Automating Reports

CryWolf® has a lot of great features to make alarm administrators' jobs easier. One of the great features built in to CryWolf® allows jurisdictions to email reports easily to alarm companies.  If you don’t currently use this feature, here is how to start:

From the Reports menu, scroll down to "Alarm Company Related" and then over and down to "PDF creation for eMailing to Alarm companies".  Then over to "Accounts by Alarm Company".

In the "Accounts by Alarm Company" pop up, use the pull down menus to control the information that the report will include.  For my office, our weekly reports are meant to inform the alarm company of any new permit numbers that were issued that week, so we select the alarm company type  and the date that the account was created.  We then choose the dates that we want the report to cover. CryWolf® also allows you to click the Email Reports box option to send the reports electronically to all alarm companies with an email address on file.  The Text pull down menu allows you to select what letter you want to appear in the body of the email.  (The letter has to be available in the Letters section of Maintenance).  

For 6 months, I have been trying to use this feature to send the reports, but I could not get CryWolf® to display our list of letters in the Text box pull down menu.  It was driving me absolutely bonkers. 

In my defense, my unit processes alarms for several other jurisdictions besides our own.  This means that in the Agency pull down menu, several agency names appear along with the choices “All” and “Default”.  (For some tasks, all of the agencies use the same settings so the "All" choice helps minimize the information that must be set up in the rules of CryWolf®. The "Default" choice is used for settings that apply to all jurisdictions). Because CryWolf® sorts pull down menus alphabetically, “All” always appears in our Agency box.  (If you only process alarms for one jurisdiction, the agency that appears is most likely “Default”).  All these months of growing frustration were caused because  I should have been changing the Agency to “Default”.  If I had done so, my list of letters would have been available to me the first time I tried to send this report by e-mail 6 months ago.

I have to give a shout out to our fantastic CryWolf® rep who very patiently pointed this mistake out to me this week.  I figure that I am not the only one who ever makes these blunders, so I am sacrificing my pride so that you don’t make the same mistake.