Toby Sterrett's dashboard

I just bought the app *because* of this post. Didn't know about the $5 off if you buy it now. Look, the app is already great, and I was 99% sure I was going to buy it when it's out of beta. I find it useful enough right now to use it full time, they've already listened to my feedback and addressed stuff I specifically asked for, and I don't see a problem with supporting a young project and encouraging them to continue.

I submitted a feature request through the app with this idea, but I'll put it in here for posterity :) I recommend checking out Socialthing!, i remember them doing it pretty well. Thanks!

Hi mlc thanks for the message. Let me think about this a bit :)

Oh, by the way, this support site is provided by getsatisfaction.com, I don't really have any control over their usability...I should take a look at if there any settings I can tweak though.

Hi Kevin. Glad you like Stafftool so far. As far as reporting goes, there are some options available now, and more planned for the future.

Things you can do now:

• You can group people by family. To build the families up, simply set up the relationships between the people when you edit them. To create an overall household, just mark a person as "Primary Household Contact." Then, for example, you can add a relationship to that person as being the spouse of another person. That will create a spousal relationship between both people, and they'll both be included in the household. You can also add children to those parents through relationships, and they'll be included as well.

• You can filter people by groups, tags and smart groups and print those out. You can also switch to the household view and the filters will be applied to the primary household contact. When used with the flexible power that Smart groups give you, you can get some pretty specific filtering done with this.

• Formal annual giving summary reports are in progress. As it is right now, you can click on a person to view their info card, and click on the "Contributions" tab, which will give a history of their giving. Also, in the main Contributions section, there is a running total for all contributions, as well as the Year-to-date contributions. You can also filter the contributions by tags as well, which will give you the same totals. More extensive and formalized reporting is definitely in the pipeline though, including CSV exports for importing into Excel and printable reports.

That said, there are plans to formalize reporting a bit, with more detailed charting, and printing, as well as with more hooks for filtering. For instance, always up to date reports on peoples' involvement in different groups or events. Once some more infrastructure is in place to enable these things, we'll be able to do some pretty interesting things.

There is some existing discussion at the http://support.stafftool.com website as well for different types of reporting that people have suggested if you'd like to take a look there and perhaps provide some feedback of your own :) If you have any other questions or would like some more specific help on what's currently available, please don't hesitate to post more!

There is no specific DOD in the app right now, but you could easily add "DOD" as the name of a custom important date (just choose the Custom... option from the important date name drop down, which will give you a text field where you can type "DOD" or "Date of Death"). This will make DOD available as an option in the drop down moving forward for other records.

As for having inactive people, one method would be to tag people who are not active with "inactive" and then create a smart group called "Active people" with the rule "not tagged with inactive" - this effectively gives you a list of everyone who is active. You can also add other criteria to this smart group, such as "not tagged with visitor" or "not tagged with out of town" or any other criteria you can think of. This lets you keep everyone in your main database, but still have an easy way to send messages to just the active people in your organization.

Hope this helps!

Hi Rob, just wanted to let you know that the first version of contributions tracking is now available in Stafftool. It's very new, so I'm referring to this initial version of the contributions functionality as a bit of a beta, so I'd love for you to check it out and put it through it's paces a bit and give some feedback about it so we can really dial it in. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

Funny you should ask! I'm putting the finishing touches on a contributions section as we speak. Some of the main features of it are:

* contribution tracking by individual person
* contribution tracking by event (for those who don't want to track individually but would rather enter in a total per Sunday service, for example)
* tags and filtering for tracking what the contributions are going toward
* a pie chart breakdown for a quick overview of how much has gone toward each tag
* trend overview chart by month to see contribution trends over the last few months
* overall and year-to-date totals
* per person and event contribution tracking when viewing those individual records

Those are the main things going into the first version of the contributions section, with plans for fleshing out more of the reporting aspects in the future, as well as listening to all the feedback that is sure to come!

Here's a little teaser video I just made right now to let you see the stuff above in action - http://stafftool.net/contributions/ - it's a bit quick and rough, but it should give you an idea of what's coming up. I'm hoping to get this launched on the site within the next week or so.

Let me know if you have any questions, I'd love to hear what you think.