Introduction to Hourglass¶
Hourglass is a system designed to help the Congregation Secretary. It allows publishers to securely enter their own field service reports and see their own report history. If you haven’t watched the introductory video that’s part of the Hourglass Tour, you may want to watch it now.
This introduction aims to provide an overview of the basic concepts used in Hourglass. They are:
Publisher Records¶
Each publisher in the congregation has a publisher record. This record includes the kind of information found on the top of the S-21 Publisher Record Card, such as their birth and baptism date.
The list of publishers appears on the left side of the main Hourglass screen. You can click on an individual publisher to view their record, or you can type part of their name to find them, use the arrow keys to move up or down one record, and press enter or right arrow to select their record.
The publisher record has four tabs: Publisher, Emergency Contacts, Delegates, and Options. Most of the fields on the Publisher tab are self-explanatory, but a few notes are warranted.
Family Contact can be used to filter the All Publishers contact list down to one row per family. By checking this box, perhaps for the head of the household, then when you go to the contact list, you can choose to see everyone, or only the family contacts.
First Month is visible when the publisher’s Status is Baptized or Unbaptized Publisher, and it sets the first month that time is tracked for this publisher. Months before the first month will not be counted as missing. The most obvious use for this is when there is a new Unbaptized Publisher, who begins publishing in this month. There are other times when this is useful, such as when someone moves in to your congregation and you don’t want to input (or don’t have) historical reports for them.
Address will autocomplete from other addresses in your congregation; once you type a few letters of an existing address, similar addresses will appear and you can select them. By doing this, you will save time, and families with the same last name and address will be grouped together in the All Publishers and Field Service Group lists.
Changes to the Publisher tab need to be saved; the Save button will change color when this is necessary. Saving will result in a green check mark when successful.
The Actions menu provides additional actions that can be taken for the selected publisher, such as deleting them, viewing their publisher record card, etc. Send Reminder sends a reminder to just this publisher if they are missing a report for the past month. Revoke Access removes this publisher’s ability to enter their own time. Their record stays intact, but reports must be entered manually by a Congregation Admin. Access can be restored if desired.
Publisher Icons¶
There are a few icons used in Hourglass:
- indicates that a recent email to this publisher bounced. The email address is not valid.
indicates that this publisher is a group overseer
indicates that this publisher is a congregation admin
Delegates¶
Delegates provide a way for one publisher to enter reports on behalf of another. This is commonly used for parents to enter reports for their children, but can be enabled for anyone.
To enable it, select the publisher record of the person that will have someone else entering reports for them (e.g. the child). On the Delegates tab, enter the name of the person who will be entering reports for them (e.g. the parent). When the parent accesses Hourglass, via a browser or mobile app, they will see themselves and their child, and can view and enter reports for both.
Emergency Contacts¶
Emergency Contact information can be stored for each publisher. Go to the Emergency Contacts tab when viewing the publisher record, and enter the information. If multiple publishers have the same emergency contact, type a few letters and then select it from the dropdown. Multiple emergency contacts can be set for a given publisher.
A complete list of emergency contacts for the entire congregation, organized by group, is available by selecting Publishers, Emergency Contact List.
Reports¶
Up to 8 years of field service activity can be stored for each publisher in Hourglass. A list of months appears below the Publisher record when selecting a publisher, with the most recent month listed first. Input is automatically saved, and success is indicated when a date is updated in the Reported column.
Hours can be any whole number, including zero. It can also be 0.25, 0.5, or 0.75 to indicate 15, 30, or 45 minutes of time. Other values will result in an error, indicated by the row turning red. You can also right-click on a row without a report and select Active to indicate a publisher who has reported some activity in the month, in harmony with the December 2020 announcement.
Report rows will become disabled (grayed out) when that report has been marked as submitted to the Branch (for more information on submitting monthly reports, see Monthly Workflow). The only fields that will be available will be those that are not included in the report to the Branch: Credit and Remarks.
Credit is used to track Regular and Special Pioneer credit hours for other theocratic projects that are not field service. Publishers cannot input this information directly; they can indicate it in a Remark, but the Secretary or another Admin should review this and enter the proper number of Hours into the Credit field.
You can right-click on the report row for some additional options. If the report has been marked as submitted, you can undo this by clicking Undo Submitted. This should be done with extreme caution as it has the potential to make your reports to the Branch inaccurate. The reason is that any past unsubmitted report is viewed by Hourglass as a late field service report that should be included in the next month’s totals.
For reports that have not been submitted, you can delete them or mark them as submitted. Marking them as submitted means that the report has been submitted to the Branch already. This is commonly done when entering historical reports for months that were submitted prior to using Hourglass, for example.
Invitations¶
Invitations are the only way to allow users to access your congregation in Hourglass. Whether you want to invite a publisher to submit their own reports, to allow another Elder to have access as a Congregation Administrator, you must send them an invitation.
Invitations are used to link the publisher record in Hourglass to one of the following:
- The mobile app running on one device
- A Google account
- Any email address (with a password selected by the user)
Invitations are one-time-use. For security reasons, as soon as an invitation is used to successfully link one of the above, it is invalidated. If a user has multiple mobile devices, such as a tablet and a phone, and wants to use the Hourglass mobile app on both, they will need an invitation for each device.
Invitations accepted in a web browser allow the user to create a password or sign in with their Google account. Once this has been done, those credentials can be used from any device to sign in. For a Group Overseer or a Congregation Administrator to see the full interface, with all reports, etc. they need to sign in with a browser. When they accept an invite, a small white button will appear that allows them to accept with a browser instead of being directed to the app store.
Invitations can be sent via email through the Hourglass web site (they will open in your computer’s default email application). For Congregation Admins, they can also be sent from the mobile app through email, text message, or through a QR code displayed on the screen.
Permissions¶
There are four levels of elevated access within Hourglass: Group Overseers (View), Group Overseers (Update), Congregation View All, and Congregation Administrators. All of these are managed through the Profile & Permissions page.
Group Overseers automatically receive the Group Overseers (View) permission when they are assigned as a group overseer in the Field Service Groups page. They can view reports for those in their group, but not enter them. They can also see the list of missing field service reports and the congregation contact list.
If someone is given the Group Overseers (Update) permission, they gain the ability to enter reports for those in their group. They can do this through the web or a mobile app. They can also update the contact information (phone number, email, and address) and emergency contacts for those in their group.
The Congregation View All permission permits the viewing of everything in Hourglass: all information and reports. It allows updating contact information and emergency contacts for anyone in the same group as this brother. If the brother is the overseer of a group, it also allows him to enter reports for those in the group.
Congregation Administrators can do everything; they have full permissions to add and remove publishers, view all reports, etc. It is recommended that at least 2 Elders have this role, in case one loses access for some reason. Some congregations choose to give their Service Committee this role. As indicated in Invitations, an invite must be sent to these brothers in order to securely provide them access.