do anything other than preview the receipt. And then of course, when you preview it, you could then print it from the preview or do whatever you want to. But yes, screen design is your solution. It is a processing Screen to configure your receipt reprint. Actually, that makes me curious if we can customize the document center. document conversion document purge, maybe it's a management Screen.
Zach Malloch 23:13
So we can customize the Document Center actually don't know that we would need to for very many reasons. I mean, this would be another way to make sure that people are not selecting different users. If you didn't want to go the the permissions direction. I suppose we could also get rid of the delete Button here if you wanted to make sure nobody could delete things. So there's the option there or you could remove the import file Field. Theoretically, you're not doing very many imports, especially if you're just using this for reports. It's really you know, some of your logo stuff or some of your template management stuff that you might need to import at some point. But generally speaking, that's not going to be used here. Good question, though, a couple of tangents that I hope were useful. And I don't see any other questions unless there were Bret that I missed with. Okay, then I think we can go ahead and take this and for landing. Thanks, as always for joining us for this short and sweet topic. As always, if you have any questions or if you have any topic suggestions, just email either Bret or myself. And we will be back here with a virtual symposium next week and another RecChat the week after that, and we'll just keep repeating that for as long as we can.
Bret Alarcon 24:34
Ever and ever,
Zach Malloch 24:36
ever and ever. Alright, that's very welcome. Thanks for your attendance and we will see you soon.
Bret Alarcon 24:43
Thanks, everybody.