This blog posting stems from a conference-call-style training I sat in on about a year ago, where we did not really have control over what was covered, and one of the topics that was covered in depth was formatting. My initial feeling on it was eh, formatting is not that important, or easy enough to figure out, but the …

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Navigating the homeless services landscape as a family can be very stressful and often leads to sometimes heartbreaking changes in household configurations, before, during, and after program stays. Capturing this kind of data can be especially tricky since not only are the situations complex, but the data objects …

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Lately HUD has been encouraging CoC's to set objectives designed to end homelessness. I worked with the CoC committee tasked with setting the objectives to create a report that could show how each project was doing in relation to these goals. That report helped the committee get baseline data to know where projects …

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While the ideal first step in writing a good custom report is writing down your plan, mapping out your queries and variables, and design, we all know the specifics in a large report can change while it is being built, and plans do not always pan out the way we intend. As a result, reports can turn into a tangled web of …

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A custom report is needed- what are your first steps in building the report? A good first step is to write down exactly what you need to show, who the audience is, who will be actually running the report (if that's different), the data elements you will need to show it, what prompts will be needed, and the basic …

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Sometimes we need to look at client data that represents the most recent data available on a client. For HMIS, this would translate to showing data as of an Exit Date, or, if the client had not exited the program on the last day of the reporting period, the report would use the last date of the reporting period …

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For many years, our HMIS's main data quality report was pretty much the APR (except for HPRP). The conventional wisdom was "if your APR looks alright, your data must be fine." Once we started participating in the AHAR in a meaningful way, and submitting HMIS APR's and using other reports, like the NOFA, we …

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There is one very big difference between hair cutting and report designing- in hair cutting, there is no going back. However if you are not careful, designing reports can be much like hair cutting, where every move you make has the potential to wreck everything. I have designed a few very large reports over the past …

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Over the past couple of years, we have come to realize that between the CoC APR, the HMIS APR, the AHAR, and the NOFA, the definition of "missing" assessment data is a moving target. An agency with a completely clean APR that shows no missing data may have many many errors contributing to bad data on the NOFA …

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We have had many agencies call to ask where to find a calculation of shelter nights. This means that each night a client is served in their program counts as one shelter night. It is measured between two dates, so that the nightly client count served on each night in the date range is added together to give a total …

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