Support FAQs for Count Administrators
We have developed the Frequently Asked Questions below to help Count Administrators take full advantage of the features within the Point in Time Regional Command Center. General FAQs about the point-in-time count, and about the services available from Simtech to support it, can be found here. If you don't see the answer to your question already posted please submit a ticket to our help desk and a member of our team will be glad to assist.

Office Hours 
Simtech provides ongoing Office Hours during "PIT Season" and will be sharing the schedule on this site. Areas of focus for the open office hours include: 

• Volunteer recruitment
• Review of new features and functionality
• Post-count data cleanup
• Deduplication of clients
• What to do with empty surveys
• Evaluation of the count and the tech and next steps in partnerships
• Wrapping up the PIT report and submitting it to HUD 
• Informing local policy and improving outreach with the aid of PIT data

Count Planning and Count Activity Setup

• How can I edit and manage surveys?

• What do we need to do to customize the questions in the surveys to meet our local needs?

• How do I revise the order of the surveys listed within the Counting Us app?

• How can the Command Center be used to manage Regions and Count Teams?

  • How do I Create Teams and Assign Coverage Areas?

• What are the typical Roles and Responsibilities of Jurisdictional Count Leads? 

• How can I control what map boundaries are displayed within the Counting Us app?

• How can I use the Counting Us app and the Command Center to conduct a Point in Time count for sheltered projects and/or sheltered projects not using HMIS or with poor data quality? 

• Why should we consider a "Known Locations" approach for planning purposes?

• How do I view the Known Locations Surveys that have come in already?

• Which Observation Tally instrument should our community use?
   

Volunteer Recruitment, Team Management, and Training

• What do we need to do to customize the Volunteer Registration Portal to meet our local needs?

• How can we use social media to recruit volunteers for the PIT count?

• How does the Counting Us app help personalize and streamline the data collection process? 

• How can the Command Center be used to manage user accounts?

• What are the various User Roles available within the Regional Command Center?

• We want to conduct a training but want these survey records to be ignored from the final HUD report. How can we do this? 

• How can I manage the information to be shared with surveyors in the My Count section of Counting Us?

Managing Data Quality within the Regional Command Center

• What final steps should I take before the count is about to begin?

• How do I message a user through the Command Center?

• The count has ended. How do I prevent people from entering additional surveys?

• How can I check for duplicate surveys within the Command Center?

• Can I tag responses with my custom tags for a post-count follow-up?

• Why do some households have an "Unknown" household type?

• How do I find and correct Unknown Household types?

• How can I use the Data Export feature and Excel to improve the data quality of our survey data?

• Why is having a response for age so important that Simtech made this a required field? 

• How do I change the location of a survey?

• How do I archive/unarchive a record?
   

Reporting and Data Analysis

• How can I generate a HUD-compliant Point in Time report from the Command Center?

• How can I aggregate the unsheltered and sheltered counts gathered using Counting Us with the results from HMIS and the Point in Time Report Generation Tool? 

• How can we derive estimates for any responses that are left blank? Is there an extrapolation tool?

• How does the question "Where were you sleeping on the night of the Count" impact the Point in Time reports?

• How does the PIT report calculate chronic homelessness?

• Why is there no "long and indefinite" qualifier on either developmental disability or HIV/AIDS? 

• HUD requires that we report on complete data for gender, race, and ethnicity. How can we meet this requirement if our data is incomplete?

• What do the numeric values for the data elements such as age range, gender, ethnicity, veteran's data, and sleeping location, in the CSV export represent?

• How can I see data, or run a report, over a geographic subset of the data?

• How can we derive estimates for people experiencing homelessness while living in vehicles or tents?

• Why is there a difference between the count of surveys on the dashboard and/or the CSV export, and the total number of clients counted within the point-in-time report?

• How can we get the national Point in Time trend analysis updated to include our recent count results?

General 

• How can I provide feedback on the tools and services provided to us during the count process?