2014 Release Notes

Enterprise Software 2014 Release Note

The latest update of your favorite rental management software has been released.  As always, the bulk of the updates have come through suggestions from users like you.  You will find a listing of many of the changes that were done. There are plenty more changes that are either under the hood or just streamlined and not in this document.  We know you are anxious to see whether the idea you submitted made it in, so get reading

Quick Summary

Account Summary Report:   There are two new check boxes to customize the info on the Account Summary Report: Hide Credit Balance and Hide Finance Charges.  The Hide Credit Balance option will hide any customers who overall have a credit balance.  And of course the Hide Finance Charges, hides the finance charges.  Who would have guessed?

Moving Rows:   The process of moving items on a contract has been redesigned so that a screen refresh is not required thus making the moving process much faster especially for large contracts.

Moving Items with Sort Fields:   It has always been a pain if you wanted to move an item up and down on a contract when you have defined all of your line items with sort field values.  Now as you move an item up or down on a contract, you will be prompted if you want to change the sort field of the item you are moving to match the sort field of the next item.  This will keep you from having to change the sort fields first before the move.

Move to Specific Row:  A popular suggestion was to be able to move items on a contract to a specific row without having to manually move it one line at a time.  Well now your request has been approved.  You can right click on a line and click Move Row.  You will then be asked which row you would like to move to.  Enter the number and you are done.  It will also automatically update the sort field to match the next item.

Move Multiple Rows:   Just when you think we have accomplished everything possible with moving items around on a contract, your mind is about to be blown.  On the contract processing screen, you can now multi-select rows and then move those rows as a group to a specific line.  This allows you to quickly put all of the items for a particular area to be grouped together.

Task List:   You will now have access to your Task List directly from the Program Menu.  This option has replaced the Inventory Price Adjustments which was moved to the Data Management Menu.

 Non-inventory Items:   When you write a Purchase Order for a non-inventory item it is very tiring to have to type the name each time you place the order. So for those who get tired of typing “toilet paper” every couple of weeks, the past item names that you had ordered will now automatically populate the field.  You can either choose them using the drop down list, start typing and select from the matching items, or if you enjoy the finger exercise just type the whole name.  In any case, it will also help to keep your naming conventions the same from employee to employee.

 System Notification – Subrental Request:   So you are in charge of procuring all of the items that need subrented and you know that it takes time to investigate, price, order, and get delivered; however, the other employees don’t grasp that concept.  They are constantly requesting subrentals a day or two before they are needed and not notifying you until it is too late.  Well the days of jumping through hoops are over.  You can set a new System Notification for Subrental Request within X Days.  So a setting of 2 would send you a notification automatically anytime a Subrental is made within 2 days of when it is needed allowing you the maximum amount of time to accomplish the impossible.

PO Modification Number:  A new field has been added to the Purchase Orders that will keep track of the modification number to easily identify each modification in order.

PO Modification PDF:   A PDF copy of each PO modification will now be stored.  Under the PO Edit listing, you can click on each modification and get the saved PDF copy of the PO at that time.

Parameters:   You are now able to print a hard copy of your Parameter settings.  This is helpful to document what your settings are especially for a multi-store system.  You can quickly compare one store to another store’s settings.

Item Utilization Fleet Report:   A new dynamic grouping has been added to the report that allows you to group by Home Store, Current Store, Division, or Category.  There are three levels of grouping allowed.

Fleet Aging Report:   A new dynamic grouping has been added to the report that allows you to group by Home Store, Current Store, Division, Category, Group, or Department.  There are three levels of grouping allowed.

Item Rate Analysis Report:   A new dynamic grouping has been added to the report that allows you to group by Home Store, Current Store, Division, Category, or Header.  There are two levels of grouping allowed.

Emailing Error :  When sending an email, if there was a problem with the sending, you were notified of the problem.  The only issue was that the program continued on assuming it did its job of notifying you.  Now the program will take you back to the email screen after an error so that you can try again without having to retype the entire message.

Customer Balance:  Customer Balance has had a name change. It is now called Customer Dashboard to properly convey its functionality.

Customer Dashboard:   A couple of new columns are available in the Customer Balance (sorry old habits die hard, Customer Dashboard) screen: Ordered By and Completed Date.

View Items on Order:   When you have an item on order, you could click on the “On Order” column and you would be shown all of the orders for this item; however, you wanted to know more details.  Well now you have them at your fingertips.  The Purchase Order number will be shown with each line as well as the Contract Number that the order was placed for.

 Discounts:   There are multitudes of ways to give discounts within the system.  It is sometimes difficult to know which discount trumps other discounts.  If you setup a percentage discount for a Job Site/Venue, it will trump a previously set discount percentage on the contract.

Background Colors:   You wouldn’t believe the screaming we got when we changed the background color from white to black.  You would have thought that their favorite pet had died. Consequently, we added a parameter so you could choose white or black for your background.  Well little did we know the battle we had started.  Store 1 really liked the black background, but Store 2 really like the white background.  The employees from different stores would keep changing the parameter causing a huge feud.  We are always trying to be peace makers so the background parameter is now held per store. But we even went further.  You can now pick ANY color that exists!  Yes, you can choose any color from the color gradient wheel.  Of course, you thought there was a battle when you could choose one of two colors. Just wait until it is one of a million colors.

Maintenance Due:   The Maintenance Due grid has added a couple of columns to show Item Number and Serial Number.

Maintenance Due:   You are looking at all of the items that need to be maintained and you think, “I sure would like to group the items, color code the items, select certain items, etc.” Well now you can export the grid directly to a spreadsheet.  Then you can do anything you would like with the data in the spreadsheet.

 Maintenance History:   You can now export the Maintenance History for an item directly to a spreadsheet.

General Ledger Entries:  Let’s say you have setup an Electronic Funds Transfer item to make payments through Account Payments.  This works great except when you go to reconcile your checking account, all of the EFT’s for each day post as one number. This makes reconciliation rather difficult.  So you can now set the EFT payment method to make separate entries into the General Ledger making reconciliation a breeze.

PO Approval Override:  You have setup all of your security for Purchase Order submission.  You have the proper person set to be able to approve PO’s and you have set the maximum Purchase Order amounts; however, the process can be rather constraining for your repeating orders for such things as fuel or office supplies.  Well you can throw those constraints off.  There is a new field in the Vendor record for Allowed Amount.  With this field you can set an amount that anyone can write a PO to that vendor for up to that amount.  For example, you could set $50 on OfficeMax.  Then anyone could write a PO for up to $50 without having to get their pending PO approved.

Maintenance Clear:   The system keeps track of maintenance; when it was done, how many hours, how much cost, and who did the maintaining, but the question that is asked, “Who did the clearing of the maintenance in the computer?” Well now the operator who is clearing will be asked for their ID and their name will be logged with the maintenance completed information.

