Best practices for annual roll-over of constituent codes

Question

Would anyone like to share their best practices for the annual rollover or promotion or constituent conversion? This will be my first time running this process solo. I think that my approach should be:

* Run an export that contains people of numerous constituency codes, and include each person's import ID as well as each code's import ID
* In Excel, keep track of what changes are necessary
* Run a number of global changes based on the import IDs

Help me understand — Can I change New Student to Current Student, or do I need to add Current Student and then delete New Student?

Peggy Dolter · Answer

Thank you both for responding. This time around, I exported to Excel, determined which ID's would get new codes, and used those ID's in a query, as JoAnn described. Next year I will use normal queries (not just lists of ID's) for the simpler ones, as Steve described. I might not be able to do that for the more complicated ones — parents who have a new grad but also a younger student, who might or might not remain enrolled our school, and that kind of thing.

Another wrinkle involves choosing which constituency code is the top-ranked one. Some of our business rules have been tweaked. But that is our problem. Well, my problem, lol. I could visualize those issues better by looking at the exports.

Thanks again!

Steve Townsend · Answer

I don't know how many records you're dealing with but our process seems much simpler. I do it one constituency code at a time. For each one, I have a query of the constituents whose code needs to be changed,  then I run a global change for each query. This is all using pre-existing queries which are updated each year and saved global changes to make the process as automatic as possible. We always change the constituent code rather than adding and deleting.

JoAnn Strommen · Answer

I would have a static query with constituent ID, or import ID, of the records with one specific code A needing to be changed to code B. If you have the user rights, you can do a global change to replace code A with code B.

I have boxes checked to create query of exceptions and query of changed records.

The thing to think about is if you will be able to query the next group needing to be changed or if you need to change code B to code C before change described above.