setting up a pit count service provider (or not)

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.

Point-in-Time (PIT) Count Administration

🌁 Service Providers

⚙️ Event Settings

📝 Setting up the Survey

🧭 Survey Locations

🧮 Enumerators

🕚 Shifts