QUICK SUMMARY
Customer Rewards: Are you a member of a frequent flyer program? Does it affect your habits? Our sales guys all belong to different airline’s programs. What we see is that our sales guys will spend a great deal of energy (and extra cost) to make sure they fly with that airline. Many consumer studies will show similar results. If you give a person a “treat” for a desired action, they will continue to do that action. Pavlov proved this with dogs and the same applies to people. There are many customer reward programs from airlines, to Starbucks, to grocery stores and they all have the same intention of getting customers to buy more of their products. To encourage your customers to rent more from you, we have created a Customer Rewards system. You define the percentage of each type of income that you want to reward the customer with. For example, you might want to give 1% rewards on rental and .5% rewards on sales and nothing for asset sales. As the customer rents from you, the rewards will automatically accrue in their account. These rewards can then be used on future rentals. You also define the expiration date on rewards. For example, you can set them to expire after 6 months thus encouraging your customers to come back within 6 months to get the benefit. The accruing of the rewards and the expiring of unused rewards are automatically handled by the system. If the customer has any rewards available, the counter person will be given the option of applying the rewards to the current contract. This is a new module; however, for current customers, there will not be a charge to purchase the module. Please contact sales to have the module enabled .
Contract Fulfillment: Your warehouse guys load up all of the items for a customer and they include some bags for the linen or racks for the dishes. How do you know whether you got them back? With Fulfillment, you can now over-prep an item either a new item such as the bags and racks or existing items such as extra linens. Fulfillment will keep track of the actual quantity that you sent out and then expect to get that same quantity back. If you want to add those extra items to the contract, under Contract Processing; Fulfillment tab, you can right click on the over-prepped item and select Add Item to Contract. The quantity of the item that is over-prepped will be added on the contract. There is also an Add All Items to Contract that will add every over-prepped item to the contract.
Contract Fulfillment Sell Item: You are using Contract Fulfillment to keep track of every item you send out and every item that comes back. It is awesome!!! But it can get better. It was a bit cumbersome after everything had been fulfilled to reconcile the contract to the actual item counts. There have been two menu options added to the Right Click of the Fulfillment tab: Sell Missing/Damaged Items and Sell All Missing Items. These two options will do an asset sale of the quantity that was missing on the contract. For example, you sent out 10 linens and only 8 of them came back. Simply right click on the short line and select Sell Missing/Damaged Item. The 2 missing linens will automatically be added to the contract as an asset sale. If you are a party company and charge damage waiver, you will be asked whether you want to bill the customer for the missing items.
Contract Fulfillment: You have a pile of stuff in front of you and you are tasked with returning all of the stuff on the appropriate contract. Instead you start writing your resignation letter. Put your pen down! With the two new scan methods in Contract Fulfillment, you can accomplish the task in record time and maybe even get a raise. Blind Scan allows you to scan in items from one customer that were out on multiple contracts. This is especially helpful for large events or the end of a job where the customer has many contracts and all the items are coming back. The second mode is Double Blind Scan. With this method, you can scan in items that are from multiple different customers and different contracts. Fulfillment will return the appropriate items on the correct contract for the correct customer .
Contract Fulfillment RFID: One of the worst jobs that exists in rental stores is counting inventory. The second worse job is counting piles of linens and chairs coming back from rental. Actually this might be the worst since it is constant. To take the bite out of the counting job, you can now use RFID directly in Contract Fulfillment to scan items in or out. This means that you can have a pile of 100 linens of different sizes and in 10 seconds accurately select them to send out or to receive in. Now everyone will be volunteering to count in the linens on Mondays.
Close All Fulfilled Items: A new close option has been added: Close All Fulfilled Items. This option will look at all of the items that have been returned from Fulfillment and close them. When everything has been counted, the contract status will be closed; however, if there are still outstanding items, the contract status will stay open.
Self Service: “I forgot my password. Can you change it?” “I bought a new phone. Can you change my contact phone number?” “I want to get my notifications via text now instead of email. Can you change it?” There is probably some formula that correlates the number of back office requests to the number of employees and it is probably an exponential formula! To reduce the headaches of the back office, we have added self service options for the employees. Under Counter System; Tools, there is a new option for Operator Information that allows an employee to set their own email, cell phone, and desired contact method. But wait there is more. The employee can also change their own password and if they have forgotten their password, they can request a new one. The password is sent via their default notification method.
Return Transfer Item: One of our great new features in v2015 was the ability to automatically create a return transfer for an item being transferred to you. Well at least it seemed great at the time. Surprisingly many people didn’t like the time savings they were afforded with the new feature. In fact they used up all of their extra found time sending us emails about how terrible the new feature was. But we did also get the occasionally email from users who liked it as well. To try to make everyone happy, there is now a parameter per store that you can set whether you are given the automatic return transfer prompt. Set it to no, and it will be just like it was before.
Subrental Requests: A couple of years ago, we added the ability to on the fly add a Subrental request for items you are short. This was a great improvement to the process. Hopefully you see that we are always working on making the processes smoother and easier for you. While the requesting of a Subrental was smoother, the processing of that request was a bit cumbersome (some of you have used more colorful words to describe it). So in our effort to always get better, the process for creating a Subrental contract from a request has been redesigned. You will now be given a list of all the pending requests. There is a checkbox next to each requested item. You simply checked each item that you will subrent from the vendor. Once finished, the system will find every vendor that you have subrented those items from in the past and allow you to select the desired vendor. Then you are done! The system knows the dates needed for the items so it automatically sets the desired dates on the Subrental. It also knows the contract number requesting the Subrental and automatically fills in the contract link for that as well. All that is left is to hear the colorful words you use to describe how great the change is.
Vendor File: While we have had default language for customers for several years, we had not also added this feature to the Vendors so now you can set the default language per vendor. And while we were at it, we threw in default currency for free. So if your vendor is in a different country you can set them to automatically choose the correct currency whenever a PO is written so the employee no longer has to remember.
Vendor Edit File: “Who messed up this vendor record?” is a common question we get and previously we couldn’t answer the question so usually you just blamed the employee you didn’t like for screwing it up. Now each time an employee edits a vendor record an edit will be made so you will know who the culprit is…but be careful it might be you.
Vendor PO Printout: There is a new field in the Vendor record that will automatically printout on the PO each time printed or emailed. This field can be used for shipping method, shipping account, or any other info you always want on the print out.
