Windows Client 8.6.3

11/07/2013

Overview of the Most Notable Changes

Chronicle 8.6.3 is a maintenance release, that is, it’s devoted to minor improvements and bug fixes. Our main improvements were in these areas:

Bonus Manager: We’ve added the ability to do bonus calculations for a single rule or department, fixed a number of calculation issues, added the ability to copy rules, and made a number of other setup changes to make the rule creation clearer and easier.

Documents: We’ve continued improving the documents screen to make it easier and more efficient. We’ve made many layout improvements, added the ability to filter documents on the left and edit document properties on the right, and added significant customization options. You can now require custom docs on a job, and produce custom pdf files. We've made various other minor document improvements.

Job Manager: We’ve added activity views that include completed jobs to both the activity summary and activity detail reports to help you evaluate past performance for any period of time rather than just reviewing current jobs. The Activity Summary report now also has an on-time % column to help you better evaluate where your biggest problems are.

Labor: We’ve added Current Week and Past Week filters to the labor summary report, improved labor audit logging, and fixed an error that sometimes occurred when moving labor from one job/department/activity to another.

Preparations for Dashboards and New Calendar: The next release of Chronicle will have a completely rewritten calendar with many new features. It will also have customizable dashboards that provide customizable summaries of key business statistics, including period-over-period reporting and graphical displays. While you can’t see these new features in this version, this version contains many behind the scenes changes to prepare for these new features.

Reports:  We've added buttons to the Reports Panel to make it easier to get to all of the main reports in Chronicle.

Miscellaneous: We’ve made a variety of other changes and improvements including changes to login, emailing calendar events, collections manager fixes, improved form position saving, and less waiting while journals are sent.

Bonus Manager

The Bonus Manager has been a public beta feature, meaning this feature is a test version available for general use. We believe that it works, but as a test version, it may have more issues and bugs than we’d expect to find elsewhere. It will remain a beta feature until Chronicle 8.7.

After you open the Bonus Manager, it’s now shown in the Windows Taskbar to make it easier to return to.

Bonus Calculations

Ability to run bonus calculations for a single rule or a single department: You can now evaluate bonuses for a single rule or department. This can save time if you have many rules or if you only have responsibility for a single department.

Added new columns to the calculation report and added customization preferences that determine whether these columns are visible:

Invoice Minus Credit Memo & Taxes

Credit Memo

Final Invoice Date

Final Payment Date

Days Between Final Invoice and Payment

Calculation Improvements:

• Credit memos were not deducted from the invoice amounts before doing bonus calculation. We’ve corrected this.
• Bonuses for hourly employees are divided up based on the amount for each employee earned on a job. For example, if Sam earned $150 on a job and Will earned $100, Sam would get 3/5 of the hourly bonus and Will would get 2/5. Previously, rounding could create situations where slightly less than 100% of the  bonus was given out. We’ve made the calculations more precise to improve this.
• If settings indicate that an employee is ineligible or gets less than 100% of the bonus, we ignored this and gave the employee a full bonus anyway: We’ve fixed this.
• For hourly rules based on labor rate with sub-materials deducted:. Sub/material costs were deducted twice for this rule only, resulting in slightly lower bonuses for jobs with sub/material expenses.
• Corrected multiple bonuses if multiple depts when calculating for the job as a whole: Amounts were correct but were incorrectly broken down by dept.
• When calculating by job rather than dept, some jobs incorrectly showed blank labor: Problem was for jobs that had a start date before the bonus program started but some dept that started after that date. Since this is for job bonuses, jobs that started before the start date should be excluded even if some dept started later, so fixed this by eliminating these jobs from the report.

Bonus Setup

Ability to Duplicate an Existing Rule: New button on the rules tab creates a new rule based on the highlighted rule so you can create a similar rule without having to re-enter everything.

New setting determines when ineligible employees have bonuses adjusted: If an employee's that has a reduced bonus% has these two options: calculate the amount the employee would have gotten, and adjust it in the "Override" column (this is the default setting) and lower the calculated bonus amount without showing what the employee would have gotten. We recommend the default setting of calculating the bonus and then offsetting it in the override column since this shows the employees what they would have gotten and gives employees an incentive to meet the conditions for getting the bonus.

Access to person journal from employee setup: Right-click menu lets you open the employee file and/or employee journal.

Formatting, wording changes, new headings, and changed order of entries on the rule screen to improve clarity

When editing an existing rule based on labor %, Allow Negative Bonuses was incorrectly checked, and the screen reported conflicts in rates even when there were none: We’ve fixed this.

Undo Posted Bonus

You are able to undo a posted bonus if user incorrectly posted a bonus and needs to undo it. On the Approved Bonuses report right click on the posted bonus and select “undo post for this item”. We also added a new security context to control whether a user can undo the posting of a bonus: COMMISSIONREPORTUNDOPOST.

Documents

We’ve been making ongoing improvements to the documents screen to make it more efficient and easier to use. We’ve continued those changes in this release:

We’ve simplified screen layout and buttons, and renamed several column headings and buttons for consistency and clarity.

Filters on left can now single out departments for a department, deleted documents, etc.

You can now edit document properties on the right rather than doing this through menus or another screen.

We've added a missing docs section to the screen. Double-click any missing requirement in this list to add that document.

Ability to require additional docs on a job: You can add a doc set or an individual doc to a job's requirements. For example, if you need an Itel report on one job but if this isn’t a requirement for all jobs, you can now go to that one job and specify that document as requirement.

We've added a right-click menu to doc list to give useful shortcuts.

Ability to customize docs screen: You get to the customization options through the tools menu or the right-click menu. These preferences all auto-save.

