How does your org use control reports?

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Marrit Ingman
Marrit Ingman Blackbaud Employee
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
I'm newly certified in RE as a Blackbaud employee, and I'd love to hear some "real-world" uses for control reports within an organization. Creating a control report is recommended as a best practice, and we've recently revamped the Basics eLearning resources that teach how and why to create one when building a query. But I'm curious what happens next for users. How do folks actually use them? Does anyone not use them? All insights welcome. ? Thanks!
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  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
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    I use them for our gala. We have a series of queries that are merged together. It is very helpful to save these so that the following year I remember what criteria we used and what needs to be updated.
  • Karen Diener 2
    Karen Diener 2 Community All-Star
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    I hardly ever use them. To the point where I would almost say "never". I'm not sure why I would print a piece of paper that replicates a query that I can find in the database, and I wouldn't even save the PDF to store on my network.


    The only time I have used them is when I needed to decipher someone else's very long chain of merged queries. But almost every time, those can be re-written into one query that is much easier to understand.


    IMHO, if the option to run a control report in query disappeared, I wouldn't miss it at all.


    Karen
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    Pretty much ditto Karen Diener‍. About never. I know our account uses for reports she runs from RE (don't even go to why this org is running financial data out of RE when we have FE - I haven't figured it out) and my predecessor used at times as I've found some printed in the papers I inherited.


    I can envision a few times when they would be handy but as stated info is in the query. My issue is more finding query in the thousands saved by users. (Clean up coming!)
  • Robin Evans 3
    Robin Evans 3
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    I don't have the best memory so when I'm pulling a report or list has a lot of criteria, but I don't necessarily want to save the query or parameters for this particular job since it is not going to be run on a regular basis, I will save the control report as a pdf in my files. This way if it is ever questioned whether a certain box was checked or how soft credits were handled, etc, I can simply go back and recheck the control report.


  • Alan French
    Alan French
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    I don't use control reports for queries either, only for imports etc. where there might be exceptions generated.
  • Jeannie Goings
    Jeannie Goings
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    Our implementation consultant said, "Always use run and keep the control reports so that you will know what you did." Wet behind the ears, I followed the directive and after the fifth control report, I stopped.


    Reading this thread, I can see where a control report might be useful but we haven't, used RE long enough to say, "Yes, this is a business process that will be repeated and here is the documentation that defines the process."

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