Scottish Executive Statistics

The Scottish Executive has introduced a statistics gathering arrangement for money advisers which receive funding from them. PGdebt is not designed to be a comprehensive statistics program, but the Executive has worked hard to make their stats requirements compatible with PGdebt. A large number of changes will be needed to the statistics setup in PGdebt to achieve this and we are intending to describe the procedures here as well as dealing with any problems and issues which come up. Each bureau will have to make these changes for itself...it cannot be done centrally.

This information is of historical interest only and is left here in case existing users need to reset their stats

New advice about the sort order of lists
Piloting has shown that the new SE lists are not in set out alphabetical order, however they are sorted into alphabetical order by PGdebt and this cannot be changed. A workaround for this is to prefix each line with a letter A-Z and this will force the SE stats order to remain.

e.g. SE stats of
rent
mortgage
other secured loan
will be sorted by PGdebt into
mortgage
other secured loan
rent
but the order will stay the same if entered as
A rent
B mortgage
C other secured loan

The debt categories list exceeds 26 lines, so for this list use A-Z and then ZA, ZB, ZC for the last three lines
Be consistent with entries A-fullstop or A-space, use the same each line.
Do not mix upper and lower case letters. A,b,C,d etc

NB. If you make a spelling mistake use RENAME to correct it

If a bureau has already made up the SE lists without the leading capitals, it is possible to change the list by adding the capitals later. To do this you MUST use the PGdebt RENAME button on the lists setup screen. For instance RENAME "self employed" to "A. self employed"
This will avoid losing any stats as all "self employed" stats will be changed into "A. self-employed".
Do not add this leading capital by DELETING an existing list item and then ADDING another...RENAME the existing item.

Deal with spelling mistakes the same way
e.g. RENAME "A.self-emplojed" to "A. self-employed". No stats will be lost,    "A.self-emplojed" will be reassigned to "A. self-employed"
but if you DELETE "A.self-emplojed" then ADD "A. self-employed", the "A.self-emplojed" stats will disappear and be assigned to "UNKNOWN".

These instructions are pretty detailed and lengthy. I have tried to cover everything so that beginners can carry out the changeover. Experienced users and those who have already changed their stats setup for their own needs may not need the detail, but I do suggest that everyone reads the section entitled "Where to put the new lists"

Full Instructions for the changeover

PGdebt Client Data Screen contains 5 Standard statistics list and 5 User statistics lists, there is also a Debt Categories list on the Creditor data screen. Most of these lists will need to be used to incorporate the SE stats and anything currently in these lists will be lost. You may be able to use any unused lists for your own stats, but bear in mind that the SE may add more in the future.
There are also some further SE requirements which are generated automatically by PGdebt.
The action of adding in the new statistics will destroy the old items in the lists and the stats using these will no longer be available in any shape or form after the new stats codes are entered. This is why you should ensure that all pre SE stats have been printed out prior to doing anything related to the new SE stats.

What to do first (do it now !)

The first thing to do is to decide what date you are going to change over to the new SE stats. The SE require them to begin on 1st July, but you do not have to have all the new codes entered by that date. What you must do is to have all existing client files up to date with their stats on the changeover day. As 1st July is a Saturday, I suggest that changeover day is set to be Friday 28th June.

The period up to changeover day (do it now !)

Use this time to get all current client files up to date, with all stats information entered into them. You will probably be in a stats period which started on 1st Jan 2006 or perhaps 1st April 2006. Whatever the beginning date of the current stats period, you should carry out a new stats run soon, starting at the beginning date and finishing at changeover day. With the stats run complete, take a look at the stats screen and click the "files used" option on the right. The resultant list will show every file which has been incorporated into the current stats run and alongside every file will be a comment regarding missing stats, if there are any. Print out the list and then open each offending file and input all stats. Repeat the stats run until all files are up to date.

On changeover day VITAL

Print out all existing stats for the current stats period. Make sure you select all the options that you may require ( list order etc.) and print out everything. From the moment that you start to input the SE system, these figures will be lost from PGdebt and you will only be able to refer to them from these printed lists. This can be done after changeover day but you must do it before starting to input any part of the new SE stats codes.

On changeover day or as soon as possible afterwards

Start the process of putting the SE stats into PGdebt. This process make take some time and if you have PGdebt 6 or PGdebt 7 earlier than 7.102 then you should complete the entire SE stats entry process is one session without closing down PGdebt. If you have later versions of PGdebt you can split the process, but always complete the section you are working on in one session.
You may continue to add new debt cases before the entry process is finished, but do not put any stats info into these cases until the entire SE stats upgrade process is complete. Then re-open all files started since changeover day and input their stats data. Do not start this unless the stats printout mentioned in the previous section is complete and printed out.

