Welcome to the new year. I trust everyone had an excellent Xmas and holiday season, I certainly did. Apologies for the delay in getting a new article published but it has been hard to get back into a work mindset after a nice and lengthy holiday!!
2009 certainly promises to be an challenging year from a business viewpoint. In fact, the financial crisis is nothing like I have seen in my life time and I suspect this is the case for the majority of people. Governments reaction to all this with the traditional Keynesian response of pushing public funds into the private sector to stimulate demand, using both monetary policy and budget deficits, but does this economic theory hold true today? For myself, I could never have imagined a position where the entire car industry in the US could have self destructed (and where it still may) and most commentators are saying that it will get worse before it gets better.
The legal profession, and IP law firms in particular, have always been very recession resilient. The nature of the work changes but the volume and the margin remain. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case this time around.
In any case, the market will turn around at some stage in the future and growth will return, if for no other reason than we keep populating the planet. Of course, the $64 million question is how long it will take but, once again, most commentators can’t see this happening for the next 12 months at the earliest.
So what should a firm be doing in this uncertain environment? My general view is that this year is a great opportunity to be preparing the business for when the growth returns, focusing on operational efficiency, business development and optimizing investments already made.
At this point I'll take a caveat and skip the basic financial stuff where I think you need to be very, very confident to be extending any debt facilities and leave that for another forum. Equally, major investment needs to have a quick return guaranteed. Significant investment that has a return in 1, 2 or 3 years time would need to be considered very carefully.
So how can Inprotech help?
Operational efficiency is the area that I would be focusing on first. I’ll write a future article about how the product can help with business development and marketing.
The product itself has been designed with excellent automation facilities that can both lower the cost of a performing a transaction while improving quality. Look at reviewing the workflow and processes around your higher volume transactions. For example, if a major part of your work is filing locally or PCT national phase entry, look at fine tuning these processes. When was the last time these workflows were looked at? Are all the steps still necessary, can they be deleted or consolidated? Removing 1, 2 or 3 steps in a highly used process can release a lot of clerical and/or professional time with affecting margin.
Do you do a lot of European Patent, CTM or Madrid applications? Have you made effective use of the automatic copy facility for creating national phase or related removal/opposition cases?
Then the renewals process. Can this be improved and streamlined? For foreign renewals can you make use of the fees & charges module to automatically calculate and manage estimated charges for reminder letters (even if you are not using the Billing module – I must write an article on this)? Is the reminder letter process efficient and effective? Do you, for example, make use of the multi case reminder letter approach and bulk instructions receipt for those clients that require reminding in this fashion or is there an expensive manual process in place that manages this? Are you using standing instructions to handle auto renew processing and differing reminder letter numbers and frequency for those clients that request processes outside of the norm? Can the substitute letter functionality be used for those clients that require correspondence in a different format?
Overall, the system has a lot of power in this area and renewals is one “department” that should be highly automated from both a productivity and risk management perspective.
Next area to look at are letter templates. A simple SQL query on the database can return the list of letters produced over the last 12 months so that you can isolate the letters most used. Take the top 10 or 20 or whatever is appropriate. Is there any manual intervention involved to produce the final version of these letters that could be removed by a slight modification to the file take on or data capture process thereby allowing data to be captured and hence included in the letter automatically rather than manually. A simple change to a highly used document template could bring high return at low cost.
Please note that I am not suggesting a review of all templates, just the ones that are highly used. Remember the Pareto 80/20 rule. 80% of the effort is generated by 20% of the tasks. Focus on this 20%.
A similar thing should be done with letter templates that are created on an ad hoc basis through the PassThru process. Simple changes to highly used letters could bring big return. Question why things are done in a certain way. Just because they have always been done that way doesn’t mean that it still needs to be.
Another thing to consider is maybe using the Fees List program for lodgement processing if you have a spreadsheet, Word-based or manual process. This program can be used standalone without the need to use the charge generation. Simply set up the Fee Types and create the lodgement list with the program by selecting the case and the lodgement type. The integration will bring in the relevant case details without the need for re-typing and potential errors. If you want to go a bit more advanced the system can be set up to calculate the official fee but I am not sure that the benefits in doing this outweigh the set up effort so I would probably suggest just entering the amount manually.
