Catholic Charities Diocese of Joliet Turns Hours of Manual Work into Minutes with ServTracker
Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet provides home-delivered and congregate meals to older adults in Kankakee County, Illinois, along with exercise classes, bingo, sound baths, and other recreational programs across the region. Brandon Barrows leads the nutrition programs and uses ServTracker by CaseWorthy for nutrition operations, reporting, and client data, while the Community-Based Programs team uses the recreation module to track classes and activities.
A Spreadsheet Was Never Going to Cut It
Before ServTracker, client information lived in an Excel spreadsheet, PDFs, and paper files. Staff manually entered service units into the state database each month, often re-typing the same information. For one group of clients not yet in ServTracker, the team spent about 17 hours a month entering units into the state system. Even for clients already in ServTracker, staff still had to re-key data until an integration was built. Reporting, donation letters, and leadership questions all meant hunting through scattered sources.
Key Challenges
- About 17 hours a month spent manually logging units for one subset of clients
- Duplicate entry across ServTracker and the state system for every other client
- Client information scattered across spreadsheets, PDFs, case notes, and paper
- Donation letters requiring exports, reformatting in Excel, and a Word mail merge
- Regular 45‑minute round trips to rural sites to pick up paperwork and cash boxes
Getting Everything into One Place
Brandon led a year-long project to move every client from spreadsheets and PDFs into ServTracker so all nutrition program data would live in one system. The team set up a direct import between ServTracker and the state database, eliminating most manual unit logging.
They also connected Senior Dine, the electronic meal tracking system used at restaurant sites. CaseWorthy’s project team created roughly 200–250 client profiles from Senior Dine data over a single weekend, work that would have taken Brandon’s staff weeks.
Senior Dine now syncs service units into ServTracker every few minutes and posts them directly to the history archive. Brandon only reviews the data when it is time to export to the state, turning what used to be hours of work into a quick double check.
At the agency’s most rural congregate site, in one of the most impoverished areas in Illinois, the team deployed ServTracker Touch as a self-service sign‑in kiosk, allowing clients, volunteers, and staff to use a touch screen to record congregate meals, recreation activities, and volunteer hours in real time instead of on paper.
Measurable Improvements
Hours Turned into Minutes
Once everything was connected, the time savings were immediate. Unit logging that once consumed entire work sessions now takes only a few minutes. Donation letters can be generated directly from ServTracker instead of pulling, reformatting, and mail‑merging data from the state system.
Brandon estimates a single end‑of‑month task now saves about 1.5–2 hours per cycle.
Quantifiable Outcomes
~17 hours a month of manual state‑database logging eliminated 200–250 client profiles created automatically through the Senior Dine integration in one weekend Senior Dine service units post to ServTracker every few minutes with no staff intervention Donation letter prep reduced from 1.5+ hours per cycle to minutes Regular 45‑minute round trips to rural sites replaced by digital workflows One centralized view of each client’s information, case notes, and service history
A Return on Investment Leadership Can See
As a grant‑funded agency, Catholic Charities must justify every dollar. For Brandon, ServTracker’s value is straightforward.
“The biggest financial benefit has been the investment of how much it costs versus how much time it costs to pay me to do those things manually,” he said. No one in Fiscal has questioned keeping ServTracker in the budget, because highly paid managers are no longer spending their days on repetitive data entry.
Improved data quality also positions the team for future funder and program questions. With all client data in one system, deeper reporting and analysis are within reach.
Less Stress, More Capacity
The impact has been operational and personal. “ServTracker has definitely helped me be less stressed as a manager,” Brandon said. Tasks that once stretched across the week now get handled quickly, freeing the team to focus on clients, volunteers, and program needs.
At the rural Pembroke congregate site, ServTracker Touch has been a major relief. Instead of worrying about whether every meal and activity was logged correctly on paper, the site coordinator can trust the system to capture it in real time. “That has been a godsend to my site coordinator and her kitchen assistant and the volunteers to be able to have the data all there in one place and easily entered through ServTracker Touch."
What Comes Next
Brandon sees even more potential ahead. He regularly reviews maintenance releases and CaseWorthy University resources, picks up new techniques at CaseWorthy User Conferences, and submits feature requests through Community Hub. His goal is to bring more programs into ServTracker and make fuller use of what the platform already offers. He is also exploring ways to pull assessments directly from ServTracker so his team can spend almost all their time in one system instead of splitting attention between ServTracker and the state database.
“I do know that we do not currently use ServTracker to its fullest capacity,” he remarked. “I don’t know if anybody does, because there are just so many features that are there.”
