Tracking keys; what do you do?

[chriswoodut]

I'm responsible for tracking keys for our ward. It is.... like entropy. It is like herding cats. It is like catching leaves as they fall from a tree.

We just switched buildings and I've now seen how the other ward was tracking their keys compared to us. I try to track by individual keys and who has what. They track a key ring with a bundle of keys and that key ring is assigned to a calling. They know who has the calling and thus who should have the keys, but the clerks really don't know what keys each person has and the clerks don't really know what the keys go to.

My approach is more work as I try to do a key inventory once a year by contacting people to see what they have.

It seems there should be an easier way to do this. Maybe it's just a better spreadsheet than I'm using. My spreadsheet lists the key # and what it goes to and then all those that have that key including their calling. Then then the next key is listed, etc.

What is everyone else doing out there?

[russellhltn]

They track a key ring with a bundle of keys and that key ring is assigned to a calling. They know who has the calling and thus who should have the keys, but the clerks really don't know what keys each person has and the clerks don't really know what the keys go to.

If it were my job, I'd go this route. It would be easier to track key rings than individual keys. But I'd need another sheet that shows what key is on what ring. And probably yet another that shows what key has access to what. By "sheet" I'm talking different tabs or pages within the same file.

[chriswoodut]

They track a key ring with a bundle of keys and that key ring is assigned to a calling. They know who has the calling and thus who should have the keys, but the clerks really don't know what keys each person has and the clerks don't really know what the keys go to.

If it were my job, I'd go this route. It would be easier to track key rings than individual keys. But I'd need another sheet that shows what key is on what ring. And probably yet another that shows what key has access to what. By "sheet" I'm talking different tabs or pages within the same file.

I've got all the detail, the only thing I don't do is represent it as a "key ring". Google Spreadsheet doesn't lend itself to that one-to-many approach for representation. https://airtable.com would do it nicely. However, I'm hesitant to introduce a tool I suspect the next clerk will abandon.

[jamiep39]

We have a stake Google sheet that has tabs for each ward. Each ward has access to edit the field with the name of the person assigned to what keys/fobs. We share the spreadsheet with one person in each ward who is in charge of keeping track. I like the method of tracking by calling best, but when you have multiple callings with the same name (I'm in a YSA stake and we have 2-4 activities people per ward that all have fobs) it's a bit confusing to figure out who is "Activities 1", "High Council 5", etc. That's where the spreadsheet has helped.

As far as the one-to-many we just put a comma separated list of what physical keys people have in a column in the sheet.