I would also be looking at the name & address management process. Take on of new clients is often an area that causes issues and improvements and tightening of control here can bring big productivity gains right through the process. Ask yourself whether control should be centralized? Can the name copy facility be used to assist with getting some of the base data right? Have the country defaults been set up appropriately? Have you implemented audit trails so that issues can be tracked down and investigated to iron out issues as they occur?
Are the facilities for credit control being used effectively? If you are not using Billing and the Accounts modules then the Restrictions functionality is the main assistant here but the Correspondence and Billing Instructions fields could be used to warning on outstanding debt. Of course you would have to weigh up the effort required to keep this up to date but, depending upon your accounts module, maybe some simple SQL could be built to make this a process that doesn’t require that much manual intervention.
If you have Billing maybe putting a budget against a case and monitoring against it can be of assistance in managing your financial exposure to clients. You can also use Billing to collect, use and monitor prepaid funds even if you don’t have Accounts Receivable. If you are using Accounts Receivable are you making use of credit limit monitoring?
If you have Billing and are not using Fees & Charges then you can get big benefits. I know the set up is counter intuitive and there can be a bit of maintenance involved but if you can work through this and understand the concepts there is a lot of power there that can lead to productivity and control improvements. Once more I would look at initially implementing with the high transaction load areas such as renewals, filing applications, examination requests and for areas that you suspect fees are slipping through the cracks with the manual process.
Of course, I am probably preaching to the converted here but hopefully there may be one or two areas to explore. It always difficult to be generic with these types of things. When you know the specifics of customer it is much easier!!
In any case, the goal should be to fine tune, to improve, to build greater productivity & quality that means your systems are as effective as possible, both for the short term return and to be ready for growth when it returns.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Inprotech: Names Maintenance for Accounts
It is possible to created a restricted access version of the Names program so, if you are using the accounting modules, the accounts department can be given access to update name, address and accounting details related to a customer.
Release 4 added in the Supplier tab to this functionality and hence it made it potentially useful for those clients using Accounts Payable and the fully integrated accounting suite. To give it a go set a new application in Security for the Names executable using the parameter –NACCOUNTS. It’s quite nice from an accounts viewpoint in that all the extraneous tabs disappear and the relevant information is all there, easy viewable. The programs look so much easier to use when they have tabs that are all contained in the one screen. Don’t know why, it’s just neater!
One area that this restricted version doesn’t cover however is the Staff Responsible tab. So if the accounts department is adding these details so that the aged debtors report can be produced by attorney responsible then you still need to give them access to the full program.
Release 4 added in the Supplier tab to this functionality and hence it made it potentially useful for those clients using Accounts Payable and the fully integrated accounting suite. To give it a go set a new application in Security for the Names executable using the parameter –NACCOUNTS. It’s quite nice from an accounts viewpoint in that all the extraneous tabs disappear and the relevant information is all there, easy viewable. The programs look so much easier to use when they have tabs that are all contained in the one screen. Don’t know why, it’s just neater!
One area that this restricted version doesn’t cover however is the Staff Responsible tab. So if the accounts department is adding these details so that the aged debtors report can be produced by attorney responsible then you still need to give them access to the full program.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Inprotech: Coding Tax for the BAS
Setting up tax codes in the system to be able to easily get auditable totals for the Australian tax office’s Business Activity Statement (BAS) it not that straight forward.
The system comes with a system used tax exempt category but if you use this invoices (both sales or purchases) that are marked as Exempt do not appear on the tax proof listings and hence you can’t get the totals of tax free sales and purchases that are required for the statement. Equally, using just one exempt tax code for GST means that deriving total export sales has to be a manual exercise. The same is true for capital expenditure purchases but as law firms typically don’t do much of this it is less of an issue.
The way to get around this is to set up two new tax codes, Exempt (Local) and Exempt (Overseas), both with a zero percentage taxation rate. The system provided exempt rate should be not be used. Unfortunately, it can’t be deleted so I would recommend renaming it to something obvious like “Do not use”.
Once this is done set up the WIP codes to be used by the system to be either GST or Exempt (Local), depending upon the nature of the charge. Typically Official Fees and Foreign Associates charges should be Exempt (Local) although there may be other charges, such as international couriers, that may also be exempt of tax.