Report Export:   When you export a report to a PDF file, the tree view will now be exported as bookmarks in the PDF file.  This allows you to quickly jump from group to group in the report.

Spreadsheet Export:   There are some reports that have more data than can be displayed on a regular sheet of paper.  These reports will have a small Excel icon in the right hand corner of the report.  That signifies if you export the report to a spreadsheet you will get extra columns of information that is not displayed on the report.

Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP):   The AEMP has come up with an industry standard for interfacing with GPS location and hour meter readings on equipment.  You can interface with any manufacturer or GPS provider that is compatible with the AEMP standard.  You setup your account information under Configuration; Store Configuration; AEMP Setup.

Contract Links:   When in Contract Processing, a contract will show a link to those contracts created from it such as Subrental, Service, or Repairs. You can get to the associated contracts by double clicking the contract link.  A new Counter System will open with that contract.  This allows you to easily get the details for an associated Subrental contract for example.

Translation Messages:   The language translations were wildly successful in the last update.  It seems that New Yorker’s don’t know how to speak Texan and vice versa.  We have added a couple of new translation messages including Invoice message, Tendered, In-store Credit, Signature, Account Credit, and Pending PO.

 PO Formats:   A new PO header format has been added to print the Remit To information rather than the store information.

Transaction Item Detail:  When you click the plus sign on any transaction listing screen, you will get a listing of all of the items on that contract.  Now that screen will list a column for Subrental quantities if there are any on that contract.  This allows you to quickly tell whether the items have been subrented or have requested a Subrental.

Transaction Item Detail:  The substatus is a great tool to be able to mark the process of a particular line item.  For example a substatus could be “Prepped”, “Loaded”, “Waiting for Count”, “Waiting on Parts”, etc.  Now the substatus of a line item will be displayed in the Transaction Item Detail screen.

Cubic Size:   There is a new field in the Item record that is used to hold the cubic size of the item.  This information is used on the route reports to determine whether you have enough space on the truck for the delivery.  By the way, if you have items in your database for specific employees, it would not be nice to enter their cubic size in the record.

Desired ROI:   Of course if you ask anyone what their Desired ROI is, they will say 1,000% plus.  But realistically there is a number that you would like to get for each type of item.  It might be 300% for your party items, 150% for your homeowner items, and 50% for your large equipment, but there is a goal you would like to obtain.  There is a new field in the Item record for Desired ROI. By entering the number it is like setting an income budget for the item that you can compare to your actual ROI.

Contract Formats - Footer:   Two new footers have been added to the Contract formats: Vertical Totals – No Legal and Horizontal Totals – No Legal.  These would mainly be used for internal formats such as Transfers or Repairs.

Contract Formats – Cases:  A new column has been added that will show the Case Quantity.  You must define the Case Quantity in the item record for this to be displayed.

Contract Formats – Rates:  If you are printing the Hour/Day/Week rates on your contracts and your parameters are set to Round Overtime to Next Day, the contract will only print Day/Week rates.

Styles:   We are excited by the new Styles implementation.  Each item record has three new fields: Style 1, Style 2, and Style 3.  And in each category, you define what those styles are for all the items in the category. So for example, you might have “Color”, “Size”, and “Material” for the styles in your Linen category.  You would then enter the appropriate answer for each linen.  Under the Item Lookup screen, you can search by Styles so you could type “BLUE” to get a listing of all your blue linens.  For your Trencher category, you might define your styles as “Depth”, “Width”, and “Speed”.  The styles also interface to your integrated website.  Your customer will be able to click on their desired category and then they will have the opportunity to filter the items using a drop down for each of the styles in that category.

Barcode:   You have always been able to hold the barcoded information of an item in the item’s Key or Part Number; however, sometimes the barcode changed or it wasn’t the part number.  Now there is a new field in the item record specifically to hold the barcode number.

Address Extraction:   There are multiple Address Extraction options under Marketing.  You can now choose whether the customer’s contacts are extracted or just the main customer information.

Clone Contracts:   When they cloned Dolly the sheep, they got an exact copy of Dolly, with all of her flaws and imperfections.  When you clone a contract, you get an exact copy of the contract with all of its flaws and imperfections.  So the clone of the contract is going to have the Picked Up By and Ordered By already filled.  There were many vocal people that didn’t like that imperfection so now when you clone a contract the Picked Up By and the Ordered By fields will be blanked out. In addition we have changed the name of the option.  It is no longer called “Clone Contract”.  It is now called “Fraternal Twin Contract”.

GPS Address:   A customer calls and wants you to pickup the backhoe.  You schedule the pickup from the Called Off Rent screen.  Your driver shows up at the job site and can’t find the unit anywhere.  After an hour of phone calls and tracking it down, the customer tells you that he moved it to one of his other job sites 50 miles away.  You try to smile as you state that it would have been really nice if he had mentioned that the day before.  Well if you have a GPS unit on your equipment, you don’t have to be at the mercy of the customer.  From the pickup address of the Called Off Rent screen, you have two buttons: “View on Map” and “Use GPS”.  The “View on Map” will show you where the item is currently located and where the original address is.  If they are at the same spot, you can continue.  If they are different locations, you can verify that with the customer while you have them on the phone.  You can then click on the “Use GPS” button and the pickup address will be filled in with the last known GPS coordinates.  Your delivery driver might just give you a kiss.

Inquire Contract:   When you have drilled down on Transaction History either from an Item record or a Customer record, you can now right click on any of the contracts and select Inquire Contract.  A new Counter System will be opened with that contract.

Item Merge:   With great power comes great responsibility. This feature has been requested for many years; however, we cringed at how it might be used for the forces of evil. At long last we have come to terms that we trust you to only use the power for good to make your database world a better place.  Yes you can finally merge those separate item records into one.  Merge responsibly.

Update Serialized:   There were several fields that updated from the header to the serialized items.  Now there are a bunch more:  Name, Description, Group, Part Number, User Defined 1, User Defined 2, Instructions, Suppress Availability, Require CC, Non Discountable, Sort, Setup Time.  In addition, for bulk items, it will copy over Critical Level, Case Quantity, Rental Case, and Cleaning Delay.  So the next time you want to update the Require CC on your 140 serialized items, you don’t have to cry.

Multiple Tax Jurisdictions:   You can define your tax jurisdictions to automatically select based on Zip Code as well as multiple tax jurisdictions based on the Zip+4.  If you have a Zip code where multiple jurisdictions are defined and you haven’t selected a Zip+4, you will get a listing of all the appropriate jurisdictions.  Just click on the correct one and you will be ready to go.

Operator ID:   You can now enter the office phone with extension directly in each Operator’s record so other employees know how to contact them. This phone number is now displayed in the Who Is In screen.

