Information & Technology Services: Data Management for Bloomington Animal Shelter

THE CHALLENGE

At the Bloomington Animal Shelter, employees work to ensure animals are receiving the best care and customers are happy too. Out of the many services provided by Animal Care & Control, many require financial transactions to facilitate and fund the required care. Animal Shelter staff use Animal Shelter Manager (ASM) software to charge for all of the items and services that are for sale at the Shelter, hold appointments to schedule the various needed activities, and document/report all of the financial transactions required to run the shelter.

But what happens when the Controller’s office states that each department must also document the revenue taken in by that department into the City’s New World ERP financial system? The revenue must also be broken down by Fund and organized into batches by Payment type  “Checks and Cash” into one batch, “Credit Card” transactions into another. To meet these requirements, Animal Shelter Staff would need to run reports in the Animal Shelter Manager software, compile the revenue data into the General Ledger (GL) accounts defined by the Controller’s office, and data entry to get it into the New World ERP Financial system, leading to “summarized data” being hand entered into the ERP financial system. All this after doing all the other required daily tasks in Animal Shelter Manager as well as everything else the Animal Shelter staff has to do to just run the shelter. Compiling revenue data in the format that the Controller’s office desired, as well as the data entry to get that data in NWS ERP was a time consuming task at the end of a day.

THE IDEA

The Controller, Jeff Underwood, suggested to the Deputy Controller, Jeff McMillian to work with ITS to see if there could be a way to “import the detailed transactions” from Animal Shelter Manager into the New World Financial ERP system.

Instead of Animal Shelter Staff compiling data from the Animal Shelter Manager reports, summarizing the data into the desired batches defined by the Controller’s office and then hand entering those transactions, ITS could help by “bridging the two disparate systems”.

Alan Schertz then worked with Jeff McMillian and Virgil Sauder to map out a solution.

Jeff defined how he wanted the batches created in New World ERP. Virgil Sauder helped Alan understand how he had set up the GL structures (items) in Animal Shelter Manager. 

Alan wrote a database cross reference that associated items in Animal Shelter Manager to the desired Payment Codes in New World ERP (as defined by Jeff McMillian) for the desired revenue batches which was used to populate the import file format for New World’s revenue batch import mechanism. 

Alan and Virgil selected a “standard report” from within the Animal Shelter Manager that contained all the data needed for the day’s worth of financial transactions including ASM items that lead to New World ERP Payment Codes, transaction dollar amounts, Payment Types (check, cash or credit card) for revenue batch definition. Alan tied this all together by writing a web app that would import a comma separated values (CSV) version of this ASM standard report, run it thru the cross reference table to convert from Animal Shelter terminology to New Worlds Payment codes, and produce the needed file for import into the New World ERP system. 

Alan Schertz wants to thank Danyale Carpenter, Jennifer Clendenning, Camille Ennis and Lisa Ritchel for assisting the implementation of this change in daily operating procedures. Amy Silkworth was also invaluable from the Controller’s office.

THE COST

If it weren’t for ITS coming up with the web-app solution to this problem, funds would have been spent to purchase new software or hire an external party to create it. Not only that, but employees of the animal shelter can spend more time doing their essential tasks instead of manually compiling and entering data at the end of every day.

THE BENEFITS

What was once a manual process that would take an indeterminate amount of time and could include human error is now semi-automated, taking sometimes less than 15 minutes to complete, and results in clean, detailed data residing in the New World ERP system. Additionally, ITS has worked alongside Animal Care & Control employees to ensure unique processes like managing donations could also be used in the new software. 

A human used to complete this task every day, and software just made it easier. Thanks, ITS!

Metadata

Department(s): Information & Technology Services

Department Point(s) of Contact: Alan Schertz

Partner(s): n/a

Partner Point(s) of Contact: n/a

Type of Innovation: New Service

Date Implemented: December 2021