In previous sessions, we have identified goals for your organization AND looked at how data can help you identify and evaluate where you need to be. WE have demonstrated how to evaluate your set up and shown you how to customize not only your data but your entry process to make things easier for your staff. In this class we will be looking at strategies to keep your data TIDY.

Do you (or does someone at your organization) routinely perform checks on your data to be sure things are correct? Looking for discrepancies in your data.

In recent years-shelters have been moving toward using their data in a very

different way. Not just reporting of numbers, but process evaluation and

operational planning (We will talk about that kind of reporting tomorrow in our

breaking the bottle necks session.) For this to be possible, it is absolutely

Crucial that our data is not only correct but up to date if we will be using

our data in this way.

In THIS session, we will focus on a few simple reports to use to keep your data

clean. Dirty data is useless and can result in wasted or underutilized resources

and unnecessary expenditures due to overestimating your needs leading to

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waste or even worse, underestimating your needs—leaving you scrambling for

resources and creating unneeded stress!

During this session, work along in your database—this will help you begin to

identify your potential trouble spots. Make notes on areas that need attention.

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We are going to focus on 3 main areas for identifying issues, Duplicate records, errors in intake and outcome recording and cross checks for your active animals.

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How do duplicate records impact your organization? Your data? Do you know if you have an issue with duplicate records in your database? Is this part of your routine check? Did you know there was a way to check for that?

Duplicate Animal records can result in incomplete animal history (medical or behavior, intake and outcome), incorrect summary and statistical data with regard to unique animal counts. Duplicate person records-result in incomplete person history-(like surrender or outcome, case or ownership). This is especially important in sensitive situations, like donor information, special or even do not adopt memos. Wasted resources when preparing mailings (paper, postage and time), poor customer service presence as a result of multiple contacts to a client or contacting a customer with outdated or incomplete information about their involvement with your organization.

How do duplicates happen? For people, it is generally due to Not searching, not searching completely. Have you ever thought about how many areas there are to add a person record into PetPoint? (ideas?) There are at least 15 different operations or locations where you can “create a new person” not even counting “edit person.” If you just rely on asking the customer if they have visited you before, they may have been

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added to your databse in one of these other ways and not even realize they are in there.

For animals –sometimes you create a new record for an animal at intake then later scan that animal, find that not only does it have a chip and it is already in your system. What happens if you don’t complete an intake or other operation? Have you seen the unattached animals list? Animals end up on the unattached animals list when a user doesn’t complete an operation –the animal is in the database but is inactive-- it can be selected for an operation, but often users forget to check before recreating an animal record. This is a very common question on tech support, so if you have also found yourself in this situation, you are not alone.

How do I find duplicates?? Sometimes you just know you created a duplicate record…sometimes that comes up on a nose count, scans, searches--or in reviewing your unattached animals list. There are reports to help you! There are two reports actually, one for finding animal duplicate records and one that helps with person duplicate records.Log into your database and look at your Duplicate Reports-Our Animal report is under Animal-Duplicate Check . And our Person Duplicate report is all the way down in the P’s Person Duplicate check. You can see here the choices you have to compare records. Make selections by choosing to include or exclude the different fields in your comparison.

Knowing what to search by depends on your situation. For people email and phone number generally work well. You can include several items at first and then continue to run the report removing filters as needed. Remember to indicate what you want to include by changing exclude to include.

When you review your output, how do you know you have a true duplicate? Do we just merge everything we find? Not necessarily, it takes a little work to decide.

Duplicate records are fixed in Admin-Admin Options-Utilities-Merge Duplicate Record. Don’t forget the most important step of merging: reviewing and confirming the merge. The data merge is not finalized until that step is completed. Not completing this is just as bad, if not worse than not merging in the first place because the merge record “disappears” but the data isn’t committed to the Keep record until the merge is reviewed and committed. The important step here is to Click mark reviewed so you can actually review the two records side by side. If you have enough information to confirm the duplicate status, then commit the merge. If you are sure they are NOT duplicates at this point, then this is the ONLY opportunity you have to undo the merge. Once you commit, you cannot go back, a committed merge is FINAL! IF you need to investigate the records more, you can undo the merge and come back later.