Who Is In:   You answer the phone and the customer wants to talk to Fred.  You quickly check the Who Is In screen to see that Fred is at lunch.  You inform the customer and of course they want to leave a message.  You fumble around looking for pen and paper and of course you forget to pass the information on to Fred later in the day.  You can say goodbye to missed messages.  Just right click on Fred’s information on the Who Is In screen and you will have an option to send a text, an email (assuming those have been entered in Fred’s record), or an Interoffice mail directly to him.  No pen and paper and no forgetting to tell him later.

Price Override Password:  It is no longer required to enter a password to override a price on an IRO, IMO, Subrental, or Transfer contract.

Miscellaneous Item:   You added a miscellaneous item to your contract and entered the name; however, you want to change it for whatever reason. You start grumbling and complaining because you have to remove the item and add it back in to get the name prompt again.  You really start yelling when you have to remember the original price and then manually move it back to the right spot.  Well you can stop your bellyaching.  You can now just right click on the miscellaneous line item and select, Update Name.  Then you are done.

Transaction Operation:  You have been able to add and select a Transaction Operation for your contracts for a couple of revisions now. This has been enhanced to set specific Operations for Subrental and Transfer contracts.

Grid Views:   When you are viewing a hundred records in a grid, the refresh is fine; however, when you are viewing tens of thousands of records you might want to grab a cup of coffee.  Well the grid refresh has been recoded with a huge increase in refresh rates (for example 50,000 Customer records took 436 seconds, now it takes 7 seconds).

Job Site/Venue Search:  A search box has been added to the Job Site/Venue lookup screen for those of you with hundreds of Job Sites/Venues. They will be filtered as you type so you can instantly find the one you are looking for.

Multi-Select Substatus:  You can use the multi-select (hold CTRL key while clicking on line items) within the Contract Processing screen to update the Transaction Item’s substatus.  This allows you to quickly update a group of items to “Prepping, “Counting”, or whatever substatus you desire.

Select, Reject, Abort:  We have always tried to have a keyboard interface to accomplish most common tasks, but we received some flack for not having a mouse interface for the Select, Reject, Abort screen used in several places such as Auto Continuation Billing and Item Price Adjustments.  So the screen has been updated to handle the “S”, “R”, or “A” as well as the click of the mouse.

Inventory Count:   It is wonderful how the computer is always looking after you and checks to make sure you really wanted to do what you just did; however, at times, it can get a bit old.  For example, when you are counting 10,000 parts items and the computer asks every time whether that is what you wanted to do, you might start thinking of some ways to “help” the computer off a cliff.  To protect your investment in your hardware, there is a new checkbox at the bottom of the screen for “Don’t prompt for changes”.  With this checked, you will be able to count all of your items without being badgered.

Refresh Screen:   Several screens such as Contract Processing, Inventory Count, Item Availability, and Customer Dashboard have added F5 to refresh the screen.

Auto Continuation Bill Preview:   Two new buttons have been added to the Auto Continuation Billing screen to preview the contracts needing continued.  Set your selections and then click the Preview button.  You will get a listing of each contract that it will continue.  If you have a question about any of the contracts, you can click the contract number and will be taken directly to Inquire on the contract.  In addition, if you want a not so automatic Auto Continuation Bill, there is a Close button next to each contract.  If you click that, you will be taken directly to the Close Menu for that contract.  You can use that to manually close some contracts that need special attention or use it to manually close all of the contracts listed.

Customer Type:   You can now make a Customer Type inactive so no one can use it on customers.

Commission Level:   The Customer Pricing Type now has a place to put a default Commission Level.  This is used with the optional Commission Module.  By setting the default here, you won’t have to manually set each customer.

Program Menu Lite:   The majority of your users don’t need access to all of the features available on the Program Menu, but if you use Menu Security to disable those features, the employees feel slighted that you don’t trust them enough.  So to give you the ability to lock down your terminals while not alienating your employees, there is a new option:  Program Menu Lite.  It has minimum options such as Counter System, File Maintenance, Item Availability, and End of Day.  You can setup which terminals use this mode under Menu Security; and uncheck the Full Menu box under Program Menu.  Another nice benefit of this mode is that it takes much less memory.  If you have a bunch of users, it can make a big difference.

Task List:   If you have created a task for a customer or transaction, when viewing the task, you can email the customer directly from the task.

Contract Numbers:   So currently the contract numbers can be 6 characters long.  This gives you a maximum of one million contracts, one million quotes, one million credits, one million repairs, etc.  If you wrote 100 contracts a day, it would take you 32 years to get to one million. One million: 1 followed by 6 zeros: 1,000,000.  It is a big number.  But it isn’t big enough!  We have a customer breathing down the neck of contract number one million so the field has been increased to 10 characters long.  That gives you a maximum of one billion contracts.  One billion with a B: 1 followed by 9 zeros: 1,000,000,000.  It is a big number…

Continuation Bill:  Continuation Bill contracts add a letter to the end of the contract number.  Now some of you might sit around and ponder the deep things of life such as, “What happens when you continue contract 1000Z?”  Well there are people who know the answer to that deep question and don’t overly like the answer.  It goes to contract 1200A (or whatever your current number is).  This field has been increased to two characters so the new answer to your life’s most puzzling question is: contract 1000AA. In 48 years, we will tell you what happens with contract 1000ZZ.

GPS Reading:   For items that you have GPS units on, you can see the GPS readings from Item Availability; Tools; GPS Reading.  It will show the location as well as the current meter reading.  There is also an option to view the location of the item on a map.

Data Management:   We have consolidated all of the Data Management features under one menu on the Program Menu.  From here you can get to Mass Database Update, Mass Price Adjustments, and Parts Database Update.  In addition, the customer and inventory import and export options are available with the Data Management module.

Call Log:   A common request was to lower the password level required to modify Call Logs.  While we didn’t exactly do that from a security standpoint, we did make it where you can add a note to an existing call log without a password at anytime.

Transaction Signature:  So you have purchased the signature capture devices and you religiously get your customers to sign the forms; however, you could only make out 1% of people’s name from the signature.  Well now you have the option of typing in the customer’s name to go along with the signature.  So on printed invoices and statements, the customer will see the signature as well as the pickup person’s name in readable text.

Item Income Trend by Store:   This new report will display turns and Return on Investment by store to help determine inventory distribution between locations.

Did You Know:   Did you know that there are Did You Know tips? Well now you do.  The top right side of the Counter Menu will display a message whenever new Did You Know tips are released.  When you have a second, click on the message and see if you already knew.

Automated Reports:   As reports get more and more complex, the number of parameters required increases as well.  This was a problem for people who had automated reports setup to print/email/fax each night.  The number of parameters available to set has increased to 15 which should cover any of your custom reports.

