Recently we heard that the Service Counts report was possibly not reporting correctly. It was more about having an expectation of how it will report versus what it was actually reporting. So the questions are, “Why is it reporting this way?” and “Should it?”
The issue: The report for Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 was not adding up to the same total when running the report for both quarters combined. The combined report was showing more contacts than when running separately.
Why is it reporting this way? So I’ll focus on one guardian example to explain why. In Quarter 1, the guardian had contacts but no enroll date. Let’s assume the guardian had a Status of “Recruit” in Q1. In Q2, the guardian was enrolled – “Active” – and had an enroll date in Q2. The report is being run on a date after Q2. When running the report for Q1, the guardian wasn’t seen as existing yet because the logic of the report was that an “Active” guardian will have an enroll date on or before the last day in the report date range. And even if you have “Recruit” checked in the report filters, this guardian is also no longer a “Recruit” at the time of the report is being run. The guardian is “Active”.
Should it report this way? The logic of the report wasn’t completely off, but we decided to correct it to better reflect service counts regardless of the enroll date. So now you can expect Q1 + Q2 to equal Q1 and Q2 combined.
There is one thing to note about the Status filter. This report will count all contacts in the date range for the guardians that match the Status(es) selected at the time you are running the report. Taking the same guardian in “Why was it reporting this way?”, you cannot run the Q1 report for “Recruit” guardians and expect to see that guardian listed in the report. But you can expect to run the Q1 report for “Active” guardians and see that guardian in the counts.
I expect there may be a 3rd question to answer for any of you reading this, “Why the long explanation?” Basically when I was on the client side of Visit Tracker, I was always interested finding out the “why”. It helped my work with the sites I was supporting too. So maybe some of you might like to read about the “why”. Also, I wanted to illustrate the process of answering the most important question, “Is it correct?” We never assume something is easy and straightforward. We investigate what you tell us, work with you to understand how you want things to work and make the necessary correction.
Thank you to the program that emailed about this report. It gave us a chance to look into this report and make an improvement.