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From time to time, people ask me about how a report handles bed-nights. Unless otherwise specified, a bed-night is counted if a client is booked in at exactly midnight.

That means that there is no minimum stay length. If a client books in at 11:59pm and then books out at 12:01am (2 minutes later), that counts as a bed-night.

That means that if someone books in at 1am and stays the entire rest of the night, that does not count as a bed-night.

That means if someone is there at check-in and slee…

Have you ever had a client that didn't have a cell phone number and couldn't reliably access the internet to check their email?

...

That was rhetorical. Of course you have!

Typically, we use the Contact Info tab on the Client Vitals screen to record the way we can contact our client, but the default options are out-of-date and fairly limited. Like, who has a pager or a fax machine these days?

What if I told you that instead you could make this tab way more useful?

The first thing that you'd…

As of HIFIS version 4.0.59, there's a new feature that identifies the client's Housing Status.

The Housing Status is derived from a combination of both the client's Housing History and their Admissions, and can be one of 5 statuses:

1. Housed
2. Homeless
3. Chronically Homeless
4. Unknown
5. Transitional

You can look up the Housing Types that belong to the Housed, Homeless, and Transitional categories in Administration > Housing Continuum by looking up the Reaching Home Continuum. A client is Chroni…

And that's a wrap on #CAEH22. It was so great to see so many faces that have only been Zoom personalities for the past three years.

1. We need to get better at getting out of the way of indigenous-led housing programs that are doing a great job @Celest Hayward @Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi
2. New Zealand is dealing with many of the same challenges we are in Canada @Ali Hamlin-Paenga
3. We can't just bulldoze an encampment and assume that'll solve the problem. We've got to work on understanding the root cause…

Communities in British Columbia have been caught between a rock and a hard place, HIFIS-wise, with BC Housing holding a provincial license but only utilizing it for their own funded programs, and Designated Communities now being required under Reaching Home to adopt HIFIS and Coordinated Access locally.

ACRE Consulting was hired by Employment and Skills Development Canada (now Infrastructure Canada) to identify viable options for HIFIS deployment across British Columbia, and the report is now pub…

As of April 1, 2022, Ontario communities now have new funding requirements through the HPP program. There's a lot to take in here, so many communities are rightly concerned about what this means for them. In particular, those using HIFIS are wondering how they should start recording data so that they can pull it out at the end of the year.

I'm afraid that I don't have all the answers yet, but since so many people are thinking about this right now, I thought it would be good to start a discussio…

• The fact that Reaching Home-funded agencies will soon be required to use HIFIS 4, and that some eligible activities do not clearly align with the available HIFIS modules (including transitional housing and permane…

Several years ago, we wrote about a new feature (new in version 4.0.52!) that allowed for more secure passwords in HIFIS, with more options for customizing.

Internet security has evolved, so we thought it was time to revisit our old discussion. HIFIS has several features that allow you to configure some things, but how should you configure them?

Password Expiry

One thing that has been examined recently is policies that force a user to create a new password every so often (typically 90 days). …