Local clients should then have their tax code set to blank so that the tax coding will be picked up from the WIP items.
Foreign clients should be set to Exempt (Overseas). Billing will use this tax code to calculate the tax, overriding the tax code recorded WIP codes, and report the revenues under this category so total export sales can be derived.
Local suppliers need to have their tax code set to GST and the tax treatment should be inclusive or exclusive as applicable.
IP Australia is a special supplier however and needs to be set to Exempt (Local) and Tax Inclusive. The tax treatment of Tax Not Applicable, even though it seems obvious to use that one, should not be used as this means that any invoices will not be recorded on the Tax Proof Listing. The default expense account also needs to be set to an account that doesn’t require disbursement to WIP so that Lodgement/Fees Lists can now be entered without being forced to disbursements to be recorded against a case. I’ll go into processing lodgement or fees lists below.
Foreign Suppliers need to be set to Exempt (Overseas) and Tax Inclusive. Once more, the tax treatment of Tax Not Applicable should not be used. If this is used the suppliers invoices will be excluded from the tax report.
The next trick is then to ensure that all accounts payable transactions that need to be reported on the BAS are processed through the Purchase function in Accounts Payable, even if the GST component is exempt. If they are entered through the Manual Payment process as a one off payment or as a withdrawal through the Cash Book then they will not be considered for tax reporting as these to functions have no GST capability.
The biggest load of transactions here will be the payments for lodgements to IP Australia, ie. the official fees, whether the fees list is generated automatically from Inprotech or raised manually. These need to be entered as a purchase and then manually paid using the purchase option. One one thing to be aware of here is that IP Australia as a supplier will default to not disbursing invoices, therefore, if a sales order for fees or invitation to pay is to be processed and disbursed to a case then you will need to change the expense account to one that will force the disbursing to WIP. This means that the operator has to know to do this. Another option is to set up another supplier for IP Australia with a default disbursable account. Then the operator has to know to use this! Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Other AP transactions that could be an issue here are financial services transactions that have a GST component and are automatically debited from the bank account, eg. lease payments, American Express card commissions, fees for foreign exchange payments. The temptation here is to take these up through the cash book but if you do that the GST component can’t be captured and processed (and you definitely want to capture these ones because this is GST that you are paying and can claim!). Raise them as a purchase invoice and pay them through manual payments to both get them on to the cash book for bank reconciliation and record them on the tax proof listing for BAS processing.
Equally it is not possible to register GST against general journals in the General Ledger so any transactions here that affect GST have to be put through the relevant sub ledgers.
The net result of the above is that the BAS worksheet can be created as follows:
G1 - report total of sales and tax from the Sales Tax Proof listing
G2 - total of sales for Exempt (Overseas) category from the Sales Tax Proof Listing
G3 - total of sales for Exempt (Local) category from the Sales Tax Proof Listing
G11 - report total of purchases and tax from the Purchases Tax Proof listing
G14 - total of purchases for Exempt (Overseas) and Exempt (Local) categories from the Purchases Tax Proof Listing
I haven’t discussed capital expenditure purchases as there usually aren’t very many of these so they have to be handled manually. Alternatively a separate tax code can be established for this and the reports will then total against this code.
The most important thing though is the set up of the client and supplier details. If this is not done properly then non-taxable items won’t appear on the reports. Not a complete show stopper in terms of the statement because the tax to be paid is always correct but the audit-ability is less complete.
I have a little Excel spreadsheet that mimics the worksheet and adds up the totals once you enter the above so if you want a copy drop me an e-mail. I don’t have much experience in this area in other jurisdictions, eg. VAT in Europe, but I am sure the principles are the same.
The system comes with a system used tax exempt category but if you use this invoices (both sales or purchases) that are marked as Exempt do not appear on the tax proof listings and hence you can’t get the totals of tax free sales and purchases that are required for the statement. Equally, using just one exempt tax code for GST means that deriving total export sales has to be a manual exercise. The same is true for capital expenditure purchases but as law firms typically don’t do much of this it is less of an issue.
The way to get around this is to set up two new tax codes, Exempt (Local) and Exempt (Overseas), both with a zero percentage taxation rate. The system provided exempt rate should be not be used. Unfortunately, it can’t be deleted so I would recommend renaming it to something obvious like “Do not use”.