Recapitalization: Yeah it is a big word, but it simply means that you can add value to an existing item and then separately capitalize the increase. This can happen when you replace the engine in your Cat D11. You would continue to depreciate the unit based on the original purchase date and price, but in addition you would depreciate the engine from today and maybe with a different deprecation method. Now you can handle this seamlessly through your system. You can manually add the recapture line in the Item record under Purchase Details or you can write an IRO for the unit. When you close the IRO and the repairs are over $1,000, you will be asked if you want to recapitalize the repairs. If you answer Yes, the repair cost and date will automatically be added to the purchase details. If you want to change the depreciation method or years, you would modify the item and select the Purchase Detail to enter specific values.
Salesman Dashboard: How many times has a sales rep asked you how much in sales they currently have pending? How many times have you wondered how one sales rep was doing compared to another? What about the aging breakdown for sales reps? The new Sales Rep Dashboard allows you to slice and dice your numbers anyway you want to. You can look at a single sales rep or all your sales reps. For the sales rep, they can go to the dashboard and see all of their pending contracts by quotes, reservations, open, or closed. They can know the amount of the pending contracts at a glance. You can also subgroup so you could group all of the contracts by status and then subgroup by Transaction Operation showing you exactly what is going on with all your reservations as an example. The contracts will be counted and the Total, Paid, and Owed will be summed for each group and each subgroup. There is a handy graph that you can display the result in an intuitive pie chart.
Job Site/Venue Dashboard: The Job Site Dashboard has all the same functionality that the Sales Rep Dashboard has except you can choose a single Job Site/Venue or you can choose all. This allows you to quickly see which job sites are doing great and which are not. You have probably wondered multiple times what the total revenue you have gotten at a particular event center. Not only can you get that, you can also get what revenue came in each month or what the average days to pay at each venue. The opportunities for analysis are endless.
Transaction Dashboard: The Transaction Dashboard has all the same functionality that the Job Site Dashboard has except it is based on All Transactions. You can group or subgroup by Operator Assigned, PO Number, Job Number, Sales Rep by Transaction, Customer, or Job Site, Transaction Operation, Transaction Type, Contract Info, and Customer among other things. This is a powerful tool to quickly group your transactions together to see trends and adjust accordingly.
PO Dashboard: Not to be left out, Purchase Orders now has a dashboard as well. Designed after Day at a Glance, the PO Dashboard has tabs for Open, Pending, Credit, Closed, Posted, and Sub Rental. These tabs can also be grouped by Status, Vendor, Ordered By, Invoice Number, Store, and others. With this dashboard you can easily find the number and amount of PO’s that a particular employee has written. You can see all the PO’s still open for a particular Employee Group. As with Day at a Glance, you can right click on any of the PO’s and have the option of printing, modifying, receiving, voiding, etc. All of the processing of PO’s will now been done in the one screen dashboard to streamline the processes.
Grouping on Day at a Glance: Quick, how many deliveries does Truck #4 have tomorrow? How much in reservations do you have to a particular city? How many IRO’s are in the “Waiting for Parts” operation? These are all easily answered with the new groupings in Day at a Glance. Any tab can be grouped by Status, Sales Rep, Operation, Customer, Job Number, City, Substatus, Zip, and a number of other fields. Each grouping will show the count of contracts as well as the Total, Paid, and Owed.
Grouping on Customer Dashboard: You are probably noticing a trend here. Groupings have also been added to the Customer Dashboard. By clicking “Include Historical Contracts”, you will be seeing all contracts for this customer. Group by Aging and you will know quantity of contracts for each aging group as well as dollar values. Group by PO Number and you will know the exact dollar amount that he has spent on an open PO. The options are endless so go have fun.
Sales Rep: When someone talks about Sales Reps, they are typically
talking about the Transaction Sales Rep; however, the customer could have a
different Sales Rep because of territories and to make things even more
complicated, the Job Site/Venue could have a Sales Rep defined. So what can you
do with all of these different Sales Reps? Well now in Day at a Glance and
Customer Dashboard, new columns have been added for Customer Sales Rep and Job
Site Sales Rep. So along with the already existing Transaction Sales Rep you can
know exactly the three different sales rep options for each
contract.
Sales Rep: To make sure everyone is clear on
who is the sales rep on a contract, the Information Tab now displays the
Transaction Sales Rep, the Customer Sales Rep, and the Job Site/Venue Sales
Rep.
View Job Site/Venue: Previously you couldn’t really tell whether you were viewing an existing job site/venue on a contract or adding a new job site/venue. To make it clear and keep people from messing up an existing venue, a new button has been added to the Delivery Tab on the contract for View Venue. This option will show all of the info associated with the Job Site/Venue, but will not allow the end user to change it.
Create Job Site/Venue: If you create a new Job Site/Venue from a contract, you will be warned in case you thought you were just modifying. If you really want to create a new one, smile with the confidence that you got it right.
Dispatch Persistent Grid Filters: If you set filters on your grid within Dispatch Center, when the data is refreshed by adding a contract to a trip or truck, the filters will be maintained. When you change filters, you will see a ‘Clear filters’ button for an easy mechanism to remove all the current filters.
Purchase Order Reference Number: Your vendor sends you a quote from some items you purchased. Now it is a month later and you can’t remember which PO was for that item. Well with the new Reference Number field, all your worries are over (OK, this might not solve all of your worries, but might get rid of this worry). Simply type in the vendor’s quote number in the Reference Number search and magically that PO will be displayed (assuming of course that you actually typed the quote number on the PO).
100% Discount: There are a number of ways that you can give stuff away for free and once you give it away for free, it will always be free. That isn’t always a good thing. Maybe you felt really generous when the Cub Scouts asked for a free rental so you gave them 100% off. Then later you found out it was actually for Scott Cubb. Now when you change the discount from 100% to 10%, it will automatically recalculate what the correct current price of the item is and then give 10% off that.
Contract Tasks: A new tab has been added to the Contract Processing screen that lists all of the Tasks for this contract. Now you can quickly see all current and completed tasks in one spot for the contract you are viewing.
Aging Report: The Aging Report shows everything that a customer owes, but it has also always showed any newly completed contracts in the report (contracts that nothing is owed). This has on occasion caused some calls so to eliminate any concern; completed contracts will no longer display in the report.
