09-17-26_Equipment, Referral Contacts, Alt Contacts, Time Tracking

0:02 Okay, so as I mentioned today, we're going to be covering a few different topics. We're going to be starting off with the equipment center. Now before we go any further, this is going to be a little potentially inconsistent from one database to another because there are different subscription levels within Sil Suite and also because your database administrator may have decided that you don't need to be concerned with certain areas of the software. As a result, some of the options we're going to be covering today might not be present on your navigation bar. So, just a little heads up there. Um, also I want to mention I'm using a different page layout than some of you might be. Some of you may be accustomed to seeing a

0:48 vertical stack of all your navigation icons on the left. This is a different skin, different page layouts, which puts all of the same exact options, but it displays them across the top of the page instead. So, that's what's going on. All the same stuff is there. It just looks a little bit different. Okay. Okay, so we're going to start off today by looking at the equipment center. If your center has a loan program or assist of technology or other types of equipment, this is where the equipment inventory lives. The listings are alphabetical by the name of the item, although you could opt to sort instead by an inventory tag, which you can assign when you create an item or if you edit it later on. You can

1:36 do inventory tags after the fact. You can search for specific items either by inventory tag, by the name of the item, by a serial number. You can input for the a consumer. Okay, Zoom just did something completely weird. So, are all of you able to hear me? And can you still see my screen or did that just completely wig out? I'm going to share my screen again because that was bizarre. Okay. So, I apologize for that little hiccup. Um, so, uh, as I mentioned, you

2:21 can search for items by inventory tag, by name, by a serial number, or by the name of the consumer the item is signed out to. All of those options are available. Now, if you want to, you can exclude items which are tagged as being given to a consumer unless you specifically select that from the status dropdown. So, if you want to filter those out ahead of time, you can check that box and we will remove those from the display. If you want them back, you can uncheck that box. Okay. So, I think it's doing something completely weird today.

3:08 Okay. There we go. Okay. So, other options, you can also choose to show or at least to include deleted items. The default is to only show the current items, but you could switch that to show deleted. And that will give you the deleted options with the option to restore them and bring them back. So you're probably wondering, okay, now what do I do? So depends on your level of access. If you've got the ability to manage or curate, if you will, the equipment inventory, then you will have an add equipment button located over

3:55 towards the right side of my screen. Now, if you don't, you may have the ability to view items. You may have the ability even to edit items or to sign them out to people without being able to actually create new items from scratch. So, if the add equipment button is missing for you, you may need to speak with your database administrator if that is something that you feel would be beneficial to the center in terms of enabling you to also manage equipment inventory. Now, if you do have that button available and you happen to click on it, that's going to give you a blank information page to let you create a new equipment item. And that of course starts with the name of the item itself. So maybe this is going to be

4:44 a manual wheelchair. Now, the next thing you can do is specify what type or category of equipment this is. the types of equipment are managed in the configuration area by your database administrators. Now, pretty much anything that's likely to be in your equipment center could be classified as assist of technology in one way or another. So, there may be additional options there. Something that would be a little bit more precise or exact. Uh, in this case, I'm going to select mobility aid. Next up is what kind of condition is it in? Now, this is an alphabetical list. So, the fact that mine starts off saying broken doesn't actually mean anything and I can indicate what its current

5:30 condition is. This also is configurable by your database administrators. And because stuff may deteriorate over time, you can put a date on that condition too. And that can just be as of today. That is what kind of condition it is in. When you're creating a brand new item, typically you will want to leave its status set to available. Unless you're actually taking in some broken items and you want to keep track of those so they can go out to a repair shop later. I cannot imagine why you'd want to input an item in your inventory if it's missing. And you wouldn't really want to set it to reserved because you wouldn't be able to go back and connect it with a

6:16 consumer that it was reserved for. So, usually you're just going to leave that set to available. That one also wants a date. So, we will set that to today's date as well. Next, we've got a drop down for the equipment source. And again, that's configurable. So, if you get equipment from particular areas or vendors or businesses or donations or whoever, whatever, you can specify the source. Now, this isn't required. A lot of this isn't required. I think we do need a type, a condition, and a status. And I think everything else is optional. So, I'm just not going to specify a source for this one. Now, we assume if you're creating a new

7:02 item that it was also newly acquired. So, we'll put the acquired date as today. You can modify that. You can use different dates for any of these. Condition date, status date, acquire date. If you need to backdate something, go for it. It shouldn't cause a problem. Now, next, we've got a bunch of optional information about the equipment item itself. The manufacturer, serial number, model number, and here's where you can design that inventory tag. So, let's go ahead put some information in here. Although it helps if you can type good old E andJ and maybe this is going to be EJ123

7:49 model number and I can assign an inventory tag. Now if this was a purchased item I can say when it was purchased and for how much. So, we're just gonna again put that on today's date and assign a purchase cost. Now, you can also because stuff does get used and abused over time and its current cost may not be the same as its initial purchase price, then you can also set a current cost or value. In this case, this is a new item. I'm going to say that is also the same as the purchase cost. Then we've got this weird little field called award number. And I think if that

8:36 if the equipment was purchased under a particular grant or funding source, that might be the type of information that would go in here. Now the next thing we've got, we need to specify a location for this item. You've got the your database administrators have the option to configure a set of locations, storage areas, or in my case, I've also got a very generic entry that it is signed out and is therefore in a consumer scope. You I believe you should also have this quick show, excuse me, show hide quick ad location. So, if you need to set a new location on the fly, as it were, you can click on that button, type in the

