Does anyone know if there is a way to see who marked a constituent deceased?

There is no audit trail for any specific field in RE.  All you can see is who last changed the record in some way but you can not see what they changed.

I know there are some VBA/API programmers out there who have come up with some creative ways to keep audit trails but unless you have that module ($$$$$$) I do not think you can do anything.  (someone correct me if I am wrong.)

I do believe that the next major redesign for RE has been designed in a way to give you this audit trail.  This is likely years from implementation, however.  Sorry

There are ways to find it if you really are interested and do not have audit trails set up.  There are log readers available for SQL server.  These basically allow you to browse through the transaction logs.  This is a very slow and tedious project, so I would only do this if you really need to.

It came in very handy at my last job, because one of my clients insisted that the equivalent of the Address Accelerator was mangling some of his records.  Invariably, we found that it was his administrative assistant who was incorrectly entering the data, which the program then put into a standardized format. 

If you are on SQL 2005, you don't need to wait for BB to release the next version.  SQL 2005 has table audits.  We're not on SQL 2005, so I can't tell you how to set these up.

 Drew
 

This may not be to the point, but we find it very useful to have a policy that only the Database Administrator can mark a person deceased and she (I mean me) adds a note and if available the obituary to the record,  If not the obit, how we found out a person died.  This idea won't help tracking the past but can help  creat a trail for the future.

We basically do the same thing Nina does. We only have several people that can mark someone deceased. They then add a notepad type of Deceased Notification saying how we learned they were deceased. We usually learn way after the fact so the note date helps us know when we learned of it.

Hi

Sorry to barge into this thread but I'm just bursting to ask a couple of questions!! 

Angela, when you say:

Angela Snyder:

We only have several people that can mark someone deceased

Sankari

Project Officer, Office of Development

University of Western Australia

Unfortunately, if they need to be able to edit other parts of the record I don't think you can have just the deceased tick box unavailable. It is a procedural issue. We have over 200 users and problems with people not always abiding by the procedures but this one most people seem to leave alone. It also helps that the deceased notifications that come through the mail go to a specific person and that's how we learn of the majority of them (through replies to our mailings). Our solicitors know who to notify if they learn someone is deceased while calling on people.

 If we come across a record that was not deceased properly, we fix it and if we can figure out who did it wrong, we talk to them.

Hi,

 I just oultined a project for myself to create auditing procedures that involves queries, exports and RE: Queue, then I read this thread in the User's Edge newsletter.  It reminded me I should include a specific export and query for deceased constituents.  You could schedule an export that includes the last changed by field using a "deceased" query (deceased checkbox and date last changed fields) in RE: Queue daily, weekly or what ever frequency that satisfies your desired level of oversight, volume of records and time constraints.

 Similar to other users above, we require users to create a note record documenting the details when marking the deceased checkbox.  You could also include this in your query.

jwant

Recently we have begun copying the obituary from the online obit into a note on the constituent record whenever we mark someone as deceased.  That note automatically shows the author of the note and the date the note was created.  Copying the obit serves 2 purposes, it verifies that the person really is deceased and the obit often has family info or relation info that is useful.  In this same vein, today I started looking for a way to get a report of all changes, additions and deletions each day to constituent records.  In particular I would like to see for edit changes what was in the field before the change was made.  Does anyone know if such a report is available and how do I get it? 

Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release (well re-release) of our Audit Trail customisation. The Audit Trail tracks changes made to records on The Raiser’s Edge. The three versions come in varying degrees of complexity.

• Audit Trail Free – tracks constituent deletions and reports them to a log file
• Audit Trail Basic – tracks constituent deletions, additions and updates and records them in a table that can be reported on, filter by, sliced and diced etc
• Audit Trail Professional – does all of the above but also tracks gifts, relationships, actions and participants.

All three versions tell you who made the change and when. They also tell you the previous values and the updated values.

Audit Trail no longer requires the VBA module – so the free version is truly free!

Check out an overview video. Warning – it’s cute.

For more information including a breakdown in the differences between the versions and to download Audit Trail check out the product page on our website

David - I just watched your video; it's extremely clever on so many levels!