Prevent Double Approving Hours via Self Check-in and Program Manager

Posted over 4 years ago by Cody Jang

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Cody Jang

Hi all,

This thread is similar as my suggestion. The end result of duplicate hours is the same, but the way we got there is a little different. In either case, it would be helpful to provide an error message so that hours are not duplicated for the same opportunity/shift.

In the above example, volunteers self-submit hours and can do so more than one time for each opportunity. The unfortunate ability to submit hours more than once for each opportunity also extends to Program Managers. Whether it is user error, or multiple Program Managers are working in the same program, I suggest the system not approve hours that have already been approved/submitted.

As noted in the above example, I realize that using the check-in kiosk will help mitigate much of this. We are planning on doing that at many of our opportunities but for some it's not realistic because of the set up.

We are seeing many volunteers submit their own hours, and we are manually approving hours for a shift. When we go to approve hours in bulk, we're not able to see which volunteers in the opportunity already submitted their hours. This results in volunteers receiving the hours they submitted on their own and the hours we submitted for them. And if a Manager accidentally submits in bulk more than once, every volunteer gets double hours for their shift.

I have some suggestions that may or may not be realistic, but could help:

when viewing responses to an opportunity, have an icon or highlight indicating which users have already submitted hours
while I recognize it might not be apples to apples, when I try to create a new account in the system, I get the error message "cjang@sfmfoodbank.org is already in the system." and am prevented from moving forward. How about something similar for hours?
create a merge hours feature similar to the merge accounts feature were duplicate entries can be identified and one can be removed

Ultimately, it seem the system should be able to recognize that hours are already submitted or approved and not double up.

Thanks,

Cody

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2 Comments

Cody Jang posted over 4 years ago

Hi Maia,

Thanks for looking into this.

A safeguard for volunteers and admins would be great so that hours are not entered more than once for any opportunity.

This feature would be most helpful if it can work when logging individual hours and also when doing bulk check-in, as we frequently do that.

If a safeguard were in place, a dedupe method likely would not be needed. But since there are some duplicates already a simple way to find and remove them would be great.

Thanks,

Cody

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Maia Price posted over 4 years ago Admin

Hi, Cody,

Thanks for adding this information to the forum. I completely understand how this would be helpful to both users and site managers to determine who has submitted hours before and who hasn't. Essentially, we are looking for some sort of safeguard to let an individual know that they have already submitted hours? or a deduplication feature that removes duplicate hours?

Thank you!
Maia
Galaxy Digital CX

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