How does your org use control reports?

Marrit Ingman

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!

Marie Stark

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

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

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

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

I don't use control reports for queries either, only for imports etc. where there might be exceptions generated.

Jeannie Goings

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."