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If you need assistance with Merging, visit an S.O.S. class or sign up for the PetPoint Learning Center.

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If you haven’t really worked with reports before, sign up for the PetPoint Learning Center and enroll the Learning Center course for basic reporting. Also, daily S.O.S. sessions are open for Q&A.

Basic Descriptions of report types:The first report (Animal Outcome By Intake) is a basic report and will give us individual animal information. The Age Species Crosstab reports will give us summary data, just numbers, and will include the age species breakdown (dog cat puppy kitten other) on the x axis automatically.The Intake Crosstab is also numbers only, but you can choose 1 x and 2y axis values, if it is an “Advanced” crosstab, you could choose 2 x and 2 y and it doesn’t default you to the DKPC

Extended reports will include more information than the basic reports, and will export directly to Excel. (one row per record of data).Reports that end with detail have more information and options than express reports (most common in the medical report section but other modules as well).

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Earlier, we discussed how jurisdiction tracking can be extremely helpful in planning and tracking your community impact related goals. Jurisdiction is a really useful way to do this. BUT, if your setup doesn’t match your reporting needs, AND If you are not accurately capturing jurisdiction on each intake and outcome, you simply CAN’T use jurisdiction to measure your community impact or anticipate your needs, can you?

A good report to evaluate this is Animal: Intake Age Species Cross Tab. Cross tab reports are a good starting point when looking for inconsistent data. You can look at the columns and rows to see how things line up (if data is in the right place). Once you identify discrepancies, you can then find the specific records that need to be corrected by looking in the detail reports— you would identify the filters needed to find those records by narrowing your search in the cross tab and noting the specifics to apply to the detail reports.

As you look at your choices--decide how detailed you need to get in your filters (depending of course on how your field values are set up). Decide how your data is arranged and make choices that make sense for you. For our sample- use Jurisdiction and zip code--this will help identify records that have missing jurisdiction and records that may have the wrong jurisdiction. Choose Jurisdiction in y1 and Zip in y2 and

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expand your results. In your output, you can see records with no jurisdiction, and you can quickly scan my jurisdiction and zip code pairings to see if I need to do any data cleanup.

Depending on YOUR field value set up, try different filters and combinations like Jurisdiction and Intake Subtype in my Y1and Y2 filters,-this may be meaningful to you if you have Operation subtypes that are Jurisdiction specific in some way. As you look at this data, Consider here other potential relationships in your data that could be flags. Look at the list of options here the values that you can compare.

Special note: if the staff relies on certain values being completed by default, they may not remember change it when it needs to be changed. Defaults are a great time saving data entry tip, but if you notice that they are leading to errors, you may need to remove them. It is better to have a blank entry that needs to be corrected than an incorrect entry that you may not notice.

This is also where you can see the impact of a multiple animal intake error. For instance, a transfer in of 15 animals and the user forgot the jurisdiction…now you have 15 records that need to be corrected.

Once you have identified the parameters to locate particular animals, you can use the Animal Intake report for the details.

Also notice here that you see dogs and cats with no date of birth. Is that ok? Is that something staff should always be entering according to your SOP? To find the individual animals, you can Scroll through the animal intake report looking for blank age or you can export the Animal intake extended report and sort it by age in excel.

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Outcome: What do you want to verify in your outcome data?

We can look at the same information for outcomes as we did for intakes on the Animal Outcome Age Species Crosstab report and evaluate or verify by different combinations of filters and groupings. If you have certain staff that only work in remote adoption sites and should only have certain types of outcome types or subtypes using Userid as a column or row label (X or Y) could be very helpful.

We can also look at the Animal Outcome Crosstab Advanced report. This report gives us a little more flexibility. Check species and S/N status. What are some things that would be Red Flags for YOU? Make a note to check those later. Try using outcome type and subtype here and expand to check for red flags.

