Point-in-Time (PIT) Count Administration

One of the first things to think about when setting up a PiT Count in HIFIS 4 is this: to which Service Provider will the PiT Count belong? That may seem like an odd question, and it may seem like it doesn’t matter. However, consider this: Every surveyor who is going to be entering data into HIFIS 4 will need a HIFIS 4 user account. Each user account needs associated rights.  And the way HIFIS 4 is set up, the user account has those rights at an associate Service Provider.  So when your surveyors log into HIFIS 4, they’ll need to select a Service Provider from the drop-down menu, which they will log in at. Now this could potentially cause some issues. First, you may be creating a number of new user accounts for volunteers. You’ll be granting them the ability to log in at a particular Service Provider, so among other things, HIFIS will treat these users as if they “work” at that agency. A supervisor at that Service Provider may have the ability to deactivate their account, or give them additional rights, or change their password. Second, you may be providing PiT Count rights to existing users. The existing users may already have a rights template associated with that Service Provider. This might cause some difficulties for you as you try to set up your rights templates. Let’s say you set up a new rights template called “PiT Count Volunteer.” To assign this template to an existing user might mean you need to replace that user’s current rights with the volunteer rights. The user would then not be able to do their job until you changed their rights back.  You could modify the user’s existing rights template to include PiT Count rights, but that would affect everyone with that rights template (including staff who aren’t PiT Count volunteers). One solution is to set up a brand new Service Provider that is called something like “PiT Count.” That way, for new users (i.e. volunteers), they’ll only have access to a Service Provider that isn’t being used for any other purpose. And for existing users, they’ll be able to keep their old rights (at the Service Provider where they actually work), and also have PiT Count rights (at the PiT Count Service Provider). However, if you’re just doing data entry into HIFIS after the PiT Count event, this may not be a concern for you.  Setting up a new Service Provider just for PiT Count data may not be necessary, if you just have one or two staff entering data. Or, if all of your surveyors are existing HIFIS users, and you’re simply going to modify their rights templates to include PiT Count rights, then you won’t need to worry about setting up a new PiT Count Service Provider.

There are a few terms that are important in this section. A user has the ability to log in to HIFIS. You might want to create new users for your PiT Count so that they can log in and directly enter surveys into HIFIS. A person in HIFIS is someone that does not have the ability to log in to HIFIS. You might want to create new people (persons?) if you’re doing data entry after the fact, and someone will be entering surveys into HIFIS, but not the person who originally completed the survey.  That way, the data entry person will be able to select the surveyor from a drop-down menu when they’re entering in the survey. If you want your surveyors to be users (i.e. have the ability to log in), they’ll also need corresponding user rights.  User rights define what the user has the ability to access in HIFIS, and what they can and cannot do while they are logged in.  User rights are usually organized into rights templates. To add people one at a time, use the Front Desk > People List, and click on Add Person. To add users one at a time, use the PiT Count > Volunteers List, and click on Add User. To add people or users in bulk, use the PiT Count > Volunteers List, and click on Add PiT Live Volunteers.

The last piece of configuration you'll need to do is to set up your PiT Count shifts.  A shift is the intersection of a surveyor, a time, and a location. Of course, it can be quite time-consuming to assign each user to a shift before the event, in particular when you're relying on volunteers who may or may not show up and you may need to make some last-minute reassignments. It's important to note that HIFIS 4 behaves in a particular way when it comes to Live Surveyors. It follows this line of reasoning: When a user begins a Live Survey, HIFIS 4 checks to see if the user has any shifts already assigned to them If the user already has one or more shifts assigned to them, the user will be prompted to select from those available shifts If the user does not already have any shifts assigned to them, HIFIS will automatically create a new shift for that user with the start and end time equal to the current time Therefore, if you're doing Live Surveys in HIFIS 4, you do not strictly speaking need to set up all of your shifts in advance of the PIT Count. However, it's strongly suggested that you take good notes of which surveyors were sent out at what times to what locations, so that you can edit the shifts after the PIT Count is over (of note, you're going to want to at least record what location each surveyor canvassed).