9:23 new location you'd like to add, and click save location. Now, in this case, I'm going to say this is stored in where, excuse me, the West Office. And that just copies that text into that location text field. If you need to add something and it's really going to be a one-off and you don't want to add it to the list of configured locations, you can type directly into that location field instead. And because stuff may get moved around over time, we've got a date field for this one as well. Then we've got quantity. This is actually a required field. Uh, and you can create up to 10 identical clones of this particular item. Now, if you are

10:11 assigning serial numbers and or inventory tags to items, you probably don't want to create 10 identical copies because then you will have to go back and edit nine of them in order to make that information unique, the inventory tag and serial number. So, if that's important for your recordkeeping purposes, you probably want to create these one at a time. and there are ways to streamline the creation of the next one. Now, if this item is only ever going to be available to staff, some centers use the equipment module to keep track of things like laptops and smartphones that are signed out to staff members. So, you can designate items being for staff only.

10:59 Finally, there's an optional note field that you can add on to equipment items to. At the end of the page, there's a button that says save equipment to just save this one entry. And there's also a button that says save and copy to new. So if you got a small fleet of items to enter, but you do want them to have unique serial numbers and inventory text, save and copy to new is going to be a better bet than creating 10 identical clones. Just save and copy to new. and it's got all the same information. And from here, it's going to be very easy to make those inventory tags and serial

11:45 numbers unique. Now, again, you're going to have to specify how many you want to make. Maybe that's just going to be one as well. And this time, I'm just going to save it. So, we only needed to input two of them. And I hit save equipment. Now that puts me on the information page for this equipment item. There are a lot of options available across the whole top of that information page. Starting with the ability to set a reminder specific to a piece of equipment. So if something needs periodic maintenance, you might want to set a reminder up front so that that doesn't fall off the radar. You can upload one or more pictures of the item and that can help a

12:31 consumer who is considering borrowing an item. If they don't want to actually have to go look at it, they may be able to tell from a picture or multiple pictures whether or not that item is going to be suitable for their needs. So, if you do click upload image, you can either drag a picture of the item onto our drag and drop area or you can use the browse button to locate the item on your computer. You've also got the option to use an image from another item. Now, this is particularly useful for things that are uh not durable medical equipment, things like uh sanitary supplies, personal protective equipment, or it's basically a box of whatever item it is, and you

13:18 don't really need to take a separate picture of each box. So, you might just want to borrow an image from some other item. So, I'm just going to grab that particular picture. Now, you do need to give it a name. I'm not feeling very inspired today. I'm just going to call that new picture and upload image. We'll see what I actually added there. As you scroll further down the page, you'll be able to view those images as well. There's an edit equipment button if you need to update anything about it, like if its location changes, you move it to a different storage area, you can edit the item, or if you just notice a typo, or if you want to adjust anything else.

14:05 Edit equipment is your go-to guy. Delete equipment. Well, we all know what that's going to do. You've also got the option from here to give away equipment, to check it out to somebody, or to reserve it for future use. Now, most of the time, the easiest way to do this is to go to the record of the person that you're going to give the item to or check it out to or reserve it for and then just go to the at loans tab of their record and it's going to take care of making sure that loan record is linked correctly with that consumer. If you do it from the equipment information page itself, for example, if I click giveaway equipment, the interface is not terribly friendly

14:54 in my personal opinion. Uh, first off, it'll let you choose what type of person, consumer, and R, non-consumer, or staff member the equipment item is being given to. Consumer receiving equipment. Now, depending on which type you choose, you will get a drop-own list of people of that record type. Most of the time, it's probably going to be given to a consumer, but this is just an alphabetical listing by last name of all of your active consumers. So, I think you can probably get why it's usually easier to start from the consumer's record rather than trying to track them down in what for some centers to be a list with hundreds and hundreds

15:42 of entries. But if you decide to do it the hard way and you can find the person you're looking for, then you can go ahead and select their name. When you're checking something out or giving it away, you've got the option to create a service request for that individual and the category of assistive technology. Now, I've got some additional modules installed that are requiring me to choose a program in association with this equipment loan. So, I'm going to choose one of my programs at random here. When checking out or giving away an item, I've also got the option to update the location. So, it's currently stored in the West Office. If I check update

16:29 location now, it's going to automatically fill in the name of the consumer. Now, you may recall back on the equipment list page, there is a location dropdown. If you leave that set to the consumer's name, your location dropdown is going to get huge because every single consumer that an item is ever loaned out to or given away to is going to show up on that list. And that can get really large and really cumbersome over time. And that is why in configuration I set up consumer's home just to make that a little bit more compact. And I can go ahead and I can click giveaway equipment. Now notice my options up here on across

17:15 the top have just changed. I can still upload. I can still edit. I can still delete. Although, well, yeah, I could. I can return given equipment. So if you give something away and it eventually comes back to you, you can return it to your equipment inventory. Notice here too, the status changed. Status date. Well, we just got it to A and that date didn't change. Uh there's the name of the consumer and a link to the record. The date it was given away. And everything else is all still here. There's my equipment image, which is rather a silly image. Uh but that's where all the equipment images are going to display. You can upload multiple images, too, if you want something from different angles.

