Some Things to Think about before Getting Started
Human Essentials is designed to help you manage your inventory and your relationship with partners, while also providing some information to help with your grant writing.
Here are some questions that will help you when you are setting up Human Essentials.
- Do you (your bank) want to start out immediately with your partners making requests, or do you want to just track your distributions initially?
- Do you run on a monthly cycle, or on more of an adhoc basis?
- What information do you need from our partners (see Partner Profile for what you can collect in the system - this is somewhat configurable)?
- Do you need to get all that information from your partners before they can enter requests?
- Do you have different groups of partners allowed to request different items? (if so, you’ll want to look at Partner Groups)
- Who should have admin access? (See Access Levels)
- Do you repackage items into ‘kits’? (common for period-focused banks)
- How do you want your partners requesting from you? (By # of individuals for each item, by quantity of each item, or by specific child (we don’t recommend that unless they really have the need.) This is covered more in “The Request Distribution Cycle”)
- If quantity, do you want to have our partners request in # of items, or in some other units (e.g. packs, for diapers )(see Special Topics: Custom Units )