Taxing Code:   A new field has been added to the Tax Table for the Taxing Code.  This would be the code that the taxing agency uses to distinguish that particular jurisdiction.  This number is helpful since many states require you to submit your taxes using that number.

Tax Table:   For those of you in destination based sales tax, your tax table can get unwieldy.  You can now export the table out to a spreadsheet to analyze it anyway you wish.

Data Management:   There are two new methods to extract data from your database: Table view and Query view.  The Table view allows you to see the raw data from one of your tables and export it to a spreadsheet.  The Query view allows you to view the raw data from pre-created queries such as Marketing and Depreciation.  Those with the Data Management module will have access to the Query view and every table in the Table view.  Those without the Data Management module will have access to key tables such as Items, Customers, and Transactions.  Those exports would probably replace the built in Report Generator.

Tax Jurisdictions:  There are some things of which you can never have enough; shoes, money, friends, and tax jurisdictions.  While a thousand tax jurisdictions sounds like more than you would want to keep up with, it is not enough.  The tax table has been redone to allow for a million tax jurisdiction. Yeah that is a big number.  If you use all of those up, you are going to need an army of accountants to report them all.

Customer Non-taxable:  A new field has been added to the customer record to set them to be non-taxable.  Now you are saying, “What a minute.  I know I set customers to be non-taxable before.”  That is true, but it did it through the tax jurisdiction field which meant the customer could be tax exempt for the default store’s tax jurisdiction.  Now this field is independent of the tax jurisdiction.  Which means you can set them to a particular tax jurisdiction and then mark them as non-taxable.  If you want to know why anyone would want to do that, just call up the city of Chicago and ask them how to handle out of city taxes for city businesses.

Customer Deposit Returned:   Several customers have requested the signature line that prints next to Customer Deposit Returned message on the contract be removed.  Their concept is if you don’t always get the customer’s signature, they could come back and claim you never gave them their deposit back. Makes sense.  To accomplish this, a new translation has been added for Deposit Signature.  If you don’t want the signature area, just change the translation to not have the verbiage.

Automated Reports:   The default report name has changed to include the date in year order.  This allows you to quickly sort all of the saved PDF reports by oldest to newest.

Item Availability:   Please remove your hats as we have a moment of silence to remember File Search.  It was a good program and served you well for many years.  It had gotten old and decrepit in the last number of years.  We are sure it is in a better place.  Ok, now you can throw your hat into the air. You are now able to open Item Availability directly from the Program Menu.

Time Clock Report:   You can now preview the Time Clock Report to the screen.  This allows you to save it as a PDF, export it to a spreadsheet, or email it.

Monthly Item Income:   You can export the Monthly Item Income and the Monthly Store Item Income screen directly to a spreadsheet.

Item Prep Reports:   The item weights and cubic size has been added to the Item Prep Reports.

Truck Loading Reports:  The item cubic size has been added to the Truck Loading Reports.

Transaction Shortcut:  While on the Contract Processing screen, you can right click on a line item and select “Show Other Contracts”. From that screen, you can right click on any of the contracts and select Modify, Inquire, Close, etc.  You will be taken to a new screen with that newly selected contract without affecting your current screen.

Multiple Item Pictures:  There has been a 200% increase in the number of pictures you can hold per item.  Mathematically that translates to: you can now have 3 pictures per item. All of the pictures will also be uploaded to your integrated website automatically.

Item Record:   The item record has been redesigned to allow for the new fields as well as the new tab to show the item pictures directly on the record.

Time Clock Report:   With the Mobile WorkForce you can give your employees the ability to clock in and out from their cell phone.  This is a great help for the employees that are working offsite or after hours, but you can imagine that it could pose some problems. Well never fear, we have already thought of that.  If an employee clocks in or out from the Mobile WorkForce, their GPS coordinates will be saved.  When you run the Time Clock Report, you can click on the time clock entry and a map will be displayed with the location where the time clock entry was done.  If instead of showing the venue, the map shows the location of the employee’s girlfriend, you might want to have a long (or short) conversation with him.

Time Clock Notes:   You can now add notes to any time clock entry. Simply right click the entry and select Add Note. This note will be displayed on the Time Clock Report as well.

Mass Time Clock Add:   So it’s Christmas and you have generously given everyone the day off, but now you have to enter the holiday time into everyone’s record.  By the 26th employee that you had to manually add the holiday time, you were feeling a little more like Scrooge.  Well to put the Christmas cheer back into your day (in March) we have added a Mass Time Clock Add option.  You set the date, the number of hours, the type of hours, checkbox all the employees, and then click Add.  In an instant, all of the time card entries will be made.  This will give you plenty of time to go shopping for Tiny Tim.

Subrental Links:   Several enhancements have been made to long term Subrental contracts.  You can manually click on Contract Link and enter the continuation billed contract number that the Subrental applies to.  In addition, when you continuation bill a contract, it will clear any contract links pointing to the original Subrental contract.

 Increase Fields:   Several fields have been increased in size.  For example, the item rates field can now be a million dollars.  So just update a couple of your items to a million dollars per day and watch your revenue skyrocket.  To go along with your new rate structure, the carry over cash has also increased to a million dollars.  You know, you can never have enough cash on hand because you might need to buy pizza or a new rental store.

Task Note:   Let’s say you have a task and you did something with the task but it still isn’t completed.  What do you do?  That is easy now.  Just right click on the task and select, “Add Note”.  Type what notes or updates you want on the task.  That note will be added with a date/time stamp along with your name.

Markup Percentage:   If you manually change the Markup Percentage on an item, the new sales price will be automatically calculated and saved in the item record.

Contact Lookup:   You can now select a contact from a Contacts list in the Delivery tab of the Contract Processing as well as the Delivery Address screen.  When you select a Contact, the system will automatically populate the phone and email from the Contact information.

 Aged Customer Balance Report:   When you print the Aged Customer Balance Report from the Customer Dashboard screen, the options that you have selected on the screen will set the criteria on the report so the screen and report are looking at the same contract statuses.

Automatic IRO:   You have had the option to automatically create an Internal Maintenance Order whenever an item reached its maintenance due point. There are occasions that you actually want to take the item out of service.  For example, if your annual inspections take a couple of days to accomplish, you will want to use the new feature that allows you to select the REPAIRS customer and the amount of time for the repairs.  Then when the item reaches its annual inspection date, the item will automatically be put on to an IRO and not available for rental.

Maintenance Print Only:  There are times that you would like to printout a Maintenance To-Do list, but don’t want to create an IMO or have to manually clear the maintenance every time.  You can now set the Maintenance Frequency to be Print Only. This would normally be used to print Ready to Rent instructions each time the item is returned.  It will automatically print it and you don’t have to keep clearing the maintenance.