Dispatch Center: You are setting your routes in Dispatch Center and
you see a contract that should not be marked as Pickup. Previously, you were
sent to Counter System to make those changes on the contract. Now you can toggle
delivery/pickup on or off directly from within the Dispatch Center grid instead
of requiring the contract be opened in Counter
System.
International Date Format: Our Canadian cousins
have always been so gracious and understanding that Americans like to have
things their way. Not once (well maybe that is a stretch) has any Canadians ever
complained about the US date format in everything that they saw. However, the
Australians aren’t as gentle as the Canadians. The Australians complained a lot
about Americans trying to dominate the world and they drew the line at the date
formats. To prevent a war, we relented and have added International Date Formats
throughout the program and the reports. May there be peace on Earth.
Day at a Glance Tabs: If you give a mouse a cookie…(Google it. It is an excellent read.) In v2014 we allowed you to select the tabs that were visible. In v2015 we gave you a new Overview tab. In v2015Mid, we allowed you to change the order of the tabs to put the Overview at the end, and that got you thinking. One request read, “My life would be complete if only I could change the order of all the tabs in Day at a Glance.” Well one person’s life is now complete. Right click on the tabs and you will be able to change the order just like the columns in a grid. The order can be saved for you, a store, or the company. This allows you to put the tabs that you use most often on the left side so they come up first. We are excited that we could be a small part in your daily happiness.
Default Columns: You have defined the column order that you want and you decide you want to save it for everyone at your store so you select save defaults for store. Everything is great except one thing. Your columns are not in the order you just selected! This is because you have defined your own personal order and thus the store order is not being shown. To solve this dilemma, you will now be asked if you want to clear your personal order if you save a store or company default.
Delivery Trucks: There have been some new fields added to the Delivery Trucks: Make, Model, Year, VIN, License Plate, and Id Number.
Delivery Trucks: You can now define the non-rental asset item you have for each Delivery Truck. This allows you to link maintenance due, Internal Repair Orders, and Internal Maintenance Orders to specific delivery truck.
Extra Charges: When transferring items between stores, the system has always transferred the purchase cost associated with that item. The system will now also transfer the Extra Charges associated with the transferred item.
Merge Items: The Merge Items routine will merge most everything in the item records; however, it will now also merge the depreciation history, the depreciation amounts, as well as the Item Income history.
Item Lookup: There is a new column in the Item Lookup screen to show if the rental item is marked For Sale.
Credit Card Security: With VeriFone Point, credit cards held on file for the Customer or the Transaction will now be held as a token on file to conform to PCI security requirements. With this change, your Point-of-Rental software will be out of scope for PCI requirements!
Account Payments: Accountants work hard to have settings to not allow counter personnel to take money from customers (explicitly Account Customers); however, some counter guys are bound and determined to get money from the customers. The clever counter guys have found that if they change the payment method of an account contract on open to Cash or Card that they can accept the money. So to keep these trouble making counter guys from taking any money, the ability to change the payment method will be tied to the “not allow Account payments on the counter” parameter. With this set to No, they will not be able to change the payment method to Cash or Card.
Customer Types: You will now be required to enter a password to modify or add new Customer Types
Customer Contacts: A new field has been added to the Customer Contacts for the contact’s title such as Vice President, Lunch Getter, or The Big Woohoo.
Opt In: Some countries (we won’t mention the one just North of the US) believe that people get too much email and they have a plan to solve the problem. You can’t send any email to a person unless they have opted into your email subscription so there is a new field in the Customer Contact record to denote whether this person has opted in. Of course, this only works for the law abiding companies and doesn’t work for the companies that don’t care and send 90% of the SPAM.
Default Delivery/Pickup Window: You have told your counter guys a thousand times, “set the delivery time to be all day and then the dispatcher will set the specific times later”, but it does no good. To help your blood pressure, you can now set the default delivery window and default pickup window that will automatically be selected when creating a delivery or pickup. If the counter guy simply hits enter, they are done. Of course, they can always select the correct (or incorrect) window that they would like so maybe it doesn’t fix the blood pressure 100%.
Engine Types: You might think that Tier IV means “tears for me”. There are now new engine types added to the item record to hopefully shed fewer tears when doing your compliance reporting.
Operator Assigned to a Contract: You have a big event and you have put Fred in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly for the customer. That is all fine and dandy, but does Fred or anyone else know he is in charge? Now you can mark Fred as the Operator Assigned to the Contract. He can have notifications setup whenever something is done to the contract.
Day at a Glance: There is a new tab for Contracts Assigned to You in Day at a Glance. It will show all of the contracts that you are assigned to so you can quickly see at a glance what you have in process and what you need to finish up.
Day at a Glance: There is a new column that has been added to all of the tabs in Day at a Glance for Operator Assigned. This column will show who is assigned to each contract. You can also group by Operator Assigned so you get a quick view of how many contracts each person has in process.
Contact Email: You are sending a contract to a customer and his name is Larry. You select the drop down with all of the Customer’s contacts and there are two Larry’s. Which one is it? You don’t want to act like you don’t know which Larry it is so you guess. Well to keep you from feeling like you did at your last family reunion where you couldn’t keep tell the difference between your great aunt and cousin Fred, we have added the contact’s department next to their name. You know that the Larry you want is the Shop Manager so you can select him with confidence. Now if we could just come up with something to help with those family reunions.
Customer Statement: A note will be added to the Customer Edits screen when emailing or faxing a statement to the customer.
Dispatch Center: When in the Date Range View, the trip Dates will include the MM/DD for better sorting and allows you to quickly distinguish old/future days from the current week’s days.
American Express: The credit card industry is constantly changing. It used to be that MasterCard and Visa were together and Discover and AmEx were separate. Then Discover joined forces with MC and Visa and now AmEx has also joined forces…except not in all cases. For those companies that all of their credit card money is not deposited as one bank deposit, it is a real pain to reconcile their bank statements at the end of each month. Well now you can set a separate GL Account Number for American Express to allow separate bank accounts or separate deposits for your AmEx deposits.
Accounts Payable: Some companies separate their AP expenses per store so we added a new GL Account Number for Accounts Payable that allows for each store to define the Accounts Payable account in the PO Export routine.
Auto Continuation: You might have a hard time believing this but we have had some customers that auto continue contracts that still have the header item on the contract. This is problematic on several levels such as not knowing who has a particular item and that the item shows it should be on lot and no one has bothered to report that it is missing, but most problematic of all is that the system won’t know which serialized unit should receive the income. To alleviate the problem, you will no longer be able to continuation bill a header item. You will receive a warning message to serialize the unit and try again.