18:01 There is an equipment loan history for any item that has been checked out or given away or even reserved. And it will say what the loan type is. From here, if you need to, you can edit the dates. So, if you got the date wrong on this or if you if it were a loan rather than a giveaway and you wanted to modify the due date, you can do that from edit dates. Here's where any reminders would show. There's an equipment reminder section and you can add additional notes for the item. So maybe after it's been checked out five or six times, you want to update some of its general information or you know basically make a comment about the item or say something else. So that add note button simplest note field

18:49 in the entire world consisting only of a date and a text field for the note. And then you click create note in order to save it. Okay, that's how you can create an item and give it away. Now, if it does end up coming back to you, you can click that return given equipment button. Now, you aren't going to get an are you sure. So, it should only be done if the setting of the equipment is given away, was a mistake, or if the equipment was returned. It's going to put the status back to available, and you can update the location at the same time. So this was initially in the west office. So let's put it back there. Update the location at the same time and

19:35 click return equipment. And there it is back in the equipment inventory. I can check it out, reserve it. I can print information about the item. As I roll down here, that equipment loan history has been updated. It was given away uh on the 17th. returned the same day. All that same information is still available. Now, one thing we do have up top here is print record and that is going to generate a PDF file specifically about this equipment item. So, it's going to include all of its general information as well as its load history. Any reminders, any equipment

20:22 notes will all be included up here. Okay, so that's how you manage the equipment inventory. Going back to the equipment list page. We didn't really cover all these little drop downs, but we've got a lot of little drop downs here. So, you can filter by the equipment type. Have it show you one type of equipment specifically. You can have it look at status. Now, this is super helpful if you're looking to check something out to somebody. probably the first thing you're going to want to do is just only show the available items. You don't need to see the stuff that's already checked out. It's not available to be checked out. So, yeah, the available status is going to be really helpful.

21:08 And you can filter by the condition. For example, if you're doing a run to the repair shop, you want to go, okay, give me all the broken items so I can go ahead and get those taken care of. And as I mentioned before, you can filter by location. And this is where you've got the potential to get a super long list if you are showing the consumer's individual names, which I was doing at one point in time. Finally, you can filter by source. So, where did the equipment come from? And you might want to get that information to. Okay. So, that is how you can manage your equipment inventory. If you are a database administrator, you also have the option to export your

21:55 equipment to a spreadsheet. And you can apply filters to this as well. You can choose to filter or to only include the available items or the given away or the broken reserved whatever status you want to target. You can choose to focus on a particular type of equipment, a particular condition, location, equipment source, and you can have it only show the deleted items if you wish. Now, if you've got thousands of items in your equipment inventory and you don't apply any filters, it may take a minute to generate that Excel spreadsheet.

22:42 So there's all my information about my equipment inventory. So, it's got the name of the item, inventory number, it status, status date, what condition is it in, and as of when, equipment type, acquire date, manufacturer, serial number, source, model number, award number, purchase date and cost, current cost, storage location, and location date, followed by any notes which are attached to the equipment items. and the staff member who entered the equipment in into the inventory. Now, some of these, for example, if you have it show status of checked out,

23:30 you can get some additional filters here, too. You can filter by the loan date. So, don't just set a date range without also checking the filter by low date button. It's not going to do anything. Um, so I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to have it show me all my checked out items. And when I submit that one, the information I get is going to be a little bit different. Now, most of it's going to be the same. So, it's got inventory number and status status date condition etc. and so forth. But eventually down here at the end of the world, it's going to show who it's checked out to. when was it checked out?

24:16 So, all that information is going to tag along way at the end of my spreadsheet. Now, I don't believe it also does that for given away items. I believe it only shows more general information for that, but let's find out. All right. So, we got our usual suspects here and let's go find out location staff member. Okay. So, it does show both the name of the consumer it was given to and when that item was given away. All right. So, that is pretty much it for the equipment area. And because we're covering a bunch of different

25:02 topics today, I want to pause at the end of each section and ask if anybody has any questions. So, questions about the equipment center, anybody Okay, nothing's coming in. So, we'll go ahead then and move on. And next, we're going to the referral contacts area. Now, this is another option which may or may not be present in your navigation

25:47 bar because it's again something that not every staff member is going to need to mess with the referral contacts list page. Some do, some don't. So, you may or may not have that option available to you. If you do, the list of referral contact organizations. And by the way, what we mean by referral contacts, this is typically information about organizations that work with your center that may refer consumers to you and that you may refer consumers out to when you're not able to meet all of their needs internally. So, the referral contact list page is sorted alphabetically. No alternative sorts on this one, and it does have a

26:34 number of different filters available. One of the things you can do when you're creating a referral contact entry is assign a primary referral type. the main reason that you would send somebody to this organization and they can because organizations can wear multiple hats including Centers for Independent Living themselves. You can have multiple referral types linked with a single organization and you can choose a primary referral type which is what is displayed here. Now I've got an extra module installed called the 70 OB or older blind module. older individuals with blindness and it has its own federal report and it also wants to know about referrals from

