One of the requested enhancements for PTO Manager is to allow volunteers to enter their own hours. Once this is done, PTO Manager will be able to do pretty much everything Nora describes except print the name tag. Most likely this feature will be optional so schools that don't want volunteers to enter hours can choose not to "turn it on"

- Mike

Wow...what a labor intensive job to manually load in all the hours!

We are using a standalone PC based system, called Visitor Log, to capture the sign in/out data by person, location and activity (including categories of visitor vs. volunteer.) I think it costs about $4-500. A parent donated an old lap top. The system not only captures hours by also can be hooked to a label printer to print name tags. The name tags are great because everyone wears them and you can learn people's names! Reports can be generated by volunteer or by month, activity, etc. If you know Access you can create your own versions. It was written by a PTA President who was shocked at the amount of volunteer time was spent working with this data.

The only downside is that hours worked from home are not captured and so many people come for an event...we don't bother with sign-ins. Using PTO Manager to capture these event hours will work well for us. We may eventually look into an interface to upload the volunteer data into PTO Manager. We have to look into it more and it hasn't risen to a priority yet.

For more info about Visitor Log contact Tim Lisko at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I've passed this info onto PTO Today already as a possible tie in to PTO Manager.

[ 09-21-2005, 05:59 PM: Message edited by: Nora - Colvin Run Elementary ]

Tahnks mum!!
This program is awesome once u get everything input. I appreciate all the help!

Krisann--Here's a way to enter volunteer hours. I'll walk you through an example I did that worked.

Let's say you want to track "classroom help"--people who come in and help in some way in a classroom--should be lots of people on lots of different days and times. I set up an event called "classroom help," and gave it a date of 9/6/05 (happens to be the first day of school for us). I set the time of the event to be 12:01 am to 11:59 pm (but you could set any time). I also left the box blank that says "allow volunteers to view this event" because I just want to use this event for tracking the hours that I have to enter from our volunteer sheets in the office--I don't want anyone to actually sign up for this.

Then go to "recruit volunteers" and type in the last name of the volunteer whose hours you want to enter. Find the volunteer on the list that comes up, and "select" that volunteer. Then click on "assign selected."

From there, another screen will pop up that shows that volunteer, with the date and time of the "classroom help" event already filled in. Just type over the date (you can use mm/dd/yy format), and type over either the start/end times or the number of hours. Once you have done that, check the "select" box at the right of the entry. Then click "save and return" and your hours are recorded.

There's another way of doing it, too, where you select the volunteer's name from a list of everyone who has volunteered for that event already, but I think it's a little more error prone. See what you think of this way.

I'm setting up two different kinds of events in the system. Our district requires us to report hours in certain categories--"classroom", "library help", "cafeteria help," "PTA activities," "volunteer coordination," etc. So for all those reporting categories, I've set up a one day event like I listed above, and I'm entering the hours off the sign-in sheets from the office into those categories.

Individual event chairs may want to use the system to let people sign up for a specific event--like Bingo night. So I'm setting up events for those types of things, and letting the individual event chairs assign people as they like into those specific categories. However, just because someone signs up for a 2 hour shift doesn't mean they are going to work for exactly a two hour shift. And not for 2 seconds do I think my event chairs are going to go back into the system and retype people's actual hours--there's a better chance of hell freezing over. So I'll record those hours from the manual sign in/sign out sheets using my reporting categories. And when I total up my hours, I'll only count the hours in the recording categories, not the ones in the individual specific event categories.

Hope this helps.

mum no I am not using it, I signed up for the info but haven't received it yet. I do it the old fasion way....by hand! silly me... love to hear how it is working if you are. I was sort of wondering if this post was about the new program but didnt see a link referring to it...silly me

I'm working through this same issue. They need to be directly connected to an event. I tried to make "classroom help" a recurring event, but that was definitely the wrong way to do it--way too slow, so don't do that. If I understood correctly, I was told to just add "classroom help" as a one time event, and you could change the times/hours. I'm going to try to work on that sometime over this weekend, but I can't explain it better than that until I play with it.

Pals--are you using the PTOMgr volunteer software?