[sims] SIMS Custom Report - All singleton students and youngest of siblings..

[remoore]

Good morning,

 

I am looking to get some information out of SIMS to help the PTA at my daughters school, and also help the office staff.

 

I am the husband of the PTA chair, and yesterday we spent about two hours going through class lists to send out raffle tickets so that each family only gets one set of tickets to sell regardless of how many children that family has at the school.

 

This was a pain so this morning I asked the office staff if they had a report in SIMS configured to get this information. Turns out they don't but they would really, really like one!

 

I am an IT professional and I could probably knock up the SQL for this in a couple of minutes, I test databases for a living so that's not going to worry me, however I am not going to get access to the back end of SIMS with a SQL client and I am not that familiar with the system. I have sorted a couple of problems out for the school, normally integration with ParentMail and once a user-rights problem but I could do with a quick primer on custom reporting, or a link to a manual, user guide etc.

 

Any advice greatfully received

 

Thanks,

 

Ed Moore

[vikpaw]

See if there is a built-in report for mailing points. A mailing point is defined on a student, and between the siblings who share parents and live in the same house, will determine the one student who receives the mail. We use youngest student. This will pick out your singletons and youngest sibling.

 

There is a routine in SIMS that will update all mailing points for you, and then you'll only have an issue or twins and triplets etc.

 

You are right to not touch the back end of SIMS as it's confusing and could breach their support.

 

There should already be a mailing points report, if not, the report designer is fairly easy to use, wizard based, with fairly straight forward access to the relevant tables.

 

Have a look and see, if not, I can share one of mine along with the twins audit, if you need. We usually print mailing points off by form class and give them as a tick sheet to staff.

[LosOjos]

SIMS already has functionality to deal with this

 

First thing to do is go in to "Tools > Housekeeping > General" and run the "Update Mailing Point" routine (change "Mailing Point" to "Youngest Child" if that's how you want to do it). This sets a flag on each student.

 

Then, when you create a report (via "Reports > Design Report", you just add a filter on "Mailing Point". Add the details you need, set the output to Excel and you're ready to create your Maile Merge

 

You can do Mail Merge straight from SIMS, but personally I find doing it the usual way via Word/Excel easier to manage - depending on the IT skills of the school's office staff though, you might want to set up a SIMS mail merge for them so they can just run the report whenever it's needed.

[vikpaw]

p.s. to EduGeek @remoore

 

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p.s. to EduGeek @remoore

[remoore]

Thats brilliant thanks. I will give this a go next time I pop into the office.