Handling special monitoring report requirements

It's common for organizations to have at least a few easements or fee lands that require special reports that meet certain extra requirements. Usually these requirements are set by a co-holding or funding organization. For example, a certain federal funding source may require that you provide them with a monitoring report that contains a few extra questions in addition to your normal monitoring questions.

Landscape has some great features which allow you to accommodate these needs.

Custom report templates

A Landscape report is a way of merging data into a customizable document template. You can have as many templates as you would like. If a partner requests a certain format for your reports that differs from your typical format, then it's just a matter of creating a new template that meets those requirements.

Here's a video on the basics of report editing.

Utilizing linked forms

A form is a way of collecting data that is not already in Landscape. Most organizations have at least one or two different monitoring forms, depending on the type of monitoring that's being conducted. But if you need to customize a form to meet the special needs of a particular record, it wouldn't make sense to have to add those unique forms to your list of available form templates. Instead, Landscape also has the ability to customize these forms on a site-by-site basis by using linked forms.

Here's an article on how to link forms to a site.

Use record contact data to store special ID numbers

If an organization has an ID number for the property that differs from your own, then you can easily store that ID number inside of the record relationship contact data.

Co-holders or funders with ongoing relationships to the property should be added as contact records to that property. You can then store their unique ID# inside of that contact record in the 'Record Relationship Notes' field.

This field exists to describe the nature of the relationship between the contact and the record, so you could fill this in with a different value if the same organization had the same need on a different record. This ID number could then be merged into your monitoring report by using the [[Notes]] field in a repeated 'Contact' or 'Active Contact' block.