Most organizations we work with have someone on their caseload who gets support from four programs in the same month. Each program has a funder, and each funder asks about a different part of that person's life.
The city wants shelter bed nights and exits in a spreadsheet. The province wants housing outcomes through an online portal. A federal program needs a data extract covering individuals and households. A foundation wants a story about what its mentoring support made possible.
Four reporting periods, four sets of definitions, and one team pulling it all together, usually by hand, right at the deadline.
That is the problem we spent an hour on in our October 29 webinar, "One client, four funders: reporting once and answering everyone." The short version: the work that makes reporting easy happens long before the deadline. Start from the reports, work backwards, and decide what staff need to record while they are doing the work.
Map the requirements together
Start with a funder crosswalk: every indicator you report, one row each, side by side, in each funder's own words.
Get two people in the room: whoever writes the reports and whoever does intake. List each funder's measures, definitions, reporting periods and formats. Then look for the facts they share.
Date of birth is the example we used. One funder asks for it directly. Another wants age groups. A third wants to know whether there are young children in the household. Three different questions, one fact.
Most teams find two things when they do this. Some of what they need is already being collected in another program. And some of it is not being collected at all, which is far better to find out now than the week the report is due.
A new question from a funder is not automatically a new question on your intake form. The crosswalk is how you tell the difference.
Record the fact, not the answer
Housing outcomes were the clearest example in the webinar.
A "housed: yes/no" box records one funder's answer. It does not record what actually happened. One funder counts a move into a rental as housed. Another only counts it if the person is still there six months later. A yes/no box cannot answer both.
Record the destination and the move date, then the follow-up when you have it, and you can answer both.
Age works the same way. Record one funder's age band and you cannot report another funder's bands. Record date of birth, where your program collects it, and you can work out any band anyone asks for.
This is what saves you when a funder changes its template. With the facts, you apply the new rule to the records you already have. With a checkbox, you start over.
Write down every counting rule
Two different totals can both be right, as long as you can explain what each one counts.
Intakes are not unique people. One person can come through intake twice in a quarter. A visit, a stay, a household and a person are four different units.
Before you start collecting, write down what each indicator means and how it is calculated, including the reporting period and any follow-up. Where funders define something differently, keep both definitions. You want a clear line from what you recorded to every answer you send.
And keep that line visible. A number in a report is only as good as your ability to say which records went into it and why.
Record it when the work happens
Once the requirements are mapped, decide who records each fact and when.
Some things belong at referral or intake. Others only exist at a check-in, at discharge or at a follow-up.
We shared five questions to ask before anyone adds a field to a form:
Which report line uses it?
Is it a fact, or an answer?
Do we already have it somewhere?
Who records it, and at what moment?
What happens if it is blank?
If nobody records it during the work, it gets filled in from memory at quarter end. These questions are how you catch that before it happens.
One person record shared across programs makes all of this easier. Each program adds what it knows, and each report pulls what it needs by its own rules.
Show what is missing
A good report is honest about what it does not know.
If an outcome was not measured, say so. If information is missing, name the gap and say how you will close it.
A great result from the people whose exits you recorded tells you nothing about the people whose exits you did not.
Looking at the gaps usually points to a simple fix: a clearer definition, a better moment in the workflow, or a required field where a blank breaks the report.
And when you build an export for a funder, send only what that report needs, in line with your consent and sharing agreements.
Watch the webinar recording.
How we set up Mareto
The webinar is also a fair description of how we set up Mareto.
Half of it is the same for everyone: one person record across every program, a published price, a set timeline, three rounds of changes before go-live, and hosting in Canada.
The other half is yours: your forms, your funders' reports and your words on every screen.
We bring your reporting requirements into setup from the first conversation, so what staff record during the day lines up with what you need to report at the end of the quarter.