27:21 organizations and to organizations. So that's why I've got this whole extra data column which most of you won't have to worry about. Something else you can do with referral contacts is create or add one or more of the official QPR related service types. So like housing, home modification and shelter. There are some of these that specialize in that particular type of service. And you can uh select any particular service type from here assuming that it has actually been used on some of your referral contact entries. And you can use that as a filter. Now we've got locationbased filters by city, by county, and by state or

28:09 province. So, if what you're looking to do is provide a consumer with a filtered list of referral contact organizations within their city, the city filter is going to be your go-to guy and help you narrow that down. Then, we've got a column for the name of your contact person within that organization if you have one. You may not. And finally, the last column is, do they refer consumers to your center or is it only an organization you refer people out to, but they don't refer people in to your center? And you can search for referral contacts by the name of the organization, by the

28:56 name of your contact person, and also by their phone number. If you need to create a new referral contact organization that starts when you click the add referral button. Now, this one I'm not going to create a brand new entry. It's pretty self-explanatory. First row is the only one that's actually required. The name of the organization itself. Now, the referral types, those are actually managed from the referral contacts page. Most of this stuff is managed through configuration, but this one just had to be different and it's managed from the referral types setting within referral contacts.

29:41 So, there's a drop down of the various referral types that I've set up. I can input information about my contact person, their name, their position or role in the organization, their email address. I can put a couple of different phone numbers. Here's why you input the city and county, state or province. Notice that these work differently than the location data in consumer records. That's because you might potentially be referring people to outofstate non-local organizations. So, we didn't want to tie that down too tightly and you can enter things as necessary that are outside of your typical service area for your consumers.

30:26 So there's phone information, fax and tty, organizational email, website if they've got one. And here is the little setting I want to bring to your attention. Does this organization refer consumers to your center or is it only for outgoing referrals to these organizations? The default is to assume that it does not refer consumers to your center. But if you need for this organization to show up when you're doing a consumer or INDR intake under the referred by dropdown, you need to make sure this little puppy is set to yes. Otherwise, it's not going to show in the referred by dropdown. If you do have that older blind module installed, you need to specify an older

31:13 blind referral type, too. Otherwise, it's just not going to propagate correctly onto your federal PBR, not PBR, uh, your 70 report. Now, here's just a plain old text field where you can type in information about what services that organization provides. Now, I know this is a little bit confusing because we've got our textbased services area here, but we also have more of a checklist type of services that we'll get when we're looking at an existing referral contact. So, we'll take a look at those in a second. And you can also select which counties are served by this organization. Now again, this the

32:00 counties served may be completely outside of your service area, may not even be on this list. So this may or may not actually be helpful depending on the organization you're creating an entry for. Now once you've got all that information in there, click create referral contact. It'll do exactly that and it will put you on the information page for that referral contact entry. You can also access the referral contact entry once it's created by clicking on the title of the organization. So, I got a silly name here and Agnes' excellent muffles referral contact entries. They've got a bunch of options, too. So, you can set reminders. They have their own document

32:47 center. If you have any paperwork from or related to that organization, you can upload that into the document center and keep it on file. You can print a mailing label for this organization, assuming their address information is complete. You can print information about that either without the notes or there's a note section down at the end and you can include those if you wish. If you've got some referral contacts that accidentally got duplicated and you've got a whole swarm of them potentially, you've got the option to merge them. Kind of similar to merging a consumer record. You can edit a referral contact if you need to update its information. And of course, you can

33:32 delete it if that button is available to you. Uh I'm not sure if it is universally available or if there's a limited level of access on that one as well. So let's go further down the page. You've got other information we've got here. Now down here in the referral contact section, this is where you can add contact information for people specifically within that organization. So if you say add contact, put in the name of the person, your contact person, their role in the organization, their phone number information, and their email address. And you can have multiple contact people within that organization.

34:17 You can set reminders for referral contacts, too, if you want to touch base with them periodically and see what's going on or uh whatever you need to do to be reminded of. Now, here we've got the different referral types. And again, those are managed at the top of the page within the referral contacts area itself. For organizations that have multiple referral types, you come down here, you click add referral type. and choose any of them that haven't already been selected. Most of mine have already been selected because I pick on this particular item a lot. And you can reassign which is their primary. Now this points out the primary reason that consumers are passed to you from this

35:05 organization or from you to this organization. What is their primary focus? And that would be the primary referral type. Then we've got the actual service types. Now these are the same service types that are used on the federal and state reports. So isle skills training, housing on modification and shelter mobility training and so forth. And you can add additional service types. Got a whole drop down here. Now, one of the things to be aware of with this service type dropdown is that it doesn't limit itself strictly to the official PBR service types. If your center has any custom service types,

35:50 they're going to be thrown into this list, too, as you can tell by some of my selier entries here. So, it's going to be comprehensive, and it's just going to be strictly alphabetical with no way of telling which PBR service type a service is linked to. So you can add additional service types. Hit that save button to save those. And yeah, you can only add one of those at a time. If you decide later, well, heck, that was a mistake. There is a remove link after each of those service types. Just click that link, we'll do a little are you sure, tango, are you sure you want to remove this service type from this organization? If you say okay, it's out of here.

