This program has been on the market for
about ten years now. Originally developed along with the Foster
Grandparent Program in Birmingham, the directors were happy enough
with it that they told me I ought to market it, and so I did.
I came up with the name VolTrax for these two programs. Today there are
over 150 sites using one or the other (or all) of these programs.
The program allows you to keep information
on all your volunteers, clients, and workstations, plus keeping
stipend records for all of them.Designed to be easy to use, the
program uses menus and pushbuttons for all commands. Reports can
be generated for any time period (monthly, quarterly, yearly....)
for the stipends, plus the federal govt's project profile report
produces all the numbers you need to complete it. Leavetime reporting
capabilities include a summary of accrued leave hours for each
volunteer and a detailed listing over a period of time. Produce
listings of volunteers by workstation, by date of last physical,
a birthday list for any given month, and so on. You can also print
a "detail sheet" on each volunteer and workstation that
has all the information the program keeps. You can view all the
reports on the screen as well as print them -- choosing any or
all of the pages of the report.
An optional module for printing checks
allows you to produce the stipend checks. The module also produces
a register, listing each volunteer, check number and amount. In VolTrax,
these are actually viewed as specialized reports. The
program can be run on a network, so that several computers can
all work with the same data at one time. There is no extra licensing
fee for running on simple networks.
The newest version, put out in 2005, has
lots of new and improved features, including:
--Enhanced automatic accruals for
leave time, including caps, or maximums, and more control over
how the accrual amounts are calculated.
--User-defined fields for the volunteers, workstations and clients. This
includes several drop-down (codes) lists that you define along with the
more standard ones.
--The reporting capabilities have had a major overhaul, and now include
a report designer that you can use to fine-tune the appearance of your
reports -- font styles, positioning of items, colors, etc. This version
of VolTrax takes the concept of generic reports to the next level. Pick the
fields for a report, arrange the column order, sort and group by most
fields.
--New browser screens allow you to view and edit the volunteer, station and
client data in a spreadsheet-like format.
--Advisory committee / mailing list capability.
--Batch entry of stipends, all in one screen similar to a spreadsheet.
--Networking is built-in to the basic program. No extra licensing fees
are involved.
--The data files are kept in an Access database, which allows
you easier access to the data from other software programs.
You can request
a fully working demo of the program, along with a word-processing
document that walks you through the program and explore the features
for yourself.