Maintenance Warning:   Many people use the Maintenance Frequency to handle the Ready to Rent process on every rental.  As you can imagine, the constant message coming up stating that the item is due for maintenance was causing carpel tunnel syndrome for the employees.  This message has been removed for maintenance frequency of 1 times.

Automatic IMO:   You want to know how to make a maintenance manager depressed?  Just have him look at the IMO tab in Day at a Glance.  And the worst part is that every day he gets further and further behind because new IMO’s are created even if the previous IMO hasn’t been completed. So to keep the maintenance staff on target, before creating a new IMO the system will look to see if there is an open IMO for the same item and same maintenance frequency.  If so, it will not create a new one.

IMO to IRO:   When creating an IMO either from the Maintenance Due screen or manually creating, you might decide that the repairs are really going to take the item out of service.  You can now simply change the status of the line item from Closed to Open and change the customer to your desired Repairs customer.  Sprinkle a little magic dust on it and poof, it is an IRO.

Clear Maintenance:   When in an IRO or IMO, you can right click on the rental item and select Clear Maintenance.  You will then be able to choose which Maintenance Frequency that you would like to clear.

Print Maintenance To-Do:  You can print the Maintenance To-Do sheet directly from the Maintenance Clear screen.

Day at a Glance:   When you are displaying Item records in Day at a Glance, you have three new options when you right click on an item: Category Availability, Group Availability, and Package Availability.  When selected, the availability of all of the items in the category, group, or package will be shown.

Customer Dashboard:   When you are on the Contract Processing screen, you can right click on the customer name. You will be given a new option for Customer Dashboard.  By selecting this, you will be taken to a new screen with all the contracts for this customer listed in the Customer Dashboard.

Fuel Link:   You can now define the quantity for the item in the close contract link.  For example “cDIE#4” will automatically add 4 gallons of Diesel when closing the item.

Inventory Count Report:  Many people wanted to print ALL of your inventory in one printing instead of printing them by category.  So we have purchased stock in Weyerhaeuser and made it where the report will print all 82,000 items in your inventory.  For those of you that are environmentally minded, you can get the old style by clicking the icon in the upper right hand corner of the report.

Purchase Order GL Account:   When you add an item to a Purchase Order, it will now default to the last General Ledger account number that you used with this item.  You can always type over the account if you wanted a different one.

Purchase Order Receive:  When you receive a header item through Purchase Orders, you have the ability to automatically create the serialized items.  Which is great, except when you have to watch the latest cat video on Facebook while you are also adding the serialized items.  You then forget which items you already added and end up adding one of the serialized items twice.  To help the multi-taskers, the system will check the serial number of the newly added item to all of the serialized items previously added.  If the serial number is duplicated, you will get a warning with the option of returning to the item and correcting the serial number.

Day at a Glance:   A new checkbox has been added when showing Item details on Day at a Glance for Show Component Items.  With this unchecked, you won’t see all of the component items clogging up your screen.  This is especially helpful for items such as tents that are made up of many component items.

Delivery Address MapIt:  A MapIt button has been added to the Delivery Address screen which allows you to see the delivery address on a map.

Fuel Tank:   People have really liked the new fuel tank option to automatically compute the number of gallons used based on the fuel tank setting. You would think 1/4th tank increments would be so much better than the manual computation of old.  But for those OCD people, we have enhanced the interface to allow selections of 1/8th tank.

Item Confirmed Date:   A rose by any other name still smells as sweet; however, if you called the rose “dog poop”, it will be confusing when someone says they love the smell of dog poop, but dislike the thorns.  To help alleviate confusion, the Item Confirmed Date has been renamed to Prep Confirmed Date.  Now doesn’t that smell sweeter?

Quantity Compare Analysis:   You have 1,000 white padded chairs.  You make a good ROI on them 97%.  So doing the math, if you bought 1,000 more chairs at $30 a piece you should increase your gross revenue by $29,100 (1,000 * $30 * .97).  But wait!  When you run your Quantity Compare Analysis, you will see a trend: at 100 chairs the ROI was 160%.  At 300 chairs ROI was 201%.  500 – 164%. 700 – 124%.  800 – 111%.  1000 – 97%. Do you see it?  The more chairs you own, the lower your ROI is because you don’t rent out the higher quantity as often.  So with this trend, you could purchase 1,000 more chairs and your overall ROI could fall to around 50% which would mean you would not generate any extra income.  The report shows that your sweet spot is around 300 chairs which would give you double the ROI than you are currently getting.  You could then take the $21,000 that you had spent on those chairs and purchase different inventory.  So go run this report under File Maintenance; Item Record; Analysis; Quantity Compare Report. And see what the report tells you about the depth of your items.

System Notification – Overbook:   We previously added a notification for overbooks which was great except the overbook guy received 300 notifications a day and ignored all of them.  There is a new System Notification for Overbooks within X days.  Using this, the overbook guy will only get the notifications of overbooks that need immediate attention.

System Notification – Reservation:   You can now setup a System Notification every time a new reservation is written with a reservation date within X days.

System Notification – Lowering Amount:   You can setup a System Notification every time a contract is modified and the total amount of the contract is lowered by $x.

System Notification – Locked Contract:   We put all kinds of safety features in to protect you from employees modifying a Locked contract; however, an employee can still convince the owner to type in his password and make the changes.  This is only a problem when the customer didn’t get punch glasses for the wedding that were added the day before.  You can now setup a System Notification for every time a Locked contract is modified. Thus giving you the opportunity to head off the runaway train before it drives off the cliff.

System Notification – Purchase Order:   You can setup a System Notification every time a PO is written over $x.

Delivery Surcharge:   You can now setup a default surcharge item to be added to every contract marked for Delivery/Pickup.  You do this under the Delivery Window setup screen.

Tear Sheet:   You can now print the Item Tear Sheet directly from the Item Record by selecting the option under Tools.

Commission Settings Report:   A new report has been added that shows all of the settings for the Enhanced Commission module.

Customer Type:   You want to get some people confused?  Take the Customer Types and place them in what appears to be random order on the drop down (actually it is in the order that the Customer Type was added to the system).  You want to make some people happy?  Sort the Customer Type pull downs in alphabetical order.

Subrental Request:   You change the delivery date on a contract and that causes overbooks.  You can now place a Subrental request directly from the Overbook screen.

Column Select:   Did you know that you can customize most grids with the columns that are shown, the width of the columns, the order of the columns, along with the default sort column?  You can now set the Contract Processing screen default columns under Inquire from a report link.  This allows you to set the default format when the system has not asked for the user id.

Cost of Goods Sold:   You can now select whether this report is based on the owning store of the item or the store that actually sold the item.

Show on Order:   The Show on Order screen from Contract Processing will now show the contract that the item was ordered (of course assuming that the item was ordered through a contract or was manually entered when ordered through PO’s).