Where to put the new lists

The new SE stats are described in a letter from Abigail Bremner of Scottish Executive called
"Money advice - case management and reporting framework - statistical monitoring - FULL guidance for the supply of statistics.doc
The document has much information which you will need, but I will only comment on the actual process of inputting the news stats codes. I shall refer to the paragraph numbers Abigail uses in this document where they are significant.

Help on the actual process of changing the lists is in the next section.

GENERAL
Please change the lists to the new SE categories only...if you add extra items then this will alter the percentages...this may or may not be significant but you should be aware of it.
List items can only have about 20-25 letters in them so you will have to modify the SE names in some cases,
List titles can only have about 12 letters in them. You will have to make a few printouts to be sure of what length items and titles can have...they are a proportional font so it depends on the width of the letters chosen.
The first five lists can only have 10 items, the second five can have 20.
The first five PGdebt list titles cannot be changed. Choose carefully what goes where.
Avoid using the Miscellaneous lists which are for a different purpose entirely.
The lists sort alphabetically so they will differ from the SE lists unless you add A-Z at the beginning of each line as decribed previously.

Para 16. TOTAL NUMBER OF NEW ENQUIRIES HANDLED
This information is not available from PGdebt, unless enquiries are all entered into the system as debt cases. PGdebt stats only refer to debt cases entered into PGdebt.

Para 17. TOTAL NUMBER OF NEW CASES HANDLED
No changes required. The program will provide this figure automatically. The title lines at the top of the stats printout pages include a line which reads something like " 25 files used out of 55 checked". The first figure (25) is the number of new cases in the stats period being checked.

Para 18. TOTAL AMOUNT OF NEW DEBT HANDLED
This para contains a long list of what PGdebt refers to as debt categories. You will have to delete any items of your existing Debt Cats list which are not on the SE list, and add in any new items. The PG debt categories printout will give the total and breakdown figures SE require. You can only have 47 items on this list.

Para 28. GENDER
No changes required. This is provided automatically as part of the client categories printout.

Para 32. AGE BAND
No changes required. This is provided automatically as part of the client categories printout. A tiny bug means the PG printout shows over 71 when it should be over 70...sorry ! The figures are correct, i.e. over 70.

Para 35. HOUSEHOLD TYPE
I suggest you place this in the sixth PGdebt Client categories list (the default PG name for this is User 1). Delete all existing items from the list and add the new ones.
Item names can only have 20-25 letters so you will have to modify some of these
Then change the list name to HOUSEHOLD. You can only have 12 letters or so in title names.

Para 39. EMPLOYMENT TYPE
I suggest this goes in the first PGdebt group (Default name Employment)
There can only be 10 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before

Para 48. HOUSING CIRCUMSTANCES
I suggest this goes in the third PGdebt group (default name HOUSING)
There can only be 10 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before

Para 58. ETHNIC ORIGIN
I suggest this goes in the fifth PGdebt group (default name ETHNIC)
There can only be 10 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before

Para 63. LIMITING ILLNESS/DISABILITY
I suggest this goes in the seventh PGdebt group
There can only be 20 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before
Change the title to DISABILITY

Para 70. INCOME BAND
I suggest this goes in the fourth PGdebt group (default name INCOME)
There can only be 10 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before
Change the title to INCOME
NB. It would require a change in the program code to produce this information automatically. SE did not request this. The total income figure is on the right of the FS window.

Para 76. DEBT STRATEGY CHOSEN
I suggest this goes in the eighth PGdebt group
There can only be 20 items in the list and the items and title lengths are restricted as before
Change the title to STRATEGY

Leave the RELATIONSHIP list alone...you can still use this
List nine and list ten are unused and you can use these

Actually changing the lists, step by step instructions

For networks or networks and laptops click this link for detailed instructions

For a single standalone or laptop click here

For multiple standalone PCs not networked, or standalone and laptops, click here

After changing the lists please set a supervisor password on every PC to stop unauthorised changes or mistakes changing the new codes and corrupting the stats.

Using the SE stats

Once you have updated all your PCs, collecting the stats is easy. Just carry on as before, keeping every file up to date with stats. Try not to leave the stats entry til later...do it as soon as you can and avoid having to update 50 files on the last day of the period !
When you make your first stats run after the changeover day, reset the stats run dates to Start date 1st July, End date 30th September (even if that is in the future) . The program will remember these and the stats produced will be from 1st July til the current date or 30th Sept whichever is first. The stats for any SE period can be produced at any time after the end of the period...there is no need to do them on the last day of the period, they will remain in the system.

Unfortunately some of the titles and items chosen by the SE are too long to fit within the PGdebt structure, this means that a certain amount of interpretation will have to take place when actually extracting the stats ready to send them off to the SE.

Producing stats for the period before 1st July 2006

These are no longer available in PGdebt. You must use the printouts which you made on Changeover day.
If you do attempt to do a stats run for the earlier period, any stats extracted will be totally incorrect.

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