Auto Continuation Billing: A new screen has been added that will give a preview of all the contracts that are to be continued. You will then be able to uncheck any contracts that you don’t want to continue at this point. You can also sort and filter the listing. Whatever order that you sort the list, currently it is in Customer’s name order, that is the order that the contracts will be continued. While in the preview, you can click on the Contract number to inquire the contract before continuing. You can also click on the customer name to bring up the Customer Dashboard for this customer. While that seems like a lot, it still does more! If you uncheck any of the contracts to not continue, you will be asked if you want to permanently exclude those contracts from continuing. So all the contracts that the boss has opened that he hasn’t brought the items back, you can once and for all remove those so it doesn’t keep asking you every month.
Change Item’s Store: So you are highly competitive between stores. Each store is always trying to beat the other stores in income. You have written up a reservation and are excited to receive the revenue; however, you don’t have the items in stock and you will need to pull them from another location. You could change the contract’s store to the store with the inventory, but what fun is that. You want the income. So just for the competitive you, there is a new option within Contract Processing; Tools; Change Item’s Store that allows you to set all of the items to be from a different store than yours without changing the store of the contract. It is a win-win situation for you. You get the revenue without any of the work…now the other store might not be too pleased though.
Statement Groups: Some people like to do their statement in batches: A-M and N-Z; however, there are company names that start with something other than letters for example 3M. This caused a problem for people who only did batches so to solve the problem a batch that starts with the letter “A” will also include numbers and batches that end in “Z” will include special characters such as !$%*#$ (no that isn’t cussing).
Purchase Order Edit: An edit will be made on the Purchase Order when
emailing or faxing a PO to a vendor.
Day at a
Glance: Several new columns have been added to Day at a Glance: Bin
Location, Item Price, Sales Rep by Customer, Sales Rep by Job Site, Ordered By,
Picked Up By, Operator Assigned, and Job Site. Hopefully you will enjoy your new
selections.
Customer Dashboard: Sales Rep by Customer, Sales Rep by Job Site, Customer, contract Year, Aging Group, Delivery City, and Delivery Zip columns have been added to Customer Dashboard.
Customer Dashboard Groups: You can group by the new Aging column (0-30,31-60,6190,91-120) as well as Year, Delivery City, and Delivery Zip columns in the Customer Dashboard.
Field Sizes: For those customers that are on SQL Server database, several field sizes have been increased including Delivery Notes, Item Name, Customer Name, as well as currency numbers to $1 billion. We are excited to see which location is the first to get to $1 billion.
Automatic IRO: If multiple items on a contract are marked to create an IRO when closing the contract, the counter person will be asked whether they want a separate IRO for each item or just one IRO for all the items grouped together.
IRO: When creating an IRO for broken items when closing the contract, the Item Key will be displayed as well as the Item Name.
Item Availability Delay: If you have setup an Item Availability Delay for an item, that delay will be added to the start date of a Transfer-In contract so the item isn’t available in the receiving store until after the transfer delay time.
Verified Address: If you change the delivery address via Job Site address or using the Same Address checkbox and you had previously verified the address in Dispatch Center, you will be warned and the verified address will be cleared.
System Edit: A new log has been created to keep track of who is making changes to system tables such as parameters and taxes. Now you will be able to know who messed with your parameters.
Sold Assets: When selling an asset, we keep track of which store sold the item; however, for accounting reporting reasons, you really also want to know who owns the item. So we now store both the selling store and the owning store for every asset sale. By the way, you can tell whether you are an accounting geek or not with this little test. If you said “what” or “who cares” after reading the above change, you are not an accounting geek. But if you found yourself with a big smile on your face, then you are an accountant.
Logistic Contracts: Logistic Contracts are used by Dispatch Center to create a stop or a route for something not on a contract such as lunch stop or pickup a part. The Logistic Contracts will now have their own contract numbering system so they aren’t confused with your normal repair contracts.
Logistic Contracts: You will now be able to create a Logistics contract with
a delivery status.
Close Logistics Tickets: From Dispatch
Center, you will be able to Close or Send-Out a Logistic ticket through a
right-click option without having to go through the contract in Counter
System.
Online Payments: Online Payments were added in last year’s release. It allows you to email the customer a link to pay their contract(s) online. The customer then pays the bill with their credit card through a secure web page and that payment is then imported into your system. To help keep things clear, we have added a new payment method of Online Payment so you can quickly determine where you received the payment.
Contract Format Online Payments: You can now embed a Web Pay Link directly in the PDF version of the contract that you can email to the customer. From the PDF, the customer can click the payment link and be taken directly to the secure web page and then pay his bill.
Contract Format: We have added several new columns to the Contract Format area allowing you to further customize the look of your printed contracts and invoices. The new columns are Each Price, Extended Price, and Discounted Price to include taxes in the printed price.
Tax Liability: Some customers separately keep track of their sales tax liabilities by jurisdiction for example city sales tax, county sales tax, and state sales tax. Under your Tax Table breakout specification, you can now define a liability General Ledger account for each tax jurisdiction. If you don’t define a GL Account number, the posting will continue to go to your general tax liability account.
Called Off Rent: When you call an entire contract Off Rent, the program automatically prompted you for your pickup information; however, things were not so streamlined when you only called part of the items Off Rent. To help forgetful counter people everywhere, the system will now automatically prompt to set the pickup address and if you have separate pickup items setup (items whose keys start with |PKUP), the system will automatically charge the customer for the delivery as well.
Date Out on Deliveries: You have created a reservation with a particular date and time out and a specific delivery date and time. Then you send out the contract for delivery. Party stores for years have enjoyed the separation of Out Date and Event Date, but the poor equipment stores haven’t. To spread the benefits around to all stores, even under a standard reservation, the Out Date for a delivered contract will stay what it was originally set on the contract. Of course for Will Call contracts, the Out Date will update to the day and time that the customer picked up the items.
Annoying Prompt: So some of you have described the prompt “Update Due Back Date” when sending out a delivery as “Annoying” and “Superfluous” (does that mean super flawless?). Well the annoying era is gone. If the contract is a delivery and you Send Out on the day of the delivery, no question is asked and the contract out date and item due back dates are not changed. If the contract is a delivery and you Send Out on a different date than expected, you will be asked if you want to start charging rent from today. If answered Yes, the contract out date and the item due back dates will be updated accordingly.
