End of the Year Reminders
As the end of the year comes to an end, there are certain steps that should be taken to close out the year with your WRMD account. It is much easier not to worry about your previous years data in the new year, as you can imagine. It is a good idea start in fall... that way you are not rushing to do all the work the last week of December.
1. Reconcile your records.
Search for all the animals still pending and make sure that they are closed out completely as long as they are no longer in care.
The federal report requires that the Disposition and/or Transfer type, Disposition date and Criminal activity fields are completed. If it was a transfer, the Disposition Location and State are required as well.
You can also reconcile rescuers. This feature allows you to identify and combine repeat customers. This is more for your own personal data, not so much for reporting.
For your own records it is good to export a report of all the intake numbers with their City found. Many times cities are spelt incorrectly and this will disturb your data.
2. Try to finish up all your records for 2014 in 2014.
In order for the 2014 Federal and State reports to be correct, you need to get all the patients in the system. Use the Quick Admit extension if necessary. You can still add patients into 2014 in 2015, but unless it is done before the reports are sent, the reports will be flawed.
3. This is a good time of year to look at your data and analyze it.
How did the system work for you. Are there trends that you notice, like not identifying the Sex of some of the animals. Is there a certain group that you would like to search, but can't figure out how to search them all. Try using keywords as a tool. These observations can help you in 2015. You can change a few behaviors to make sure that the data that you want to get out of WRMD is recorded in the first place.
4. We always make a few updates in the new year.
This year we are going to be changing the names of a few fields and merging others in the new records and the intake screens. No previous data will be lost, but it might be in a different section. We will post these changes before the new year to give you time to adjust to them.