Once this is done set up the WIP codes to be used by the system to be either GST or Exempt (Local), depending upon the nature of the charge. Typically Official Fees and Foreign Associates charges should be Exempt (Local) although there may be other charges, such as international couriers, that may also be exempt of tax.
Local clients should then have their tax code set to blank so that the tax coding will be picked up from the WIP items.
Foreign clients should be set to Exempt (Overseas). Billing will use this tax code to calculate the tax, overriding the tax code recorded WIP codes, and report the revenues under this category so total export sales can be derived.
Local suppliers need to have their tax code set to GST and the tax treatment should be inclusive or exclusive as applicable.
IP Australia is a special supplier however and needs to be set to Exempt (Local) and Tax Inclusive. The tax treatment of Tax Not Applicable, even though it seems obvious to use that one, should not be used as this means that any invoices will not be recorded on the Tax Proof Listing. The default expense account also needs to be set to an account that doesn’t require disbursement to WIP so that Lodgement/Fees Lists can now be entered without being forced to disbursements to be recorded against a case. I’ll go into processing lodgement or fees lists below.
Foreign Suppliers need to be set to Exempt (Overseas) and Tax Inclusive. Once more, the tax treatment of Tax Not Applicable should not be used. If this is used the suppliers invoices will be excluded from the tax report.
The next trick is then to ensure that all accounts payable transactions that need to be reported on the BAS are processed through the Purchase function in Accounts Payable, even if the GST component is exempt. If they are entered through the Manual Payment process as a one off payment or as a withdrawal through the Cash Book then they will not be considered for tax reporting as these to functions have no GST capability.
The biggest load of transactions here will be the payments for lodgements to IP Australia, ie. the official fees, whether the fees list is generated automatically from Inprotech or raised manually. These need to be entered as a purchase and then manually paid using the purchase option. One one thing to be aware of here is that IP Australia as a supplier will default to not disbursing invoices, therefore, if a sales order for fees or invitation to pay is to be processed and disbursed to a case then you will need to change the expense account to one that will force the disbursing to WIP. This means that the operator has to know to do this. Another option is to set up another supplier for IP Australia with a default disbursable account. Then the operator has to know to use this! Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Other AP transactions that could be an issue here are financial services transactions that have a GST component and are automatically debited from the bank account, eg. lease payments, American Express card commissions, fees for foreign exchange payments. The temptation here is to take these up through the cash book but if you do that the GST component can’t be captured and processed (and you definitely want to capture these ones because this is GST that you are paying and can claim!). Raise them as a purchase invoice and pay them through manual payments to both get them on to the cash book for bank reconciliation and record them on the tax proof listing for BAS processing.
Equally it is not possible to register GST against general journals in the General Ledger so any transactions here that affect GST have to be put through the relevant sub ledgers.
The net result of the above is that the BAS worksheet can be created as follows:
G1 - report total of sales and tax from the Sales Tax Proof listing
G2 - total of sales for Exempt (Overseas) category from the Sales Tax Proof Listing
G3 - total of sales for Exempt (Local) category from the Sales Tax Proof Listing
G11 - report total of purchases and tax from the Purchases Tax Proof listing
G14 - total of purchases for Exempt (Overseas) and Exempt (Local) categories from the Purchases Tax Proof Listing
I haven’t discussed capital expenditure purchases as there usually aren’t very many of these so they have to be handled manually. Alternatively a separate tax code can be established for this and the reports will then total against this code.
The most important thing though is the set up of the client and supplier details. If this is not done properly then non-taxable items won’t appear on the reports. Not a complete show stopper in terms of the statement because the tax to be paid is always correct but the audit-ability is less complete.
I have a little Excel spreadsheet that mimics the worksheet and adds up the totals once you enter the above so if you want a copy drop me an e-mail. I don’t have much experience in this area in other jurisdictions, eg. VAT in Europe, but I am sure the principles are the same.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Merry Christmas
Best wishes for the festive season to all my readers out there, whoever you are!!
Looking forward to a bright and growing 2009.
All the best.
Stephen.
Looking forward to a bright and growing 2009.
All the best.