Day at a Glance Transfer Tab: The Transfer tab in Day at a Glance will now
include resell items if you are showing item details. Of course the rental items
will continue to show as well.
Order Item: The flow of
Order Item from contract has been enhanced. If any of the three preferred
vendors has a pending PO, display all of the PO’s. The counter guy can then
select any of those PO’s to add this item. If they click Cancel, they will then
get a list of the preferred vendors for this item. The counter guy can then
select which vendor to use for the new PO.
Store Transfer Delay: One of the great features of the system is to check availability at the store level or at the company level. This works great unless your stores are quite a distance apart. The system assumes any items not rented could be rented at another store, but what if it takes 2 hours or 2 days to transfer an item between stores? You can now define the time it takes to transfer an item between stores on a store by store basis. For example you could setup Store 1 that it will take 2 hours to Store 2, 8 hours to Store 3, 48 hours to Store 4, and not transferrable from Store 5. Then when computing availability for items at Store 1, it would add 2 hours from any items at Store 2, 8 hours for items at Store 3, and wouldn’t calculate any availability for items at Store 5. By tweaking these numbers, you can get a much more accurate picture of what is available when in a multi-store environment.
Transfer Contracts: For transfer contracts you can change the Due Back Date of the item to set when the item will be available in the receiving store. The duration that has been defined in the Store Transfer Delay will be the default duration, but it can be manually overwritten as well.
Item Availability: When looking at the contract details for a specific store, all items being transferred into that store via Transfer Contracts will be displayed as well.
Special Rates use Item’s Rate Structure: A new parameter has been added to allow special rates to follow the item record’s rate structure. For example, if you had an item that had a rate structure of $100 – 1 day, $150 – 2 days, and $180 – 3 days, setting the special rate of $80 for a day will also update the item rates to be $120 – 2 days, and $148 – days. For your items only have a minimum, day, week, month structure, the parameter will make no difference.
Accumulated Depreciation: Previously the system calculated average accumulated depreciation per item when selling an asset. If the average didn’t equal the actual because of difference purchase costs over time, the depreciation was “trued up” at the end of the month. This method caused much grief for the accountants. To minimize high blood pressure, once the unit is selected, the actual accrued depreciation for that unit’s purchase lot will be computed and recaptured so no end of month entry is necessary.
Task List Report: Contract number and Customer number has been added to the Task List Report. In addition, those new fields are clickable to take you directly to the contract or the customer record.
Transfer Contracts: You can now create a Transfer contract to transfer inventory from a physical store to a Service Truck. Simply setup customer records for your trucks such as “XFER901” and “XFER-902”.
Partial Return: Some people had a great time with partially returning an item and then reopening the newly created line. Whenever you re-open a line, it will set the price and hours back to what it had been before you closed it; however, since the line was new, it would set those to 0. Now if you do that, it will leave those settings at what is was on the partial close. Of course, we are still wondering why you would do that…..
Breakout to 2 Lines: A new option has been added to the Contract Processing screen. When you right click on a line, you will now have the option of “Breakout to 2 Lines”. This option will allow you to take a line with a quantity of 100 for example and break it into two lines, one with quantity of 70 and the other with quantity of 30. This is quite handy if you need to group your items by setup area.
New Payment Methods: You have the ability to create new payment methods through Item Disbursements. Now those payment methods can be available in the Counter System. Under Configuration; Accounting Configuration; Disbursement Items select the Use on Counter System option.
Transfer Contract: A Transfer contract will now automatically select Use Same Address from the Transfer customer’s record so just make sure you set the store’s address in the XFER customer for each store.
Operator Assigned: You can now right click on a contract in Day at a Glance and set the Operator Assigned. This is especially helpful for Work Orders and Repairs to assign the mechanic. You will also be asked whether to send the Assigned Operator notifications. If you answer yes, you can choose the situations that notifications are sent.
Operator Assigned: Under the Notifications tab on a Contract, you can setup notifications for the Operator Assigned. It pulls the default communication method and details from the Operator record.
Operator Assigned: You can now list the Operator Assigned to a contract by turning on the column in Day at a Glance. Then with the Grouping drop down you can group by Operator Assigned so you can have a quick look up to see how many contracts each employee has assigned to them along with the dollar value of those contracts.
Customer’s Task: A new tab has been added to the Customer record that lists all of the current and historical tasks assigned to this customer.
Inter-site Transfer: When creating an inter-site transfer, the Delivery Truck and Pickup Truck values will be cleared to keep the dispatcher from getting confused with the original delivery and pickup.
Waiting on Parts: A mechanic has a lot on their plate without having to remember to update the status on his work orders and repairs contracts. So to help him out, the system will automatically change the contract operation to “Waiting on Parts” whenever he right clicks and selects Order Item. While that is great by itself, there is more! Whenever someone receives the parts for his contract through Purchase Orders, he will automatically be sent a notification of the received part. Now you are probably thinking that the mechanic’s life couldn’t get any better, but wait there is another rabbit in the hat. Whenever all of the items for the contract have been received and are in stock, the contract’s Operation will automatically be flipped to “In Repairs”! And the mechanic, customer, or any other employee waiting for that knowledge can be set to notify on change of Operation and they would be automatically be kept up to date as well.
Customer Damage: A customer damages an item. You create an IRO ticket for the repairs. You then decide it was customer negligence and want to bill the customer. You click on Tools; Bill Customer and everything is great. But wait, your historical repair costs show the repair costs that the customer actually paid. To keep your historical reporting in line, when billing the customer for damage the Repairs contract will be zeroed out.
Dispatch Center: Several new columns have been added to Dispatch Center; Item Name, Current Store, and Line Item Status. These columns will show the item’s name, it’s current store, and the state of the item on a contract, such as ‘out on rent’ or ‘called off rent’, to help facilitate logistical decisions.
Force Pickup Truck on Open: In Version 2015, the new parameter for Force Delivery Truck on Open was a huge hit. New software sales increased by 1,000% and signups for software updates were up a staggering 1,000,000%. So to build on last year’s success, we have added a Force Pickup Truck on Open parameter. Our operators will be standing by the phones waiting for the deluge of orders.
Contract Questions: The number of questions allowed has increased from 16 to 19 and in addition the length of the question has increased to 40 characters long.