• Choose which columns to show
• Choose whether the list is sorted alphabetically or by date added
• toggle bolding of defined docs and whether to show doc count and storage,
• Control position of missing docs section.
• Control whether doc status and other less-used entries are visible
• We now save form and column positions

Save to File Improvements: We’ve added Save to File to the right-click menu, got rid of all CAPS in the file name, and correctly use the name you provide rather than reverting to the original name. We’ve also eliminated unnecessary confirmations.

Documents now shows in the Windows Taskbar to make it easier to return to.

Image viewer now minimizes while saving documents: Once you close a set of images, rather than showing a progress bar as we save each image, the image viewer minimizes to let you go on with other work.

Acrobat Document Creation: Create Acrobat button added that lets user put selected documents, etc. into a pdf file. Requires .pdf print driver to be set up on server.

We've made some speed improvements in loading the screen.

Documents list in Job file now is accessible for newly created job, and refreshes correctly with F5.

Job Manager

New Activity View that includes Completed jobs: Activity Summary and Activity Detail views now have the ability to either show jobs in progress (like current active view), or to show jobs in a date range (which includes both completed and active jobs, but not terminated). Saving a report saves these conditions. Turned on the completed activities column in the summary view since this is more relevant now that we’re reviewing completed jobs.

Activity Summary completed and on-time % columns added: The Activity Summary report now has an on-time percent column and a Complete column; there are particularly useful when evaluating activities for a historical period rather than active activities.

Enabled help w/ F1 key.

Several other minor job manager fixes.

Added Print Button to Job Manager

Labor

Labor Summary: filter for current week and past week added.

Audit Logs improvements: We’ve added audit log entries for several setting changes that lacked them. We’ve also made audit logs clearer: the log for new labor now shows the job number, and the audit log for edits to labor value shows job number and employee name (previously these only had the customer name).

Intermittent Error Moving Labor from one job/dept/activity to another: If labor detail was filtered and a change caused labor to no longer occur in the current view (e.g. labor was limited to one job and labor was moved to a new job, or labor was limited to one dept/activity and labor was changed to a different dept/activity, and error message would have occurred and the labor would not have moved. We’ve fixed this.

Reports List

Short-cut buttons to main report areas: Added buttons for Job Manager, Marketing, Profitability, Labor, Graphs, Trends, Collections, and Bonus to Reports panel to make this an easy place to get to all of the main reports in Chronicle. This makes the reports section more useful even to those who have no saved reports or no saved reports of a particular type.

Miscellaneous

Login: If you type an invalid password when logging into Chronicle, we now return you to the login screen instead of closing the program.

Form Position Saving: We Found certain contexts where form position didn’t save after it was dragged to a new position; we’ve fixed this.

Error associating organization to person when added from locate screen: If you add a person from the locate dialog, you get an error if you try to associate that person with an organization when on the Add Person screen. we've fixed this.

Emailing calendar used RTF format in the message body: Changed this so that HTML is used; this displays the message more correctly on most mobile devices.

Job: Added Cancel button to progress dialog when loading job file. Added in 2.0.2.8.

Panel Setup: Fixed a problem that prevented the editing of a panel.

Labor Manager:

• Labor import: start/end time edits now allow 1 minute increments
• Add labor screen: When adding in labor, the tab key moves you to the next entry; shift-tab keys move you backwards.
• Fixed error when typing time to change final minute or am/pm, then time would incorrectly revert to 7:00 AM

Help: Contact support page: Eliminated script error

Financial Tab: Fixed a bug where employees with a context too low to see financial info could see some financial info on the financial tab.

Collections Manager:

• Gave more space to section for entering new notes: In response to customer request, we changed the layout to give more space to the update/notes section for wider screens.
• Errors if user tries to load a second time while the form is being created: Can only happen first time collections manager is loaded after starting Chronicle.  Will result in two (or possible three if you’re really quick) copies of collection manager window. Could also result in SQL error (variant has wrong # of elements) or unable to focus error. You may not be able to close the second window. Fixed in ChronReportsLibrary 1.1.4.11.
• Search entry resizes (and can even disappear) if user resizes collections window: Fixed in ChronReportsLibrary 1.1.4.11.
• Search entry can scramble letters, depending on user’s typing speed: For example, if user types “Smith” this could have come out as “mithS” or other similar misordering. Fixed in ChronReportsLibrary 1.1.4.12.
• No journals show if user chooses “No Limit” for max number of journals: Fixed.
• '' is not a valid date and time -> EConvertError on entering the collections manager if the user has the old accounting bridge. We fixed this

Journal Sending No longer makes you watch the progress bar: When an email/journal is sending to multiple recipients, you used to see an occasionally slow progress bar while the journals sent. Once you click send, the journal now minimizes so you can go on with your other work.

Journal and Journal History: Increased privacy called for by a BCC recipient list. Now only security level 7 can see who they are or the person who sent the transmission.

Person Module:

• Removed Calendar Preferences: In preparation for the new calendar (coming in the next release of Chronicle) which has its own preferences, we’ve removed the calendar preferences for employees from the person module to prevent conflicting preference settings.
• Phone/Email Edit: Fixed a problem where the edit screen came up behind the window you were working in.

Quick Journal:

• Spell check button added: This checks both subject and body with word style spell-check box. Language option defaults to English but lets user check in French or Spanish.
• When adding a quick journal based on a rule, the subject was incorrectly showing, this is now fixed.

Setup: Misc tab, spelling settings added: US vs Canadian English

Reports List: Short-cut buttons to main report areas: Added buttons for Job Manager, Marketing, Profitability, Labor, Graphs, Trends, Collections, and Bonus to Reports panel to make this an easy place to get to all of the main reports in Chronicle. This makes the reports section more useful even to those who have no saved reports or no saved reports of a particular type.