36:38 So, that's now been taken off. Finally, there's a section for referral notes. If you click the add note button, this one is even simpler than the equipment note. It doesn't even have date. So, all it is is a plain text field where you can create your note, then click the create note button to save it. Now, for notes that are already in there, you can edit them if you notice a typo or something, or you can also choose to delete a note if that's appropriate. Now, I'm going to buzz way back up to the top of the page because there is one button we kind of skipped. Well, there's a couple we skipped, but the one I was going to focus on is view records. View

37:25 records is super cool because it is going to let you get a listing of all of the consumers referred by this organization to your center and also referred by you to that organization. So there's the number of referrals in each direction. We show you the dates of those referrals and it looks like they are no I was going to say that they're numeric but they are so totally not. And there's the outgoing referrals. Notice it also has links to the records. So if I click on that it takes me straight to that consumer record. I can go down to the tabs specifically to the referrals

38:13 and see any of those outgoing referrals. Okay, except that was actually an incoming referral. So, I messed up on that one. Anyway, you can also filter this list if you only want to have one direction of referral at a time. You might want to just focus on the incoming referrals from this organization. And you can filter by date. Maybe you want to focus on the ones within the last couple of years. You can set a start and end date. You can filter by the current status of the consumer. If you only want the ones that are active or all the ones that were closed, whatever you want to select there. And you can filter by record type, either

38:58 consumer or. Finally, since one of the things you're going to be able to do is print mailing labels for these consumers, you can filter by contact me because you would probably want to do a separate mailing list for the people that need um large print or braille versus the people who just need plain old US mail. Okay. So once you get all your filters the way you want them, if you click the update button, that's going to apply those settings. So in this case, I only wanted the income and referrals. Now what I can also do, I can click export and get this as a spreadsheet.

39:48 So that's going to include the name of the consumer. And we break it out separately first and last. Who is the primary staff member for that consumer, the referral type, the date of the referral, the current record type of the person and their current status within Sil. Okay. So that is view records. All right. So back to the main list page here. Next thing we're going to take a look at is that referral types. So different types or uh reasons for a referral. The one that you're stuck with forever more is general. So if everybody's going to

40:34 have that one, it can't be edited or deleted basically because everybody's got to have the one referral type in order for the software to work. So we just called it general and locked it in place. And you can create additional referral types by clicking the add referral type button, typing it in, and optionally providing a description. Well, be aware that the referral types list page is the only place that description is displayed. So, it may not be terribly useful in the long run. Now, the other option we've got in the referral contacts area is this little guy that says print referrals. Print referrals as basically it has two

41:22 aspects to it. You can print information about the organization. There's filters you can apply. Referral type services counties cities and states. Using that information, you can print labels for those organizations. You can print their organization information or you can export that information to a spreadsheet. Now, this is going to have a lot of information. It's got all of the information for all of those different organizations. I didn't apply any filters at all. So, organization name, contact person name, position and email, phone information, vacciny,

42:08 address info, organization email, any notes about the services, and that's it. So, there's all that interesting info about those organizations. Now the other thing you can do with this is the referred records section and that functions in a very similar way to view records in an individual organization. And you can filter again by the primary referral type by the direction of the referral them to us or us to them incoming or outgoing referrals. You can filter by date referred between start

42:54 and end date. You can filter by the current status of the record, by the current record type, and again, because you're going to be able to print mailing labels, the contact method. So, you can filter those out as appropriate. And you can export this whole grand and glorious mess to a spreadsheet. Now, this is all the consumer information, people who were referred to or by this organization. So, we got the consumer name info, who's their primary staff, the name of the referring organization, the primary referral type, the date of the referral, current type of the record, and current status, and

43:40 there is the direction of the referral. Now, because I had it show me both directions, them to us and us to them, my spreadsheets broken into two sections. So, the top section is focusing on them to us. But as I scroll down here, I'm eventually going to run into the section that's talking about our outgoing referrals to these organizations. There we go. So, there's the refer direction. That's basically the only thing that changes. All of the other column headers will be the same. Only the referred direction is going to be different. There's referral type, organization, primary staff, and the name of the individual. So all that information is going to be

44:27 included as well. Okay. So that is the print referrals page. And that is it for the referral contacts area. And again, we're going to pause a minute before we move on and ask whether anybody has any questions about referral contacts. Now, we saw a glimpse earlier. Uh we didn't go through the whole thing, but when you're doing a consumer or IR intake, at the end of the form, there is a referred by dropdown. This is what populates that dropdown. If you go to the referrals tab of somebody's record and you're indicating you referred somebody out to an organization, this again populates the dropdown for those

45:13 outgoing referrals. So questions, anybody and we do have a question coming in. I think if somebody lowered their hand very quickly, that may have been an oops.

46:00 Okay, if nobody has any questions, we can move on. Then next up is the alt contacts area. Now, alt contacts. This is contact information for people, individuals who are connected with your consumers. This can be an emergency contact person, a parent or guardian, a spouse, even a doctor or a rehab counselor, pretty much anybody that's going to be handing to the staff member to have that person's contact info available as part of the consumer record. Now, we gave them their own slot in the database in case you ever get a call from one of these folks saying, "Oh, yeah, Sally's not going to make her appointment today. Sorry." And they hang up without telling you Sally

46:46 who. and you've got five sales that are working with your center and you're going, "Okay, great. Who's she talking about?" So, what you can do is look it up in the alt contacts database and you can search that by the name of the contact, by the consumer's first or last name if you know it, or by the phone number. That phone number lookup may help with those anonymous referral, excuse me, all contacts. So, just random phone calls. You may be able to look up their phone number and find out who the heck that was and therefore which of these Sally's is not going to make their appointment today. The table of alt contacts is by default sorted alphabetically. It displays just plain old first last. If you want to,