Overbooked Screen: You run your Show All Overbooks and it has a lot of items, but you are in the Linen Department. You couldn’t care less about whether a tent is overbooked, but you are still forced to filter through all of the other items. You don’t have to stand for that any more. There is now a Department drop down selection to only show the overbooked items from your department. In addition, there is an option to stop the overbook checking process so that you could go check a different department without having to wait for the one you are on.
Bank Deposit Screen: To streamline the bank deposit process, the screen will now show the Beginning Drawer, Current Cash, Current Checks, Current Card, and Current Debit.
Item Availability: Most people don’t know that you can double click on the item picture in Item Availability to enlarge the picture. Unfortunately it didn’t always display nicely blown up. For those that didn’t know the feature existed, go try it. For people who knew the feature existed but were upset that the ratio wasn’t right, go try it again.
Event Reservation: The Event Reservation Date entry screen has been revamped to always show the calendars to easily see the surrounding days. In addition the event times are now drop downs to easily select a time with your mouse.
Operator Assigned: So you already read about assigning an Operator to a contract. Well we did even better than that. You can assign an Operator to a customer! If you have an employee that you always want to handle the customer’s business, then assign them to the customer.
Discount Table: Under Job Sites and Venues you can define a lot of things. Now you can also assign a Discount Table. If you have special discounts that always apply to a particular venue, you no longer have to try to remember to set it. You can set a Discount Table for each Venue. And remember that with the Discount Table you can give different discounts for each Item Category.
Job Site/Venue: You can set an employee to be the default Operator Assigned for a particular Job Site.
Deliveries Per Day: So business is great, but sometimes that can be bad. If your counter guys accepted too many deliveries or pickups in a day, you may not be able to deliver on the promises. There are new parameters for Max Deliveries per Day and Max Pickups per Day. In addition, under Security you can set the password level required to override that maximum number for times you can squeeze in just one more delivery.
Epicor Reconcile Report: A new report for Epicor integration has been added to the End of Day Menu.
Tax Jurisdiction: When doing Auto Continuation Billing automatically update the tax jurisdiction to the replacement tax jurisdiction when the old jurisdiction has expired.
Work Order Items: You sold a telehandler to a customer and now the customer wants you to do some maintenance on it. It used to be a bit of a pain to get everything setup the first time, but all of that has changed. When creating a Work Order, on the Work Order Item selection screen you have the option of selecting Customer History. This will show all of the items this customer has previously purchased from you. Simply select the telehandler and the Work Order Item will be created with the serial number, model number, model year, manufacturer, and purchase date. Nothing left to do except to do the maintenance.
Work Order Items: On the Work Order Item selection screen, the Serial Number and Model Number will now be displayed.
Repairs: The IRO and IMO features have this awesome feature that will automatically charge your purchase cost plus extra charges for any consumable items used in a repair. However, there are times that you might not want to charge that amount. Labor as an example you might want to bill differently. To accomplish this, you can now set special rates for your Repairs customers. The special rate will override the purchase cost of the item.
Item Transaction History: The Venue/Job Site info has been added to the history listing for an item. In addition the screen now has grouping options where the data can be grouped by Customer, Status, Contract Info, or Venue/Job Site.
AEMP Integration: With AEMP integration you can automatically update all your items’ meter readings as well as location. We have added a couple of tools to troubleshoot any issues that might arise. The View button allows you to view the raw import from each vendor’s download. There is a second button that has been added that shows if there is an item not linked to a GPS unit.
Change Vendors: You will now be allowed to change a vendor on an
Open PO.
Void PO: Previously you could not void a
pending PO which caused much grief when a counter guy created pending PO’s when
he shouldn’t have. Now you will be able to simply void the offending PO without
having to approve it first.
AR Manager: You can create a Call Log directly in AR Manager. You can also link out to the Customer Dashboard to interact with all of the customer’s contracts.
AR Manager-Operator Assigned: You can now assign an operator to a particular account in AR Manager. This allows you to set the person who is in charge of contacting the customer for payments. You can sort by Operator Assigned so you can see all of the customers that you need to work.
AR Manager-Follow Up: A new feature has been added to AR Manager for follow up dates. When making a call, you have the option to set the date of the next reminder. Then when you open up AR Manager, you will see each customer and whether they are past due (red) or need a call in the future (green). When all of your customer’s follow up status is green, you are done.
Security: The current security model is based on 6 levels of passwords. Because of its rigidness you might not be able to get the granularity that you desire. For example, a person given the Assistant Manager password so they can override price changes, might also have rights to allow a credit hold customer. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem, but when you have a special case, you want to handle for that. So to give you more power (more power, give me more power!), we have redesigned the Security structure. With the new design, you can define access to a feature by Company, Store, Employee Group, or Employee. For example, this allows you to set the Company to have no access, but you can individually define a couple of employees that have access. The new security structure has been added to a couple of areas such as Purchase Orders, Vendor, and Venues.
Purchase Order Security: PO Security has been enhanced to be able to define access to the specific employee level. You can define things such as who can Clone, Void, or Modify a PO. You can also define who can Approve a PO, Modify a Vendor record, and Modify an Item record.
Vendor Security: With the new Vendor Security, you can define what areas of the Vendor record an employee or group can modify such as the Vendor Address, Account info, Contact info, and Products. Also you can define who can do certain functions such as Delete and Merge vendors.
Job Site/Venue Security: With the new Venue Security, you can define who can edit the information in each tab also who can view Income History or set Special Rates.
Delivery by the Mile: Many of you probably didn’t know that you could have an item with a key of “|MILE” that will ask you how many miles for the delivery and charge appropriately. Well now that has been enhanced. You can put the minimum delivery charge in the Retail Price field. So if you charge $1 per mile with a $50 minimum, put $50 in the Retail Price and $1 in the Sales Price. For anything under 50 miles, it will automatically charge $50 and anything over will charge at $1 per mile.
Xero: Integration with Xero accounting package has been
added.
Transaction Lookup: New columns for Delivery
City and Delivery Zip have been added to the Transaction Lookup
screen.
Item Transaction History: A grouping option has been added to the Item Transaction History grid that allows for grouping by month or year.