Does your organization use deferred outcomes? If so, How many “deferred outcome” animals are in the database vs still in your shelter? Using the Animal Outcome deferred report will help us know who is “supposed” to be released. Regular animal inventory will help you stay on track. This report will especially be a flag for you if your organization Doesn’t DO deferred outcomes. It is a good idea to run this report even if you don’t use deferred outcomes, just to check to errors.

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What should your animal inventory look like? What is your policy for available animals? Should they all be altered before becoming available? Should animals in particular stages or locations be altered?

Based on your policies, use your available animal inventory tools to check for errors:Look at your location view: here you can begin to look for issues and errors, with all of the animal data available right here. Location view is found in the reports menu.

Remember, the top set of filters are for the locations and the bottom set of filters are your animal filters. To find where your available animals are located…choose “available” in the lower section of filters because we want to see this particular stage, then click apply. This results in a list of all available animals.

Once we get our results in the grid below, we can click to the blue headings to sort the columns. While we have available animals selected, we can see where they are, if they are altered, if they are on hold, whether or not they have a memo and how many photos they have. FLAG: These are your AVAILABLE animals, they are showing, right now, on your Petango page and on your adoptable search iframe—so as a best practice, we should not see

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animals with no memo and no photos. According to your internal policy, do you see any additional flags here? (like available animals in locations set aside for medical or behavioral evaluation or treatment? This could mean dirty data—animals-got moved to or from the location but their stage was not updated correctly.

Here is the shortcut for our missing date of birth: as long as the animals are still active in your database, you can click to sort by DOB and then print this if needed or since your users have access to this view, this can be part of the medical or intake protocol. By the time an animal is available and ready for adoption, it should have a date of birth because animals without DOB cannot be issued a gift of insurance.

Now, what if we want to look at our available animals but don’t want to use location view…use the Animal Inventory Report or the Animal Inventory Age Species Crosstab. Navigate back to our reports website to view the available inventory reports.

Regardless of the report you choose, there are many filters from which to choose. For instance, set the stage to available and then group the output by location. What if you want to see all of the unaltered animals and what stage they were in? You would set Spayed Neutered status to no and then sort by stage. Don’t forget to check for Spayed Neutered status = unknown as well.

Medical data needs to be verified, too. Depends on your setup of course, what are some things that might be incorrect in this area. Identifying what your potential errors are is always the first step.

An example here might be Spay Neuter surgery items that are specific to gender or species. What if the staff enters them incorrectly? Look at Medical Exam Surgery Crosstab. Choose Record Subtype of Surgery, set Is SN Surgery to yes, set Animal Type and Site for my X1 and X2 and for my Y1 will choose Gender and Y2 Record Subtype and be sure to expand your results. If you don’t track your surgeries this way but you have multiple surgeons who only work specific days, you can run this report for the combinations like provider and the Record Subtype for a particular day to be sure that information has been entered correctly. Don’t forget, there are MANY ways to review this data and MANY ways for it to be recorded. These are just a few examples. So review the options you have for comparison and find the combinations that work for you!

What if you wanted to see all animals with a medical condition to see if a resolution date had been entered. Run the Medical Condition Extended Report, select “by Onset Date” and then export the data as a .csv, and sort by resolution date. If you are seeing a lot of blanks here, then your data will not be able to help you evaluate your medical process…Because—you don’t just need DATA, you need the RIGHT DATA, in the RIGHT PLACE.

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Does your organization remember to keep up with Age Group changes? And what is your protocol for assigning a size to an animal? These are fields that do not update themselves (like Animal Age). Make sure you have policies in place to review this information for animals that stay with you for an extended period or that are returned. To look for this you can run Animal Inventory History Extended for TODAY and compare the age and age group.

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For enterprise users, you can also set up some very quick crosstab reports that you can schedule to run on a regular basis to let you know if you have issuesHere is a sample Dashboard for missing jurisdictions and age group tracking.

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Identify not just when and what will be checked, but who will check for errors and who will fix, too.

What do you want to examine more closely!

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