47:32 you can flip that around and have it sort in Z2A instead. You can filter by city. That's something you can input when you're creating a referral contact. alt contact. Excuse me. I knew I was going to do that. Uh you can input phone number and you can indicate whether that is a current or active alt contact because this type of stuff can change over time. Particularly emergency contacts may change. U rehab counselors certainly can change over time. So these um can be deactivated if that's appropriate. Now, most of the time, as with the equipment loans, it's going to be easier to create an alt contact from inside of

48:18 a consumer record where they are the contact person. It's going to be easier. You do have the option to do it directly from the alt contacts page. However, you can click add contact and input all of that person's contact information. So name, phone number, including title and instructions if appropriate, address information, email address. They can opt out from mailing lists, too. You can input gender. You can even say that an alt contact was referred to you by some organization. So you can set all those up. Now once an alt contact is in the database if you click on its information page

49:06 there is that person's basic information. Not very much in this particular case but you do have the option to make an alt contact inactive if they are no longer a viable contact person or a consumer. You can set reminders related to alt contacts. If you've got the complaints module installed, you can find out if they are involved in any of those complaint entries. Alt contacts have their very own document center. You can edit the contact if any of their information changes, and you could choose to delete a contact entirely. Further down on the page, you can find out who that alt contact is connected with. So in this case, Abe is connected with

49:54 C3PO and of course with Mary who is the spouse. You can add notes about an alt contact if they are all problematic in some way or if you just want to add some general information. Now because an alt contact can potentially be connected with multiple consumers as would be the case potentially with people like rehab counselors. You can specify if the note is related to one of the people that they are connected with rather than just general information about the alt contact themsel, you can attach it to that individual's record and there is a text field for the note itself. Now usually for the alt contacts

50:41 indicating whether or not it's actual contact with the person unlike with consumer records where it updates the last contact date. Uh this is more just purely information. Did you have contact with them in the course of this note? And you could also choose to pin specific notes about an alt contact just like you can in certain areas of the consumer record. All right. And the other thing you can do with the alt contact list is take it out to a spreadsheet and export all of that alt contact information. So there is our little alphabetical list address city state zip phone phone information.

51:27 But this way at the very end of this we're going to show a separate row for each of the records they are connected with which is why Abe has two rows cuz he's linked both with C3PO and with Mary. So you can it it will include it will pick up on uh if it's linked with a consumer record it's going to pick on up on gender the relationship the relationship type and any comments linked with that alt contact. Okay. So, that short, sweet, and to the point. Oh, you can also I didn't notice this before, but you can display the person's contact address if you choose.

52:19 Okay. Questions about all contacts? Anybody? Okay, if there are no questions, we'll go ahead and move on to our last topic for the day, which is time tracking. This is another one which may or may not be on your navigation bar. Depending for one thing on whether your center is even

53:05 using time tracking and for another whether your database administrators have made a determination that you need to track your time. There are some centers that don't use it. There are some siters that use it only related to some activities or some programs or some staff. So, this is going to be a little bit potential, a little bit hit or miss. Now, when you go straight to the time tracking page, couple things I want to mention. For some of you, this will not be called time tracking. For some of you, it will say unit time tracking instead. That's a different version of the user interface where instead of entering hours worked, you would instead enter a start time and an end time. Little bit little bit of a difference

53:51 there, but the basic functionality is still the same. On the time tracking page, it starts you off on the add hours page for you to create a new time tracking entry. It's going to assume it's today's date, unless you have already created time entry that's on a different date. If you needed to play catchup, maybe you forgot to log your time yesterday. So, you set that date back to yesterday, you did your time entries. If you come back later in the day, it's going to remember the last date that was used, if any, you know, so use today's date. If it's the first time entry of the day, it will use the last date used if you've already done a time entry on a different date.

54:37 Always be mindful. Always double check the date. And also always double check the program. This is the time tracking program part of a necessary time entry. So time tracking programs are managed by your database administrators in the configuration area. So there are different types of time one can take including administrative overhead for paperwork and meetings. Fun fun fun but also for things like sick leave and vacation personal time. Uh you might also have time related to particular funding sources or grants. So those may be available too. The list of programs is generally going to be unique to each different center. So don't judge by

55:23 mine. I've got some weird stuff in here. Now, if you choose to, you can basically backtrack and link this with a consumer or record. And I'm sure you can sing this along with me by this point. It's usually going to be easier to find the record and do the time entry from that record than trying to look them up here. Now you can if you need to just type in the consu some or all of the consumer's name and click the search records button and we will give you a drop-own list of everybody that matches that search and hopefully you can find whoever it is you want to add that time note to. Now if you decide you don't

56:08 you don't have to. You're not stuck. If you do link it back with a consumer record, you've got the option, okay, to indicate whether this time entry involved contact with the person. Now, if it was the type of thing where you were writing a report about their progress and you're choosing to create the time entry from the time tracking page rather than from their record, that would not have involved direct contact with the consumer typically. Um, so you would probably not want to have that box checked in that situation. Now, for this version of the time tracking module, I would enter the hours worked. Now, when it says hours, it means it hours and fractions of hours