Event Reservation:   You wrote a reservation, added your three hundred items, then the customer mentions that the event date is different than the delivery and pickup, but you didn’t select Event Reservation at the start. At this point, you would normally just ignore it.  No more. Simply click on the “Event End Date” label on the Contract Processing screen and you can enter your begin and ending event dates.

Event Reservation:   You accidently selected Event Reservation when you meant to select Express.  Now you have to enter the event date, event time, and charge time.  What a pain!  No more. Simply hit the Escape key and you are out of the screen.

Nuke Option:   We have had multiple people ask for the Nuclear Option while in a contract.  Just press one button and you get out of whatever you are doing.  While that might sound nice when you are trying to get out, it probably isn’t too nice if you accidently hit the button when you are 500 items in on a new contract.  As a compromise, we have added the conventional bomb option.  Hitting Escape on most screens will get you out of that screen.  Except of course the last safety check of “Do you really want to cancel this contract.” You will still have to answer that.

Transfer PDF’s:  Transfer contracts will now store a PDF copy of each modification to give a better paper trail.

Transfer Sale Items:   After transferring sale items between stores, the item record will no longer be deleted off the transfer contract.  The quantity will display as zero after the transfer but will stay on the contract.

Reprint General Ledger Entries:   You now have the option to print only the GL Entries, only the Totals Report, or both.

Multi-store Closing:   When you are at a remote site and you try to modify a contract but the end of day process is still going on at other stores, you will be given a message showing all of the stores that have already closed. With this you can call the store that hasn’t yet closed and gripe at them.

Category Availability:  Inactive items will no longer be displayed on Category and Group Availability screen.

Bulk Items:   When selecting the proper store’s item from a bulk header, your store’s item will automatically be selected.

Price Change Security:  We preach in training not to change the price of a rental item since the system will have no idea what to do if the item comes back early or late.  The proper way is to set Special Rates for the item.  However, it is very difficult when a person is given two options: Easy or Correct.  To help employees do Correct, there is a new security parameter that sets a password level required to change the price.  If you set that to something other than None and you set the Special Rate password to None, it will automatically take you to the Special Rate setting whenever changing the price.

Refund Message:   We have saved you an hour a year by removing the “There is a refund.  Do you want to make changes?”  Seemed rather redundant as in superfluous information as in repeated non-necessary. Anyway it is gone.

Work Orders:   When you put a special order item on a work order, usually you don’t know the price of that item so it goes on the Work Order as $0.  When you close the Work Order, it will automatically pull the Sell Price of the item and set the Work Order price to that.

Purchase Orders:   When receiving new items on a PO, check the item type of the other serialized item and default the new item to the same item type.

End of Period Reports:  If you have reports set to automatically create PDF copies on a scheduled basis, you can get access to those previously saved reports under Account Reports; Saved User Defined Reports.

 QuickBooks Separate GL’s:  If you are a multi-store system within Point-of-Rental, but you have separate General Ledgers within QuickBooks, there is a new export option that allows you to create a separate GL import file for each store.

2014 Dispatch Center

Export to Spreadsheet:  You can export the data from the grid directly to a Spreadsheet. This is available as a right-click on a route, the grid, or from the ‘Tools’ menu. If you have a spreadsheet processing program installed on your server the file will open immediately, otherwise the file is saved to \POR\Map\Exported\. What you do from there is limited to your imagination.

Show Component Items : In the main screen, if you select the ‘Show items’ option, any component items are hidden by default. If you want to see those component items, then you would select the ‘Show component items’ checkbox.

When viewing the items for a specific contract, you also have the option to show the component items.

FYI: Component items are items on the contract that are not charged for and are marked ‘No print on contract’ in File Maintenance.

Close Old Logistics Tickets:   Point-of-Rental automatically closes Logistics Tickets after 7 days during the End-of-Day process, but now you can manually close them en-masse if you so desire.

Daily Route Summary Report:   This report summarizes all of your routes for easier digestion. This is a high-level overview of the routes showing the driver/crew assignments, start time, total time, distance, and number of each type of stop. It is available from the ‘Reports’ menu and brings the summary up on screen for you to print, fax, or email.

Red Date/Purple Date:  When you browse back in time you see a red date, when you go to the point that you are now reading from transactions that have been moved to history, the date turns purple. The number of days is based on your history setting in Point-of-Rental parameters. Only completed contracts (closed and fully paid) go to history.

Edit Contract Dates:   You can now move the date of your contracts from inside Dispatch Center by right-clicking the contract and selecting ‘Edit Stop Details’. This works for the Delivery, Pickup, or Service dates. When you change the date you will get the option to check the effect on availability and overbooking within Counter System.

Shift Pickup/Service Dates Unleashed:   Last year we restricted this to yesterday’s missed pickups that were on the unassigned node. This year, if you want to do it, by George, we are going to let you. Yesterday, the day before, last week, today, tomorrow, or any day you can think of, you can right click a contract and move it to the next business day. You can also right click a trip and it will move the whole route to the next day you are open, or you pick a date. Only the pickups, logistics tickets, and services that are not closed and completed will move.

Update Schedule for Continuous Services:   After you have put a service route in the preferred order and are ready to save it, you will now have an ‘Update Service Schedule’ checkbox that will update each service contract’s master contract service tab with the truck, route name, and planned route sequence WITHOUT affecting the time. This way next Wednesday when that service route is generated, it will be in the proper sequence and your promised times or your ‘any times’ are left intact. Newly added services will show up at the top so that you can put them where you like and adjust the sequence that will be saved for the following Wednesday. The effect is similar to a train schedule.

Show Missed Events and Move to Today:   When you use the ‘Show Missed’ checkbox, which shows pickups/services that were not closed and deliveries that were not sent out, you can right click those routes/contracts and move them to today.

Route Notes:   When working on a route, you can input special notes that will then print on the driver packet, or display in WorkForce for your drivers and crew. This way any special instructions specific to the route are communicated to your crew. This is in addition to delivery notes on each contract. If you use the WorkForce app, these notes are included in the Route Detail screen.

Employee Start Time:   You can set the time that you want the employees to arrive for their workday. This prints on the packets, and is shown in the WorkForce for your crews to see.

Set Crew/Driver Quicker:   You can do this in the ‘Route Start’ screen and save it, along with start times, or status changes by clicking ‘Save & Close’. This applies your changes without going into the scheduling/mapping screen. This also works by clicking the driver or crew cell in the main grid.

Driver and Crew Overbooked Warning:   As you assign drivers and crew you will be warned if those employees are on a route during that time. You can still proceed, but you will know what other routes you need to adjust if needed. This helps you to properly allocate your employees without having them in two places at once.