Related Transactions: You are modifying the third month of a continued contract and you want to know what was billed on the second month. Get out your pen and write down the contract number and then type that into a new contract lookup screen. You have told us that there has to be a better way. Well now there is. Simply click on the Related Transactions option under the Reports menu on the Contract Processing Screen. This will list all of the contracts that are associated with this contract such as every continued contract. By clicking the related transaction in the list, you will be taken to that contract. In addition, you will see any service contracts related, any repairs, any subrentals, and even any related Purchase Orders.
Related Transactions: When in the Transaction Search Screen, you can right click on a contract and select “Related Contracts”. All of the related transactions will be displayed.
Notifications: A new Notification has been added for Refund on Closed Contract. You can set the minimum refund amount before you are notified. This is great to keep an eye on employees refunding money from the cash drawer.
Contact Lookup: It was frustrating when adding a contact’s detail information on the Job Site/Venue screen that you had to go back to the customer’s record to get the information. Now you will be able to select a Customer’s Contact directly from the Job Site/Venue Edit screen without having to retype the info.
Certifications: It is always difficult to remember when an employee needs to be recertified. Unfortunately many times it is the OSHA inspector that lets you know that a certification has lapsed. Now you can keep track of all your employee certifications. Under the employee listing there is a new tab for Certifications. Enter the certification type, date, issuer, and expiration date. The next time OSHA stops by, you will be ready.
Quote Number: When converting a quote to a reservation, the quote number will be stored with the reservation so that you can use the Related Contract button to see the original quote or if you are on the quote, you would see the reservation contract.
Email GL Entries: Your accountant works remotely and you want them to enter your GL entries each day. Short of letting them have access to your server, you were out of options. We have added an email address field that will automatically email the GL entries file at the end of each day. Your accountant can simply save the file on her computer and import it directly into the GL.
Round Hours: We have previously added the ability to round overtime up to the next full day. Now we have added a parameter that allows for overtime to be rounded up to the next full hour so your billing would be 4 hours if the customer had the item for 3 hours and 2 minutes (minus any grace period of course).
Inventory Transfer: For those customers that utilize Service Trucks or Warehouses, it was a pain to transfer inventory from a store into the Warehouse. Well now you can transfer inventory from Service Truck to Service Truck and Service Truck back to Store. This can be done either through a Transfer contract or directly through Item Availability.
Customer Balance: New columns for Delivery City and Delivery Zip have been added to the Customer Balance screen.
Dispatch Center: When a user sorts a column, the system will now include a secondary sort on contract column to ensure line items for each contract stay together.
Closed Date: If you select a date that the store is closed for a Delivery or Pickup, you will get a warning message popup.
Paper Size: The reports have been redesigned to allow the printer driver to define the paper size. This is helpful if you have legal size paper or if you live in a country that uses non-standard sizes (also known as standard sizes in other countries).
Australian Postal Code: Australians were jealous of the time saving feature of City/State lookup by Postal Code. Well you no longer need to be green with envy; you now have the same capability.
Day at a Glance Overview: Many of you balked at the new Overview Tab on Day at a Glance. Some just didn’t like change. Some didn’t like it coming up first. And some didn’t like it because it was slow on their server. We have now solved all of those problems, except for the guy that just doesn’t like change. In fact we made it worse for that guy since there is now more change. We have increased the speed of display dramatically for slower servers. So if that is the reason you turned it off, you might try turning it on again. It really is a great snapshot to show you the amount of work you have coming up for the next 7 days. It can give you a heads up that you need to have extra help this coming Friday because there are 120 reservations going out.
Payment Receipt: We have added a new special field for the Payment Receipt that allows you to embed the Customer’s Name in the email letter. Just add {CustomerName} where you want in the default Receipt Message so your customer’s name will always print there.
Rate Variance Report: The Rate Variance Report can now be grouped by Customer Name or Salesman.
PO Print Out: The item’s long name description has been added as a column option for PO print out.
Customer Heard Report: The Customer Heard Report has been redone to display the results in an easy to read crosstab grid format.
Contract Printing: The Item Web Link will now support multi-branded locations.
Contract Printing: If you are printing the rate structures below the
items on a contract, it will no long show periods that are not a complete day
(except those that are less than a day <24).
Sales Tax
Report: It is never ending the ways that states and cities come up with
for businesses to pay them money. We can’t solve that problem, but we can make
the reporting to them easier. We have added a Taxing Authority to the Tax
Jurisdiction and the Sales Tax reports can now group by that field. So say you
do business in a couple of states, you could put the state name in the Taxing
Authority. Then when you print your Sales Tax report grouped by Taxing
Authority, all of the taxes for each state will be grouped together.
Labor History Report: A new report has been added to Analysis; Inventory Analysis that shows labor billed per day.
Chart of Accounts: You can now print out the listing of all store’s GL Account numbers along with Item Categories’ account number so in one place you can make sure you have all the correct GL numbers. This report is printed from the Account Number edit screen.
Dispatch Center: Items with zero quantity that were recently removed such as headers will no longer show in contract line item detail screen.
Suppress Fulfillment - Allows you to suppress items, so it does not show in the fulfillment process. This is useful for items like delivery, discount items, coupon items, or items that are not touched by the operation.
Repairs – The IRO and IMO have a feature that willl automatically charge your purchase cost plus extra charges for any consumable items used in a repair. However, there are times that you might not want to charge that amount. Labor as an example you might want to bill differently. To accomplish this, you can now set special rates fro your Repair customers. The special rate will override the purchase cost of the item.
Mobile WorkForce
Tablets: While the phones are great, unless you have a Samsung Note 27, the display is small. You can only fit so much info on 4 inches. Now you can pull out your tablet for use with Mobile WorkForce. The screen will automatically be sized to fit the amount of real estate you have available. This will make your inventory count or route details much easier on the eyes.
Redesign: All of the screens have been redesigned to give a more aesthetically pleasing experience. The softer colors will decrease testosterone levels and lead to fewer arguments and better customer service.
Dispatcher’s Routes: The Dispatch employee who created the route will see those routes on WorkForce without having to assign themselves as a driver or crew. This allows for easy access to the status of each route while away from the warm glow of the Dispatch Center itself.
Result Filters on Search: The Show/Hide filter buttons display options to refine your Contract, Customer, and Item searches by Item Type, Contract Status, Salesperson, Customer Type, etc. Your selections are saved to your device so that the next time you search these filters will be applied.
Partial Search: Searching for Serial Number or part
number perform a ‘contains’ style search. (Name, Alias, and barcode already did
this style search). A search for ‘55’ will find XX55XX and 55XXX and XXX55.
