Reporting previous months Home Teaching in MLS

[CMiller-p40]

Our EQ President has decided to go back over the past several months and enter Home Teaching numbers into MLS, It appears the system will not allow this. Is there an issue with our computer or is this a usual response?

My follow up question is, is it useful to enter this information other than we can see trends & history for both the Home Teacher as well as the Family being taught?

Thanks

[aebrown]

Our EQ President has decided to go back over the past several months and enter Home Teaching numbers into MLS, It appears the system will not allow this. Is there an issue with our computer or is this a usual response?

When you go to the Enter Home Teaching Visits screen in MLS, there will be three columns of checkboxes: for the current month, and the two months before that (at this moment, Jun, Jul, Aug 2009). Are you saying that some of those checkboxes are disabled? Or that you want to enter data prior to June 2009?

To enter data prior to June 2009, click on the Visits link (it will look something like 50% (12 months)). Then you can enter visits back a full year.

My follow up question is, is it useful to enter this information other than we can see trends & history for both the Home Teacher as well as the Family being taught?

The quarterly reports have already been submitted, so the only purpose of having historical data is as you say -- trends and history. For example, as the PEC is discussing the needs of the Jones family, it may be helpful to know if they have received faithful attention from their home teachers. The HT Statistics report will be more meaningful if there is more data. But there is no MLS or reporting need for the older data at this point.

[CMiller-p40]

Thanks for the quick response. Let me double check with the EQ president and get back.

[rmrichesjr]

...
To enter data prior to June 2009, click on the Visits link (it will look something like 50% (12 months)). Then you can enter visits back a full year.
...

In my experience, MLS does restrict entry of visits to the time frame after the family's records arrived in the ward. For new move-ins, if the records took a month or three to arrive, visits cannot be recorded until the month the records arrived.

[russellhltn]

In my experience, MLS does restrict entry of visits to the time frame after the family's records arrived in the ward.

This would also come into play if there was a boundary re-alignment or a new unit created.

[nathangg]

As a follow-up to this, if you do try to enter information from previous months and the family is new (or a ward was split), it will probably look like this:

HTWeirdness.jpg (65.23 KiB) Viewed 1753 times

But the weirdness for me is that our ward was formed 27 Feb 2011, everyone's records were transferred in on 5 Mar 2011, and all the HT Districts were set up in April 2011.

Why can't I enter in March data? Even though HT districts weren't entered on the computer, people still had assignments...

Any ideas? Was it because the records were transferred in on March 5th?

Thanks~!

[rmrichesjr]

(Please consider the following opinions to be my own and not necessarily those of the management...)

The screenshot ended up being only 100x66 pixels, so there isn't enough information to see anything useful.

MLS simply refuses to allow entry of visits in months before a household record was moved into the ward. I would not be surprised if there were some record movement operations that did not happen until late in March or perhaps even into April. Perhaps the records were moved in on March 5, back out some time later, and back in some time later still. That could have happened without much evidence other than the symptom you are seeing. That's one possible explanation.

Another possible explantion is perhaps MLS disallows entry of visits in the same month a record is moved into the ward. I have seen inconclusive indications of that behavior. Your case appears to be a bit stronger than indications I had previously seen. Personally, I would consider that to be a bug in the program. However, it appears MLS was developed with a high-process development methodology, in which case sometimes requirements are written that are not entirely 100.000% consistent with common sense, and the program is considered correct if it follows those requirements to the letter.

If you wish, there are mechanisms for filing bug reports against MLS. However, I would not want to get your hopes up that the bug, even if it ends up being classified as a bug, would be fixed any time soon. At the risk of sounding a bit negative, if I had hope of MLS bug reports resulting in fixes, I have some things I would report as bugs, but I don't bother. I suspect most people who have dealt with such things in MLS would recommend writing it off as an MLS limitation.

[russellhltn]

Why can't I enter in March data?

I didn't see anything in the software manual, but the Wiki claims that you cannot enter data for the month that MLS is installed. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think there's also a limitation on the month a family moves in. Either way, I don't think there's anything you can do about it.

Out of curiosity, on the quarterly report, how many families do you have listed? If it's zero, then you're off the hook for that month Otherwise, it looks like you can manually enter a number for "visited" for the quarterly reports.

[nathangg]

Here is a better image.

MLS was installed in March, then patched, re-patched, and re-patched because we were having issues.

Thanks for your help. I'm just going to chalk it up to the wiki reference, that HT (and I suppose VT) data cannot be entered for the month that MLS was installed.

Out of curiosity, on the quarterly report, how many families do you have listed? If it's zero, then you're off the hook for that month Otherwise, it looks like you can manually enter a number for "visited" for the quarterly reports.

I'll have to ask the Ward Clerk about the Quaterly Report, I'll let you know what I find out.

Thanks~!

[nathangg]

Out of curiosity, on the quarterly report, how many families do you have listed? If it's zero, then you're off the hook for that month Otherwise, it looks like you can manually enter a number for "visited" for the quarterly reports.

Here is the quarterly report data:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23534586/Q12011.png

Total Members: 311
Total Families: 120

We can't seem to enter HT/VT data, so it looks like we'll be doing that by hand.

Thanks!