Waiting List

Animal Shelter Manager offers you a complete replacement for your paper-based waiting list. It holds information about contacts, the type of animal, whether the owner can afford to make a donation etc.

Most importantly, the waiting list is capable of assigning an urgency rating to entries and automatically increasing that rating after a configurable amount of time has elapsed to ensure that a queue system can be adhered to.

To open the waiting list screen, you can select it off the diary toolbar, navigate to File->Animal->Waiting List or press CTRL+SHIFT+W

Entries are colour coded according to how urgent they are (as you can see in the screenshot). Additionally, you can use the highlight button to mark interesting entries in yellow for other staff members. Each item is given a rank according to how urgent it is and how long it has been on the list. This can be used to tell people where they are on the waiting list. The report Reports->Stats->Average Time On Waiting List can tell you how long people are waiting on average to get their animals into your shelter.

You can effectively run separate waiting lists per species if you like (turn the option on under System->Options on the Waiting List tab) as for most shelters, whether you can take a dog isn't affected by how many cats you have waiting for example. With this option on, the rankings are calculated separately for each species.

To add a new entry to the waiting list, click the new button. You will be presented with a waiting list entry form to complete. As with other screens, press the Save button at the top to save your new record.

For specific help with a particular waiting list field, hover your mouse over it for a description of what the system expects from you.

In addition to the usual add/edit/delete buttons, the waiting list screen allows you to filter the entries that you see according to a particular animal type, contact name fragment or urgency rating. As with other Animal Shelter Manager tables, you may sort the entries by any column - just click the column name at the top of the list.

If you change your filtering options, click the Refresh button to reload the list with your new filtering options.

You may also print the current view of the waiting list by clicking the Print button on the main screen. The system will generate a report from the entries currently shown on the screen. If you apply a sort to the screen, this will also be reflected on your report.

As mentioned before, the urgency update period is configurable (see later chapter for configuring the waiting list). By default, the update period is set to 14 days, so every fortnight, each waiting list entry will advance one urgency rating until they get to ``High''.

Once an entry reaches ``High'' it will stay there. The ``Urgent'' rating can only be set by users and is for extremely high priority waiting list entries.