"What's going on in my district?" It's one of the most common questions a city manager gets from council members, and one of the hardest to answer quickly. The data exists, but pulling it together means exporting, filtering and formatting, usually on short notice.
Sentra 311 answers it in two clicks, and can send the answer automatically.
Report by area
On the request queue, the "Report by area" button opens a panel with one row per council district for the period you pick:
- Received: new requests in the period.
- Closed: requests resolved in the period.
- Open now: what's still waiting.
- Past SLA now: open requests past their due date.
- Median time to close.
- SLA met: the share closed on time.
- Top request types, with counts.
Periods include the last 7 days, last 30 days, this month, last month or custom dates. A total row sums the city.
Every district gets a row, even one with nothing in it. A council member wants to see their zero.
Other areas
Council districts are the default. If your city has other GIS layers set up, such as trash pickup days, street sweeping routes or park zones, you can switch the report to any of them. See using your city's GIS layers.
Requests with no district
Some requests land outside every district: the pin was dropped on a boundary line, or a phone call came in without a location. These show in a "No district" row, so nothing disappears from the totals.
The report warns how many open requests have no district and links to them. On each request page, staff can set the district by hand with a short list. The queue also has a "No district (needs one)" filter so someone can clean them up in a few minutes.
Download or email
From the same panel, staff can download the report as a CSV spreadsheet or a PDF.
They can also email it:
- Just once: sends the table right now.
- Daily: each email covers the day before, sent at 7 a.m. city time.
- Weekly: covers the last 7 days, sent Mondays at 7 a.m.
- Monthly: covers last month, sent on the 1st at 7 a.m.
Recipients are any email addresses. Council members, their aides and the city manager don't need a Sentra 311 account. Attachments can be PDF or CSV.
Schedules are managed on the Reports page, where staff can change recipients, switch format or turn a schedule off.
What the report shows, and what it doesn't
A scheduled report runs as the staff member who set it up, so it only includes what that person is allowed to see. If a department's requests are restricted, they stay restricted in emailed reports too. No resident names or contact details appear in the area report.
Other reports
The area report is one of several in Sentra 311. Others include request volume, time to acknowledge and resolve, SLA met, open backlog by age, reopen rate, resident ratings, trends over time, hotspots by location, crew workload, worker efficiency and how requests ended. Most can be grouped by department, request type, district, channel, priority, crew or any city GIS layer. Any of them can be saved and scheduled the same way.
Setting a district by hand
When a request has no district, setting one takes a few seconds. On the request page, the District field shows "Set district…" with a list of the city's districts, sorted in order. Pick one and it's saved, with a note on the request's timeline. If the request's location changes later, the district is looked up again from the map.
Staff can also correct a district that's wrong, for example when a resident dropped the pin across the street from the actual problem, on the boundary line.
A suggestion for council meetings
One pattern that works well: send each council member a weekly district report on Monday morning and a monthly one before the council meeting. The weekly one heads off "what's happening on Elm Street?" emails. The monthly one gives a shared set of numbers for the meeting.
The goal is simple: everyone looks at the same numbers, calculated the same way, without anyone building a spreadsheet the night before.