Waiting List
============

Animal Shelter Manager offers you a complete replacement for your paper-based
waiting list, tracking owners who want to surrender animals to your shelter
when space is available. 

It holds information about contacts, the type of animal, whether the owner can
afford to make a donation, diaries, logging for phone calls and emails, etc.

Most importantly, the waiting list is capable of assigning an urgency rating to
entries and automatically increasing that rating after a configurable amount of
time has elapsed to ensure that a queue system can be adhered to.

To open the waiting list screen, go to :menuselection:`ASM --> Edit the current
waiting list` or press :kbd:`SHIFT+ALT+W` if your browser supports it.

.. image:: images/waitinglist_results.png

Entries are colour coded according to how urgent they are.

Additionally, you can use the highlight buttons to mark interesting entries in
upto 5 different colours for other staff members. Each item is given a rank
according to how urgent it is and how long it has been on the list. This can be
used to tell people where they are on the waiting list. The report
*Average Time On Waiting List* can tell you how long people are
waiting on average to get their animals into your shelter.

You can effectively run separate waiting lists per species (turn the option on
under :menuselection:`Settings --> Options` on the Waiting List tab) as for most shelters,
whether you can take a dog isn't affected by how many cats you have waiting for
example. With this option on, the rankings are calculated separately for each
species.

To add a new entry to the waiting list, click the new waiting list button if
you are currently viewing the waiting list or select add an animal to the
waiting list from the ASM menu. You will be presented with a waiting list entry form 
to complete.

.. image:: images/waitinglist_details.png

In addition to the usual add/edit/delete buttons, the waiting list screen
allows you to filter the entries that you see according to a particular
species, contact name fragment or urgency rating. As with other Animal Shelter
Manager tables, you may sort the entries by any column - just click the column
name at the top of the list.

If you change your filtering options, click the Refresh button to reload the
list with your new filtering options.

As mentioned before, the urgency update period is configurable (see later
chapter for configuring the waiting list). By default, the update period is set
to 14 days, so every fortnight, each waiting list entry will advance one
urgency rating until they get to “High”.

Once an entry reaches “High” it will stay there. The “Urgent” rating can only
be set by users and is for extremely high priority waiting list entries.