Creating Reports of Ministry Acts, Visits, or Calls

[mowestusa]

Much of the recording keeping that I'm asked to do as a pastor, is to keep a record of my pastoral acts or calls. For example, I might make x number of visits to members who are home bound per month or x number of visits to the hospital or x number of phone calls to people who have visited worship.

I discovered that I can create "Note Templates" that allow me to create a note for a name in Jethro that has a "date" field and a "selection" field where I can have a list to choose: home bound, hospital, evangelism... This enables me to create a note for every "call", "visit", or "pastoral act" that I make in the course of a month which is great.

However, I can't find a way to list all of these "contact" or "pastoral act" notes per month or per a certain date range or per year. Are there ways to create special reports that would enable me to focus on the notes I make? So, that I can at the end of a month run a report that shows all of the "home bound" calls or all of the "hospital" calls I have made in the month or the year or a date range?

[GatesheadBen]

This could be accomplished using custom fields rather than dates? For example (assuming the image comes through on Github), here I am creating a report to list all of the people who have a "hospital" date set in the last 31 days. [image: image.png]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022 at 16:41, mowestusa @.***> wrote:

Much of the recording keeping that I'm asked to do as a pastor, is to keep a record of my pastoral acts or calls. For example, I might make x number of visits to members who are home bound per month or x number of visits to the hospital or x number of phone calls to people who have visited worship.

I discovered that I can create "Note Templates" that allow me to create a note for a name in Jethro that has a "date" field and a "selection" field where I can have a list to choose: home bound, hospital, evangelism... This enables me to create a note for every "contact" or "pastoral act" that I make in the course of a month which is great.

However, I can't find a way to list all of these "contact" or "pastoral act" notes per month or per a certain date range or per year. Are there ways to create special reports that would enable me to focus on the notes I make? So, that I can at the end of a month run a report that shows all of the "home bound" calls or all of the "hospital" calls I have made in the month or the year or a date range?

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[mowestusa]

@GatesheadBen, the picture didn't come through, but I think I understand the concept, you are suggesting. I think that might work if I just wanted a "monthly" report. I'm guessing that if you visited that member in February in the hospital, but visited them twice in February or again in March, I'm guessing that only the last date that you visited would show up, because you would replace the "hospital" custom field date with the last visit. Would custom fields work if I wanted to create a year end report that lists all of the visits that I made to everyone in the span of a year? I'm thinking I would need a unique custom field for every visit, and multiple ones if one visit tends to happen more than once a month or more than once a year. I might have one member that I visit as a "home bound" for 11 months, then visit 3 times in one month as a "hospital" visit. Wouldn't I need 14 custom fields just to cover one year of reporting for one member?

I might be missing something, but I think your idea would work pretty well for a "monthly" report since most people I see regularly rarely have more than one visit per month. Thanks for the idea, and any other thoughts you have. I appreciate it. I'm enjoying getting started with Jethro this year. I have it "self-hosted" on my church Intranet.

[GatesheadBen]

You are absolutely right. For multiple visits the custom field idea won't work but your original note idea is better.

We may need some more experienced Jethro developers to weigh in as I've only learnt about the way note templates and notes from looking at the database this evening. The main complication is that notes are kept in a single field (i.e. no date fields to help with searching, sorting and filtering)

I have (1) Created a note template called Visited with 2 fields (1) type of visit and (2) date of visit (2) Added two notes (to my own person record) pretending I was visited in hospital on 5th Feb and 7th Feb (3) Written a SQL command to show all notes with the subject "Visited"

SELECT _person.last_name, _person.first_name, abstract_note.created, abstract_note.details FROM _person INNER JOIN person_note ON person_note.personid=_person.id INNER JOIN abstract_note ON person_note.id=abstract_note.id AND abstract_note.subject="Visited";

I don't know if you are happy to use a command like that to run off your reports or if that report is close to meeting your needs? You could change that command to only give you records created between certain dates.

[mowestusa]

@GatesheadBen, wow, you did some amazing research and trouble shooting into this issue. I was wondering if I could run a sql command either through a GUI tool that can read the mysql database or through the CLI and pull those notes out of the database into a list like you have done.

I would prefer a reporting tool built into Jethro, but I'm excited to see the results above, and I'm willing to invest some time into learning more about sql and sql tools that I can run against the mysql database that Jethro populates.

Thanks, for your help! This is great news. At least I know that if I do use a specialized note template there is a way to pull that data out of the Jethro database.

[tim-pearce]

Here is my suggestion.

• Create a template as above but add a year+month code field to produce something like '2022 feb monthly reporting note'
• Create a report that looks for notes containing that string (you would have to change it each month)
• Use 'Mail merge a document' into a spreadsheet
• Use spreadsheet functions to pick the data out into other columns and hide the original column

Problem with that is that it only shows one note! That is a bug or shortcoming of Jethro!

Maybe I should add 'Mail merge a document' to the 'Notes' function along with the ability to select completed notes within a date range.

[tbar0970]

Good discussion here. Jethro doesn't currently provide good reporting on this kind of activity recorded in notes. Related issue: #728

[tbar0970]

Person reports are always going to be one row per person. What we need here is a "note report" to show all notes for certain criteria. And to work out what kinds of criteria need to be supported.

[mowestusa]

@tbar0970 thank you so much for noticing this discussion, and labeling it as "feature-request". As a Pastoral Ministry Manager, Jethro has a great tool with the "note templates" to keep records of pastoral acts, visits, or calls that are made to individuals. If you are able to add tools that allow the creation of custom reports of those notes that would be a huge time saver for me when I make reports monthly to our church leaders and yearly when I make out reports for our denomination. I wish I knew PHP and SQL so that I could make some specific pull requests to add those features. If there is anything I can do to help let me know. I do maintain a "self-hosted" versions of Jethro.

[mowestusa]

Just wondering if this feature request has made it to the Jethro roadmap. I have looked into doing this with other software, but it doesn't appear possible in any "contact" type software. Looked into Monica, self-hosted personal relational manager, a CRM built for friendships but difficult to import membership list at once. Other CRM are focused on sales pipelines which don't fit my need very elegantly. Best I have come up with is spreadsheet tied to a sheet with a list of members. Thanks for all the work on Jethro.