Assign a Dispatcher:   You can assign a dispatcher so that messages can be directed to them from the Dispatch Center/WorkForce app.

Customer Dashboard:   You can jump directly into the ‘Customer Dashboard’ within Counter System  from the ‘Edit Stop Details’ screen by double-clicking the customer’s name.

Multi Select:   You can hold down the CTRL key and click stops to select a group of them, and then keep holding CTRL as you drag and they will all move together. This works when adding or removing contracts.

Range Select:   You can hold down the Shift key and click one stop and then a different stop and the range between them will be selected, and then keep holding Shift as you drag and they will all move together. This works when adding or removing contracts.

Selection Indicator: To help distinguish what contract you are selecting or the group you have selected, the far left-hand column will turn white. This helps in Multi/Range Select and when you scroll the grid to the left.

Out-of-Service Trucks:  You can pick a date range in which a truck will not be available due to maintenance or the driver took it on vacation. This is done by right-clicking the truck to select ‘Truck Details’ and then click the ‘Status’ button to pick the dates and add a note. During the specified date range, the truck will show with a red ‘X’ and be in a node called ‘Out of Service’. Dispatch Center will warn if you try to assign routes to these trucks, but you will still see any contracts that have been unknowingly assigned to them. When the truck is ready for work it automatically becomes available or you can manually put it back into service in ‘Truck Details’.

 Route Definitions:  Previously we populated the list of route names by whatever had been used on a contract in the last 14 days, but now you control that list of names from the ‘Route Definitions’ feature located in the ‘options’ menu. Only the route names you have defined are available in drop down lists within Dispatch Center. Your initial list will be made of those typed in the last 14 days of contracts. You can make a route name store specific as well. This helps show a more concise list for each store by only showing appropriate names.

You can still type something different on the fly, but it will not be saved unless you go into Route Definitions and save it as a new definition by clicking the ‘Add from contracts’ button which will import new names from the last 14 days of contracts. You can also mark a definition as inactive to hide it from future use.

 Automatically added Logistics Tickets:   You can define up to three Logistics Tickets to be added to a route definition. These can be added into a route at the beginning, middle, or end. A checkbox shows up when you first go to map/schedule the route and if you choose it, these contracts are created automatically and you will see them in the schedule screen. This feature is huge if you are always required to take a lunch mid route, start at the warehouse, get gas on the way back to the rental yard, or end at the dumping station. 

Default stop time per Logistics Customer: The logistics customers are special records to denote a type of stop for your drivers, such as lunch, gas station, store 2, etc. They have a special key like ‘Log-Lunch’ or ‘Log-Store001’. If you want there to be a specific amount of time set aside for these stops which is different than your ‘Default On-Site time’ for a Service Contract, then you would type the number of minutes into the logistics customer record’s ‘User-Defined 1’ field found on the ‘Account’ tab in the lower left-hand section ‘Other Info’. Note: Your field may be labeled something other than ‘User-Defined 1’ due to your Store’s parameters.

Default On-Site Time for Deliveries, Pickups, and Services: This value is used to allot time in addition to drive time when scheduling a route to more accurately plan the crew’s time. Previously there was only one parameter for Default On-Site time that applied to all stop types. We have broken this up into Delivery, Pickup, and Service to allow you more control over your scheduling. Initially all of these will be set to your original value for On-Site Time. 

Default Late Stop Grace Period for Deliveries, Pickups, and Services: This value governs when the Dispatch Center will label a stop as late on screen or reports. Previously there was only one parameter for late stop grace period that applied to all stop types. We have broken this up into Delivery, Pickup, and Service to allow you more control over what is late. Initially all of these will be set to your original value for Late Stop Grace Period.

Net Help: You can now click on the ‘Help’ menu at the top of the main or scheduling form and select ‘Net Help’. This will bring you into our help site and pre-search for Dispatch related support documentation. This information is constantly updated with new tips and procedures.

Open GPS Map: If you have the TSO integration and want to watch your trucks drive about the city on their daily routes in real-time, you can quickly and easily do just that from the ‘Tools’ menu at the top of the main Dispatch screen by selecting the ‘Open GPS Map’ feature. This will open a web browser and automatically log you into your TSO account. Your trucks and their stops will be displayed and refresh automatically. You can drag this window over to a second monitor/72” flat screen TV and enjoy the show.

Oversized Load Warnings: Several years ago we incorporated the weight of an item and the GVWR to warn when a load was overweight. Now we have gone an extra step to account for cubic capacity. You can define the cubic size of an item in File Maintenance. You define the cubic capacity of the truck in the Truck Details screen in Dispatch Center. Based on calculating the total cubic size of each item on each contract within a route, the program will warn you if it exceeds the cubic capacity for that truck.  You can set the percentage at which you want to be warned in Dispatch Center’s parameters.

Automatic Employee Filtering: When you are assigning drivers, dispatchers, or crew the selection screen will automatically change the filter to that employee type. This only works if you have assigned the employees to groups with names containing: Driver, Crew, or Dispatcher.

Send email/text to crew: You can right-click on a route and select this feature which will open the Message form and pre-populate the driver and crew’s contact addresses based on what you defined in their operator/employee record. If they prefer email, then their email address is added or if they prefer text then their cell phone and provider extension is added.  You type in a message and send it on its way to keep in touch with your employees while they are out of the office.

This option also exists per truck, where it will populate with the truck’s default driver’s message address. If one does not exist you can easily add it by using the ‘Employees’ menu in the email form.

Note: to keep from providing other employees with each other’s cell phones, those addresses will be placed in the blind carbon copy section and displayed as their name and a code. When you send the message, Dispatch Center will swap those placeholder values for the actual address. When these messages are received each Bcc recipient only sees their address listed.

Send email/text to Customer: Very similar to the above feature, but this one automatically populates with the Customer’s contact message address. You can select any additional contacts from the drop down list of any contacts found in the customer’s record. You can include your employees from the ‘Employee’ menu. You can use the Bcc to keep everyone from replying back to each other.

You can import one of your email letters to send a common message template for instances such as upcoming deliveries/pickups.

2014 WorkForce

SSL Encryption:  You will notice that your browser displays a padlock or similar icon denoting that you are on a secured site. https://porwork.com is 2048 bit encrypted so that anything you type or any results you see travel in a secure tunnel away from prying eyes or devices in the same manner as banking and investing sites. It is also important to realize that no sensitive data is stored on the WorkForce server. There is no credit card or merchant information and we strip any fields such as tax id from the customer data prior to upload. This leaves us with a highly secure vault that is also empty of valuable data as far as hackers are concerned.

 Item Actions:   A new menu allows you to search for items directly and then perform item specific tasks.

Item Search:   You can search for any item that is not marked as inactive by its key, name/long description, serial number, part number, alias/lookup, item number, or barcode fields. You can type the name or use a 2-D Bluetooth scanner on any device.