Stephen.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Inprotech: Searching for Cases in Multiple Countries
Another piece of potentially “hidden” functionality that I had reason to use recently was the ability to search for cases in multiple countries. This was added a few years back as a part of a sale for a firm who wanted to be able to report on cases for a client in a particular “region”, as defined by the marketing department eg. Asia Pacific, North America, South East Asia, South America.
The country pick list that is used from the case enquiry screen is different from the pick list used in other places in the system in that it allows the selection of multiple entries by using Ctl-click and Shift-click in the usual manner for multiple selections. Upon doing this the case enquiry will then return all the cases in countries selected.
The pick list itself also has “selection” criteria at the top of the dialog. It is possible to select all countries within a group or all those with a particular country attribute. I can’t remember what the attribute search was actually for. Hard to see, for example, a list of all cases in countries with single class applications being particularly relevant! Anyway, I am sure there was a reason for it, I just can’t remember it. These country selection criteria then limits the countries displayed in the body of the pick list so that the you can easily select the countries necessary.
You can also select multiple countries in the country entry field itself. Simply enter the desired country codes separated by a semi-colon, eg. US; CA, will return United States and Canada.
To be able to search on a region for marketing purposes, as mentioned above, it is then necessary to set up a new country group in the Country program that includes the countries defined to be in the region. From Cases, then use the Country pick list to select the multiple countries in the new group. You can then add extra search criteria for the client and maybe the property type. For example, all of a particular client’s trademarks in the South East Asian region. If you are using the Family field to define the clients brand name then this could further filter the list.
I am not sure how often this type of thing would be a requirement for many users but if it is there is a way to get the information out!!
The country pick list that is used from the case enquiry screen is different from the pick list used in other places in the system in that it allows the selection of multiple entries by using Ctl-click and Shift-click in the usual manner for multiple selections. Upon doing this the case enquiry will then return all the cases in countries selected.
The pick list itself also has “selection” criteria at the top of the dialog. It is possible to select all countries within a group or all those with a particular country attribute. I can’t remember what the attribute search was actually for. Hard to see, for example, a list of all cases in countries with single class applications being particularly relevant! Anyway, I am sure there was a reason for it, I just can’t remember it. These country selection criteria then limits the countries displayed in the body of the pick list so that the you can easily select the countries necessary.
You can also select multiple countries in the country entry field itself. Simply enter the desired country codes separated by a semi-colon, eg. US; CA, will return United States and Canada.
To be able to search on a region for marketing purposes, as mentioned above, it is then necessary to set up a new country group in the Country program that includes the countries defined to be in the region. From Cases, then use the Country pick list to select the multiple countries in the new group. You can then add extra search criteria for the client and maybe the property type. For example, all of a particular client’s trademarks in the South East Asian region. If you are using the Family field to define the clients brand name then this could further filter the list.
I am not sure how often this type of thing would be a requirement for many users but if it is there is a way to get the information out!!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Inprotech: More on Release 4
Having just been through another Release 4 upgrade with a client I thought I might pass on these experiences as well. The client, in this instance, went for the “rapid fire” rather than a more structured approach and sometimes the situation necessitates this. There is just a different risk management profile with these types of projects and you need to plan for more post implementation issues.
In any case, the client is live on the new release after a bumpy ride, especially at the end. I thought I might pass on some of the issues encountered as they were different from the previous project. The client experienced some minor template issues, but these were more related to the upgrade from SQL2000 to SQL2005 than the Inprotech upgrade. The two areas to go through are, firstly, the deployment process and, secondly, some issues that we found with the application.
The firm itself has 35 users, one of which is a Citrix server which supports another location with 15 users. The client PCs run Windows XP SP3 and they have now migrated to a brand new server which is running only SQL Server 2005 and Inprotech Version 4.0. The administrator logons on the Client PCs have a local profile on each PC and so differ slightly from machine to machine, this may explain some of the behaviour below.
In terms of the deploy the issues were:
The other application we have had an annoying problem with is the new Launch Pad. Occasionally, it gets itself confused remembering the screen position and when the user logs back in the Launch Pad can’t be seen, even though the task bar has an icon that shows it is running. What appears to be happening is that the X/Y coordinates of the remembered screen position get corrupted and the Launch Pad is position “off the screen” somewhere. The first 2 times this happened we resolved it by changing the screen resolution to the highest available and the program could then be seen again and moved back to the centre of the screen, so that it can be accessed once the resolution of the screen is changed back to normal.