56:55 only, not hours and minutes. So it's for example if I tried to input 15 thinking that would mean 15 minutes or even five minutes it's going to read that as 15 or 5 hours instead. So if you need to do something like 15 minutes you'd say 25 quarter of an hour half hour is.5 minutes 75 hour and a half 1.5 and so forth. So you get to brush up on your decimals a little bit. Now, I've got a module turned on in my database that will also calculate the number of units. So, when I move out of that hours worked field, it's going to autocalulate units where one unit is

57:41 0.25 or 15 minutes. Then, I have a text field where I need to type in some information about what exactly I did. So, I'm going to say I was prepping for a meeting. And I click the add hours button to save that time entry. Now, notice it's ready for me to create another time entry and it has stuck with the same program. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's perfect. And you would be ending up creating a series of time entries all linked with the same program. That's great unless it's not true. If you need to create a time entry under a different program, always double check. Always make sure that you've got

58:27 the right program for the time entry you're about to do and it's not just a carryover from a previously created time entry. At the end of every page, there'll be a summary of all of the time entries created so far on that particular date. And you may be going, "Okay, so that's all well and good. What if I need to delete a time entry or edit it? What if I got a typo or I grabbed the wrong program? How do I fix those? There's no edit link here. That's correct. There isn't. The way you edit or delete a time entry is by clicking on the number of hours. When you click that link for the hours, it brings that up for editing. You can choose a different program,

59:13 enter a different time, add you some more notes. One thing you can't do if this is already linked with a consumer record or if you've indicated it is not linked, that's something you can't change after the fact. So that's kind of locked in. You can't switch it to a different consumer or say, "Heck, that wasn't consumer related after all. What do I What was I thinking?" You can't unhook it. Now, if you do just need to make some changes once you've made those changes, click update hours to save them. If you needed to delete the whole time entry entirely, then you click delete hours. And that's going to take you the to the little are you sure tango. So, there's a summary of your time entry, date,

59:58 program, time, and notes. And if you persist in saying delete time, you still get another chance to change your mind by a popup dialogue box. Are you sure you want to delete this hours log? Note, this log will not be able to be restored once it is deleted. And you can say okay and delete it or cancel and keep it around. So that's how you create a time entry. Now you may have noticed I've got this graphical calendar off to the right. The graphical calendar off to the right can be used well it's going to have a couple of side effects. One thing you can use this for is you can navigate. But notice it doesn't just change the

1:00:44 display to the side. It also changed my date for my next time entry. That may or may not be what you intended. If you ever use the side cal for your next time entry, always confirm it's got the right date. One thing this calendar does though is it shows in green any days that have time entries and you can click on that date and bring up the time entries for the date. So there is that particular time entry from that date. So that's what that guy is for. Again handle with care. It is going to change your date your main date field.

1:01:30 All right. So the other thing you can do if you are a database administrator or a time tracking administrator, you will have a staff drop-down available that is going to allow you to enter and to view time entries for other staff. So, for example, if I want to view time entries for good old Freddy here, I can choose Freddy's name. Except that's not sticking, is it? Okay, that's interesting. I'll have to look into that later on. Okay, so in theory, oh, actually, I might have time tracking turned off for Freddy. Let me try somebody else here.

1:02:15 Nope, it's just not taking it. Okay. Well, that's interesting. Maybe it has was because I did a program already. Nope, it's just not letting me do that. Okay, I will look into this later. That's interesting. Okay, so in addition to being able to enter new time tracking hours, you have three different time tracking reports. the hours overview, the time sheet, and the consumer INR time log. Hours overview in some ways is the most flexible of the reports. Again, you can filter by staff or you can have on this one, you can have it show you all staff,

1:03:00 all time entries from everybody. You can have it include any service requests. So, there will be the service type if there was one associated and you've got your date range. Now, the default date range for all of the time tracking reports goes from the first of the month through the 15th or from the 15th through the end of the month depending on which half of the month you're currently in. Well, we've just barely gotten into the second half of September. So, it's only showing me that second half. I can expand this. I can broaden that date range out and set a different start date or even a different end date. If I do that, I need to click the change view button

1:03:48 in order to make that actually take effect. So there we go. And there I picked up some additional time entries. Now the way this page is organized is that it is sorted by the date of the time entry. So, this starts early on and it works its way towards the end of the time frame as it goes down the page. Now, notice that a couple of these have a little star, a little asterisk after that particular time program. And at the end of the page, there's a footnote that says that asterisk indicates that that time log is tied to a community activity. And with that time tracking column that says consumer, it will

1:04:34 instead of having a consumer name, it's going to have a link to that community activity. Now, the thing that I like, well, a couple things I like about this cuz I'm a data geek. One is you can filter it by program. So, all your time tracking programs will be displayed. You can narrow it down and focus on only the time entries created under a particular program. Default is to show you everything. And the other thing this one will let you do that the other ones don't facilitate is export. You can throw all this time tracking data to a spreadsheet and that's going to pretty much match what is on screen. So there's the name

1:05:21 of the staff member, the date of the time entry, and we'll put that in a couple of different formats in case you need to sort time tracking program, community activity if one of them was linked, service type if they were linked with a service, the timestamp. I've got my time stamp turned on. So it's showing me not only the date of the time entry, but the date and time when that time entry was input into the database. Then I've got hours and units. I've got the notes for the time entry. If it was linked with a consumer, well, who was it? First and last, we'll break it out separately. We'll show the record type, consumer or we'll throw in the ID number of that