Previously it would only find 55XXX.
International Date Format: If your
location uses year-month-day, day-month-year, or anything else that is not good
old USA month-day-year then the WorkForce app will display date and time values
in your region’s format.
Availability: When you search for inventory you will see the
current availability displayed in the In and Out columns. This gives salespeople
an easy way to peek at what’s available when they are visiting job sites. This
same information is displayed when a specific item record is viewed. Values are
shown with a Red cell when less than 1 remains In, otherwise the cell will be
Green. This availability data is for the current day and updated every 5 minutes
from your server by default.
More Color: We have added
the familiar colors you know and love from Counter System and File Maintenance.
Items and special fields are now their appropriate red, green, yellow, or gray
colors.
Fulfillment: We have added depth to the fulfillment process to further encapsulate the life-cycle of a contract by adding Loading and Transport options. Each Fulfillment ‘in/out’ process gathers item counts, comments, timestamps, who performed the action, and meter/fuel readings (when applicable). This tracks the many phases of each order in real-time while showing exceptions such as over/under or changes to the contract itself.
Prep out: Inventory is pulled, inspected, and staged/packaged for an order. ·
Loading out: Prepped inventory is placed on a delivery vehicle. ·
Transport out (delivered): Inventory is unloaded at the customer jobsite/venue. ·
Transport in (picked up): Inventory is collected from the jobsite/venue. ·
Loading in: Inventory is placed on a vehicle for return. ·
Prep in: Inventory is inspected, cleaned, and placed back in the warehouse. ·
Will - Call out: Inventory is given directly to the customer. ·
Will - Call in: Inventory is returned directly by customer.
Dispatch Center
Delivery Logistics Tickets: Allows user
to create logistics with a delivery status.
Set contract for Delivery or Pickup: Allow user to toggle delivery/pickup on or off from within Dispatch Center instead of requiring the contract be opened in Counter System.
Handle date format yyyy-mm-dd: Isolate and resolve display and sort issues resulting from previously unsupported date format.
Item Current Store code and name column: These columns allow the user to see what store an item is currently at by name or store code.
Line Item status: Allow user to see what state an item on a contract is currently in, such as ‘called off rent’ or “hold for count”.
Persistent Grid Column Filters: Allow user to maintain sub filters on columns between Dispatch changes such as adding a contract to a trip/truck. When filters are applied the ‘Clear filters’ button appears to alert the user and allow an easy mechanism to remove the current filters.
Include MM/DD in Trip Dates on Date Range Views: Better sorting and allows the user to quickly distinguish old/future days from the current week’s days.
Close Logistics Tickets: Allow user to close logistics tickets by right-click option without opening Counter System.
Send-out Logistics Tickets: Allow user to send-out delivery logistics tickets via right-click option opening without Counter System.
Hide 0 quantity items: Items with zero quantity that were recently removed
such as headers will no longer show in contract line item detail screen nor the
main screen when ‘show items’ is enabled.
Always group by contract:
When a user sorts a column we will include a secondary sort on contract column
to ensure lines stay together by contract.
Delivery Truck Refresh: the program will refresh the out-of-service, new trucks, and inactivated trucks during other data refreshes. This ensures any changes to your delivery truck fleet are immediately visible to other dispatchers. Previously this was only refreshed at program launch, thus a broken truck would look available until someone closed and re-opened the program.
Out-of-service by IRO: This allows you to put a usage item on an Internal Repair Order (IRO) that will automatically mark its linked Delivery Truck out of service until the IRO is closed. You can open or close the IRO from the Truck Details screen in Dispatch. You can create a usage type rental item to track your delivery trucks. The Truck and Item records are linked by the item number in Program Menu’s Configuration. You can also create maintenance schedules on the usage item to handle things like renewing registration or changing the oil in File Maintenance.
Send-out all: There is an option on the right-click of a route that will cycle through all of that route’s reservation contracts and initiate the Send-out via Counter System. If you accidentally clicked the wrong route, as each contract is processed, the Dispatch Center will give you a few seconds to cancel before opening the next contract in Counter.
Disable Multi-Match Moving: When there are a group of contracts for the same location, time, and stop type, the Dispatch Center automatically moves them as a group to keep those stops together. Typically this is exactly what you want, but if you want to manually dictate the position you can now uncheck the “No Grouping” option on the scheduling form as needed.
Group Notify Dispatchers: By default the Dispatch notifications for the
dispatcher go to the employee who created the route or was manually assigned as
the dispatcher. Now you can override this to notify a group of dispatchers
instead.
Print-all Packets: Trees beware, but you can print from the
all-trucks, store, or truck-type nodes. This will generate all of the print jobs
without requiring you to go through each route one at a time.
Print original contract along with service contracts: When you print a packet for a route containing service contracts, you will have an option to include the original contract as well. This works like the print attachment and instruction options.
Route Filters: The main grid can now be filtered by contract status, contract operation, route status, and stop status.
View Attachments: In the Edit Stop Details screen, there is now a dropdown list of the contract’s attachments. You can click to view them as needed.
Custom Route Packet sheets: You can maintain a list of special documents to be included with a route packet. These will print first when a packet is generated.
Transfers Tab: A new tab is on the main grid that only contains transfer contracts.
Auto Close L-tickets: If you enable this option, after 3 days any open standard L-ticket will be closed automatically.
Color Sync: The ‘contract’ cell now matches Day at a Glance’s color scheme. A reservation will always be yellow until it is sent out and turns green and then is closed and turns red. The ‘d/p state cell’ will always be yellow for a delivery and green for a pickup. Previously the ‘contract’ cell followed the ‘d/p state’ cell. The end result is two-fold: 1. Consistent behavior with the rest of our apps. 2. When planning a future date, you can quickly distinguish the contract’s state from the stop’s state.
Who Locked/Unlocked: A transaction edit will be written when the lock/unlock contracts feature is used within the Dispatch Center. This way you know what dispatcher to reward.
Who Moved to Next Business Day: A transaction edit will be written when the move contracts feature is used within the Dispatch Center. This way you know what dispatcher to consult.
Transfer to Same Address: If no delivery address is entered in a Transfer contract (and why would you since you know where that other store is), the program will now automatically use the address data from the special ‘Xfer’ customer record.
Multiple instances: You can now have more than one Dispatch application open per user. This allows you to edit many routes at once