Lifetime Hours Fix
The Lifetime Hours on the volunteers’ info tab calculates as of today by adding all the hours records in the Reporter. The Reporter increments those hours automatically. That field is editable, however, so it may include any hours that your staff added if you got the Reporter some time after your program began and you wanted to add in past hours served. Or some hours from a data conversion.
Lifetime Hours ought to equal or be higher than the total hours served from your earliest records until now. Lifetime Hours that are lower than the total hours on an Hours Served report suggest that they have been edited sometime. You could try reindexing, as that fixes minor corruption, but I can’t think of any other explanations for the descrepancies.
Reindexing is very easy to do. Be sure to shut down the kiosk—anything that is accessing the data files—and everybody’s Reporter except the one which will perform the reindex.
- Make sure everyone else is out of the Reporter.
- Close the Touch-Screen Assistant on the kiosk.
- Close all the Reporter windows except the main menu.
- Click on the File menu | Reindex Data.
- OK.
- Watch the progress meter.
- When it says finished, click OK.
The Reporter creates the indexes all the time. It’s how the Reporter alphabetizes and aligns all volunteers. Occasionally the indexes get out of place or corrupted. The Reporter reindex utility can re-sort the indexes and remake them.
You can see the lifetime hours and the hours served together on a spreadsheet by running the Hours Served Summary by Volunteer spreadsheet. Be sure to check the box to include volunteer details and use a date range from the “beginning of time” in regards to your organization until the present.
If you still have a lot that are off, we could do a quick fix for you in which we adjust your data so that the higher number [hours served or lifetime hours] shows in the Lifetime Hours field. If we did that, you would send us a backup of your data and we would fix it and send it back right away.
We’d be happy to discuss this further over the phone.