1:06:06 record. Now, some of these columns may not be there. If you don't have the timestamp feature turned on, that column will be missing. If you don't have units turned on, that one will probably be missing as well. That list is the data you can export and it's going to show you the grand totals, total hours, and also the total number of units. So, that is the time uh hours overview report. Now, the next one we've got is a time sheet report. Now, that one is specifically for one individual at a time. If there's no facility that will let you do uh all staff, you can do other stuff. I could as a database admin

1:06:54 look at data for somebody else, but by default, it's going to show me my own info. And you can change the date range as we saw before. Now, it's going to give me a summary at the top of the page, the total time charged to each different time tracking program that was used within that time frame. Well, in my case, it's only just the one. Then it's going to have a weekly daily breakdown of the time entries within the time frame you're looking at. Well, I'm going to run this back to the start of the month. Hopefully give me a couple more rows of data or not. I don't do time tracking this day in this database very often. So anyway, so for every week or partial

1:07:41 week within the time frame that you've selected. So there is it's starting um September 1st, there's all the subsequent weeks. There is my time entry for today. So going down, you've got the total time entries for a day. At the end of the row, you've got the total time entries for that program. And in the bottom corner, you've got all the time entries within that particular week. So, it's a really good summary of all those time entries. Now, I have a feature turned on in my company profile that I want a space to look at the notes linked with these time entries. By default, this notes area down here, that's optional and it won't be included

1:08:28 by default. Only if you specifically turn that on and say, I want to see the notes. Otherwise, it's just going to be numeric data. uh what days were charged, what program were they charged to, how much time, all that good stuff. Now, from this guy, you've got multiple options. If you click the print button, all that does is give you a stripped out version of the web page without all the icons and navigation stuff. However, it will include employee and supervisor signature and date lines and a space for some additional notes. So you can put those in within your I don't think this is actually editable on your browser. No, you probably have to print this using your web browser's

1:09:14 print feature, but you can generate a PDF file. And if you got software that will let you edit a PDF, then you could use the signature employee and supervisor signature fields and have this actually signed. Now, it will also let you do the same thing in a Word document. You all know what word documents look like, and I haven't run word yet today, so it's going to take a really long time for that to open. But it's the same basic idea, same info as you have on screen with the addition of signature lines and date lines and a notes area that's to be

1:10:00 added onto this particular time report. Our third time tracking report is the consumer and R time log. As you would guess from the name, this is only going to show time entries which are connected with a consumer or IR. So if I run this back a month or so or a year, I'll get data one way or another. And I can have it include the notes and I click change view just to get myself some data. Now I can filter this. I can have it show me only the consumers or only the INRs. Default is to include both of them. And I can filter by program. So if I

1:10:47 only want to see the time entries under a specific program, I can narrow that down. Now this one we're back to a setup where we can include data for all staff. So, I got yet more rows of data here, but notice it's not telling me which staff member created which time entry. So, this one typically you're probably going to want to run on a per staff member basis. Okay. Now, one cool thing about this at the very end of the page. So this is showing for every different program that

1:11:33 was charged the date of the time entry consumer or it was linked with number of hours number of units and because I told it to give me the notes it's giving me the notes. Now at the end of the page though it tells me how many time records are included in that time frame. What's the total number of hours and how many units? Then there is a listing alphabetically by consumer last name of all of the time entries that have been entered for that individual within that time frame that I specified. So Wiki here has a total of 8 and a/4 hours 33 units. And these are links to their records. If

1:12:20 I want to go take a closer look at their time entries, I can just click on that, open it in a different browser tab. flip on over there and review their time tracking data. Okay, so this guy is printable. I believe that also this is only at the end of the page, not at the top. I can print this out, which is going to give me a nice little PDF file that mirrors what's on screen. Same type of information. program, date, consumer, summary, and the units as well as the notes. And I can throw this whole thing out to yet another spreadsheet

1:13:09 which will have the same information again with the exception of the notes. So this will show basic information only. consumer name, program it was charged, date to the time entry, hours, and the number of units. So, that one's fairly concise. Okay. Now, last but not least, I also have installed a time log history. I believe this kind of accompanies one of the other modules. I'm not sure that this is installed by default. So, if you think it looks interesting, uh, let us know. We can get that installed for you as well. But what this does is it lets

1:13:55 you target one specific date and one specific staff member and find out what time entries were created or edited on that particular date by that particular staff. See if this No, this does not include a show all setting. And I can click on that time entry if I want to make any mod. Well, let's say no. Uh so date or time modified. So that is just giving me a little bit of extra information. Okay. So that is it for the time tracking area and that is the last of our topics for

1:14:40 today. So today we have covered the equipment center, referral contacts, alt contacts, and we just took a look at time tracking. Does anyone have questions about any of those areas?

1:15:26 Okay, nothing's coming in. So, that concludes our training call for today. Tune in next week when we will be looking at consumer andr intake procedures. How to create brand new INR and consumer records from scratch. In the meantime, thank you for using Soul Suite. Thank you for participating in today's call. I hope it was useful for you. And again, do tune in next week and hopefully that topic will be of interest and of use to you as well. And have a good day everybody and please stay safe out there. Goodbye.