Monthly Summary

The Monthly Summary report is a critical part of keeping Hourglass in sync with your reports as submitted to the Branch. For the current month, the summary is calculated by looking at all previous reports that have not been marked as submitted to the Branch. In most cases, these would be reports for the month being viewed. Often there are some late reports from past months included as well.

It is absolutely vital that you synchronize your Monthly Summary with jw.org, and click the Submitted to Branch button each month with the exact values you enter on jw.org. More information on this process is available in Monthly Workflow.

Below are explanations for some things you may see on this report:

Warning Messages

You may see some warning messages on a Month Summary report. These are intended to help prevent accidental errors in calculating the totals. Some examples include:

  • A high number of late reports. This means that the number of unsubmitted reports from past months is high relative to the number of publishers in your congregation, and probably means that some past reports need to be marked as submitted. It could be that you just need to view the Monthly Summary of a past month and click Submitted to Branch, or you may need to individually go to older reports and right-click to mark them as submitted.
  • Previous month not submitted through Hourglass. This could simply indicate that it’s your first month and you have not imported any data. Since nothing has been submitted, extra caution is warranted in making sure the report is accurate.
  • Some number of reports have already been marked as submitted. There is a mixture of submitted and unsubmitted reports for a month. You might have manually marked a report as submitted when the rest were not. This is an unusual situation and extra care should be taken to ensure accuracy.

Inactive Publishers

This is an expandable list of those who are inactive, and if the month they became inactive is known, it is displayed. Note if you add a new publisher to Hourglass and neither enter any field service reports for them nor assign a First Month within the last 6 months, they will show as inactive, because there is no report for them in the past 6 months.

Unsubmitted Reports from Previous Months

You may see a message near the bottom of the report that says “The above totals include [number] unsubmitted reports(s) from previous months.” As indicated above in Warning Messages, these are usually late reports from past months. Since the monthly summary looks for all past unsubmitted reports, it tells you how many it found.

Carrying Over Minutes

When there are fractional hours for your congregation that don’t add up to a full hour, they are carried over automatically to next month. If this occurs, a note indicating the number of minutes will appear at the bottom of the report.