Original publication date: February, 2007

How to Create a Batch of Counseling Sessions

For those of you who have ever used WinCATS, you may be aware of WinCATS’ batch sessions feature. This feature allows you to simultaneously create a batch of identical counseling sessions for a subset of clients. The ability to batch counseling sessions is great for documenting an outreach effort on behalf of a large number of clients. For example, a letter detailing the changes in government contracting that is sent to all woman-owned businesses, or a conference call scheduled with all veteran-owned businesses.

And although this feature has been in WinCATS for a long time, there was never an efficient way to accomplish counseling session batching in WebCATS. Until the release of build 418, that is. Now, WebCATS can closely mimic WinCATS’ ability to batch counseling sessions. We say closely mimic because it doesn’t work in exactly the same way as WinCATS’ batch sessions feature does. In WinCATS, the batch sessions feature creates multiple counseling sessions, one for each client. In WebCATS, this feature creates a single counseling session with multiple clients attached to it.

This may seem like a big difference in functionality (e.g. hundreds of new counseling session records could potentially be created in WinCATS, while only one new record will ever be created in WebCATS), but because of the way WebCATS handles counseling sessions with multiple clients attached, the effect is exactly the same. When reporting on counseling sessions by client, counselor, or center, WebCATS treats a counseling session with multiple attendees as multiple counseling sessions. This means that report numbers are the same regardless of whether there are 50 counseling session records or one counseling session record with 50 clients attached to it.

WebCATS’ batch sessions feature actually offers an advantage over WinCATS’ version. If a batch edit is necessary, you only need to make the edit once in WebCATS. In WinCATS, you’d probably find yourself deleting the whole batch and starting over since it wouldn’t be feasible to make the same edit over and over for a large number of records.

Follow these steps to batch counseling sessions:

1. Create a client subset that consists of the clients that you will be creating the batch of counseling sessions for (such as all woman-owned businesses).
2. Select Add|Counseling Session
3. In the new counseling session record, click the "Select Clients" hyperlink that displays next to the Client(s) field to open the Add Clients window.
4. Select the "Last Client View" option at the top of this window and move all displayed clients from the left pane to the right pane of the Add Clients window, as shown here.
5. Click the Update button and finish creating the counseling session record.

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