Request IMO:   If an item in the yard requires maintenance, you can bring up the item’s record in WorkForce and start an Internal Maintenance Contract that imports into your Point-of-Rental system. You type a description that will become the ‘contract info’ text. The item remains available for rent. Further processing of the IMO is done within Counter System.

Request IRO:   If an item in the yard is broken or otherwise un-rentable, you can bring up the Item record in WorkForce and start an Internal Repair Contract that imports into your Point-of-Rental system. You type a description that becomes the ‘contract info’ text. This puts the item out of service and keeps it from being rented until the IRO is closed. Further processing of the IRO is done within Counter System.

Item Photo:   Now that you can have up to 3 images for each item in Point-of-Rental, we have made it very easy to update your item photos right from your rental yard with a single tap. You find the item record in WorkForce, and take the picture from your mobile device. This updates the item’s record in Point-of-Rental and also your hosted website. You can edit the sequence of the images from File Maintenance.

Note: If you upload more than 3 images for a single item, the 4th and on will be added as item attachments.

Item Meter:   You can update the meter on an item that is out on rent or parked in the rental yard. Find the item in WorkForce and type in the new meter reading. If the item was on rent, this new reading will be used to continuation bill or close out the contract and bill for the meter usage.

Item Count:   Using a barcode scanner and a mobile device, you can now perform an inventory on sales and parts inventory wirelessly. The item count date and quantity difference is updated in your Point-of-Rental system. A manager or authorized employee can view these updates to your inventory and finalize them via ‘Inventory Reports->’Update Inventory Count’.

Get Directions : This button will open your mobile device’s mapping application and get you a turn-by-turn route from your current location to the contract’s delivery address.

Dispatch Actions: If you have our Dispatch Center module, then your drivers and crew can get their assigned routes, start times, stop sequences, delivery notes, contact information, etc. directly on their mobile device. To use this feature, you must set your routes to status ‘Route Confirmed’ and assign a driver and/or crew to the routes. When your employee logs into WorkForce they will see only their routes and whether they are assigned as a driver or crew. They can click the route to see the stops in order along with planned arrival, departure, stop time, etc. They can click on each stop to see contract details like salesman, delivery contact phone/email, job site information, delivery instructions, contract comments, Contract operation and transaction type, view the items, get directions, and perform any task for the contract such as closing a service, marking arrived or departed.

Additional Contract Search options: We added item number and barcode field searches in addition to contract number, customer name, contract info, item key, item part number, and item serial number.

Quick Search Contracts: You can use special terms to perform special searches:

 ‘SSR’ to return only reservation contracts

‘SSO’ to return only open contracts

‘SSD’ to return only delivery contracts

‘SSP’ to return only pickup contracts

View Items on a contract: Use the ‘View Items’ button from inside a contract to see a list of each item, and then click the item key button to view more detail about the item or perform an item task.

Request Service:   If an item on rent requires service, you can bring up the contract record in WorkForce and start a Service Contract that imports into your Point-of-Rental system. You type a description that becomes the ‘contract info’ text. The resulting Service Contract can be routed in Dispatch Center to the location of the item based on where you submitted it with WorkForce, GPS telemetric data, or the original delivery address. You can close this service contract upon completion using the WorkForce app too.

Printed Name: when collecting a customer’s signature, you can now type the name as well. This will appear on reprints of the contract under the image of the signature.

Time Clock Employee Groups: If the employee using the WorkForce is marked as multi-group in their Operator record, they will have the option to select from the available employee groups you have defined. Their default group is automatically selected so that they need only specify when clocking in/out for an alternate group.

View Time Clocks on a Map: Within Point-of-Rental’s Time Clock Report feature any WorkForce initiated clock in/outs are shown in green and have clickable links to view the GPS based location where the time punch was performed.

WorkForce Edits Report: You can review the types of tasks your employees have been performing within Point-of-Rental from the Program Menu #17 Override Reports menu by selecting the ‘WorkForce Edits Report’. This report can be grouped by task, operator, or operator store. It can be filtered by date range and viewed on screen, faxed, emailed or printed. You can click links in the report to view the GPS based location where the task was performed.

2014   Integrated website

No Pricing:   You can now mark individual item records to hide its pricing info on the web.  By entering <NOPRICING> in the item record’s WEBGROUP field (editable from File Maintenance – Item File – Record Detail’s Options screen), your integrated website will no longer display rental rates/sell prices for those records and will instruct your online customers to  “Request Quote” instead.

Shipping Calculator:   If you are planning to sell new equipment/supplies on your integrated website, you can now offer a shipping calculator on the checkout page.  This shipping calculation requires weight information to be entered in your Item records WEIGHT field.   Also by entering <FREESHIPPING> in Item record’s WEBGROUP field (editable from File Maintenance – Item File – Record Detail’s Options screen), you can offer free shipping for selected records.  If you have questions on how to use this feature on your integrated website, please contact our Web Design Team.

Customer Portal:   You can now allow your account customers to make online payments using credit cards on their customer portal account.  Elavon’s InternetSecure payment gateway securely handles all credit card transactions.  If interested in this online payment option for your Customer Portal, please contact Melanie or Andre for pricing information.

Layouts:   Several new website layouts have been designed in order to give our users more design options to choose from.  If you do not have an integrated website or would like to upgrade from your basic layout, please contact our Web Design Team for options and pricing information.  You can see the sample layouts on our website at www.point-of-rental.com, click on Features on the main menu.

Picture Layout:   The “grid layout”, often used for our Party Stores, has been enhanced to allow a more uniform way of displaying your item record pictures regardless of your item pictures’ height or width.

Super Category:   A new Super Category feature is now available allowing you to create a super category comprised of multiple categories.  For instance, you can now have a LINEN super category which in turn points to existing categories e.g. LINEN POLY, LINEN STATIN, LINEN ORGANZA, etc.  Or you can have a CONVENTION EQUIPMENT super category consisting of TABLES, CHAIRS, and AUDIO VISUAL EQUIPMENT categories.  Please note that by design, a category can now be assigned to multiple super categories.   If you have questions on how to use this feature on your integrated website, please contact our Web Design Team.

Styles:  With the new Styles fields in Record Details screen, you can now organize certain item record groups by up to three predefined styles. For instance, your linen records can now be organized by Linen Fabric (Style #1), Color (Style #2), and Size (Style #3).  Or you can now have your Tent/Canopies category item records organized by Tent/Canopy Style (Style  #1), e.g. Frame Tents, Pole Tents, and Canopies.   In addition, the Item Category Edit screen (under Configuration; Item Configurations; Item Categories menu) will allow you to name your own three styles per category.  If you have questions on how to use this feature on your integrated website, please contact our Web Design Team.