Monthly Home Teaching at Stake Level

[jepeneter-p40]

At the stake level, MLS seems to be only able to show home teaching at a monthly level using the Stake Quarterly Report. Is there a way to get the monthly data at the stake level? If not, that would be a nice addition as our stake president would like to get that data monthly. Right now we use the high council to collect that data but we have to track it outside of MLS (in an Excel spreadsheet).

Thanks,
-John-

[russellhltn]

Try having each of the ward "Send Membership data to Stake" (Found under "File") after they have entered the reports for the month. Naturally the stake will have to do a Send/Receive it get it.

[thedqs]

I think he wanted to know if there was a report that would generate the information on a monthly basis instead of a quarterly. I don't know but could you make a custom report for that?

[russellhltn]

You can find HT/VT reports under the "Organizations" section of MLS. It's not the same format as the Quarterly Report, but it's got everything there.

I don't think custom reports will do the job because custom reports works on the membership database and doesn't do summery reports.

[thedqs]

Ok then another feature they should add the MLS, the ability to create custom summary reports.

[jepeneter-p40]

Wouldn't you know that after I posted, our ward clerks got together and found that report. The big question we asked was what was it doing under Organizations?

Anyway, the next feature enhancement for that would be to make the CTRL-SHFT-C option work on that report so we can copy and paste into Excel. That doesn't seem to work. So then we tried printing to PDF so we could copy and paste from that into Excel. That didn't work either. So how about a print to CSV or export results?

Don't get me wrong, I think the church does an amazing job with the resources they have and we are very pleased. But making suggestions is a good way to make things better. As our stake president says, "The Lord is often pleased but rarely satisfied."

[russellhltn]

So then we tried printing to PDF so we could copy and paste from that into Excel. That didn't work either.

Yup. MLS prints as a graphic. PDF is not a single format. It can support both text and graphics. Copy and Paste can't convert graphics into text.

[thedqs]

If you wanted to get really complex, you print to a picture (TIFF and JPEG are ones my OCR software uses) run it through and OCR (one that has table support) and then copy the resulting table into Excel. Messy yes, but you get copy and paste functionality.

[rmrichesjr]

Try having each of the ward "Send Membership data to Stake" (Found under "File") after they have entered the reports for the month. Naturally the stake will have to do a Send/Receive it get it.

There is nothing under "File" (or anywhere else I have searched) by that title or which can transmit home teaching visits to the stake, at least not when I use MLS as 1st counselor to the elders quorum president. Is that option limited to clerks?

Because of my experience with MLS, I have the assignment to enter visits into MLS. The handbook says the visit report is due to the stake on the 10th of the (next) month. I'd like to comply with that directive, but if I enter the visits in ward MLS on the Tuesday the 9th or 10th, it's going to be several days before a clerk transmits the data to Church headquarters, which (of course) must be done before the stake can see the results. Maybe I should bug MLS support to ask how I'm supposed to get results to the stake by that due date. (I'm lucky to have the reports to me by the 10th, let alone nearly a week earlier.)

[russellhltn]

There is nothing under "File" (or anywhere else I have searched) by that title or which can transmit home teaching visits to the stake, at least not when I use MLS as 1st counselor to the elders quorum president. Is that option limited to clerks?

Probably you'd need more rights then the ward is currently giving you to do that function. But you might try some testing with the clerk and the stake to see if that will do the trick. If it does, then it up to them to come up with a procedure that works for everyone.