On the third occasion the program was still nowhere to be seen no matter what we did and this might be related to users that use two monitors, I am not sure. In the end we tracked down the table that recorded the defaults (DEFAULTSETTINGS?) and deleted the row for the user. When they then logged in the defaults were reset and the Launch Pad is accessible again.
This is a highly intermittent bug and we haven’t been able to duplicate the circumstances that cause it and hence report it through. It is however very confusing to the user because they effectively can’t access the system at all. Fortunately the workaround fix is pretty quick once you know.
I have now been involved in, with and around three upgrade projects and all have them have been problematic so my advice would be thorough testing and preparation. However, I am also aware of another project that went completely smoothly so I guess you can be lucky!!!
In any case, the client is live on the new release after a bumpy ride, especially at the end. I thought I might pass on some of the issues encountered as they were different from the previous project. The client experienced some minor template issues, but these were more related to the upgrade from SQL2000 to SQL2005 than the Inprotech upgrade. The two areas to go through are, firstly, the deployment process and, secondly, some issues that we found with the application.
The firm itself has 35 users, one of which is a Citrix server which supports another location with 15 users. The client PCs run Windows XP SP3 and they have now migrated to a brand new server which is running only SQL Server 2005 and Inprotech Version 4.0. The administrator logons on the Client PCs have a local profile on each PC and so differ slightly from machine to machine, this may explain some of the behaviour below.
In terms of the deploy the issues were:
- Word needs to be installed on the server for the installationto work. CPA acknowledge this as an error but it isn’t going to be fixed until the release of Version 5.0.
- For the client PCs the approach taken was to physically install the client component one each PC rather than use a silent install process. Partway through the installation it became apparent that running the setup.exe when logged on as an administrator actually went to the shared network folder which contained the dglib.dot, dgwiz.dot, etc and deleted the contents of this folder!! This only occurred on certain PCs. The server software installation had then to be re-run to retrieve these missing templates then save a copy to return to the folder every time a client installation deleted them.
- For the .OCX files to register correctly on certain PCs it was necessary to actually launch Inprotech logged in as the administrator. This wasn’t clear from the documentation, and as a result it was necessary to re-log on to a number of PCs when users noted a problem on logging in.
- The new colouring scheme doesn’t show satisfied reminders any more (or we can’t seem to find the way if it is possible). The firm doesn’t feel comfortable in just deleting all satisfied reminders in a blanket fashion. In the past some rules were set up to be satisfied automatically at due date and they would like to be able to manually review to ensure these rules have been corrected.
- The details of where the where the due date has arisen from has been taken away from the message on the screen. This was information that was used in certain instances to better understand the situation with the due date but is now not available. You can get it by viewing the report but this just adds another step in the process.
- The Countries button appears to be no longer available for reminders that are satisfied by updating the Designated Countries tab, eg a 30/31 month reminder on a PCT or a 12/18 month reminder on a Madrid case. The firm has rules to satisfy the reminders if all of the countries listed are updated to a particular level, eg to national phase filed. The Countries button used to appear on the second tab of those reminders and listed the countries which had not been updated to the appropriate level. We don’t seem to have access to this anymore but it may be that we just haven’t found the appropriate site option or whatever.
The other application we have had an annoying problem with is the new Launch Pad. Occasionally, it gets itself confused remembering the screen position and when the user logs back in the Launch Pad can’t be seen, even though the task bar has an icon that shows it is running. What appears to be happening is that the X/Y coordinates of the remembered screen position get corrupted and the Launch Pad is position “off the screen” somewhere. The first 2 times this happened we resolved it by changing the screen resolution to the highest available and the program could then be seen again and moved back to the centre of the screen, so that it can be accessed once the resolution of the screen is changed back to normal.
On the third occasion the program was still nowhere to be seen no matter what we did and this might be related to users that use two monitors, I am not sure. In the end we tracked down the table that recorded the defaults (DEFAULTSETTINGS?) and deleted the row for the user. When they then logged in the defaults were reset and the Launch Pad is accessible again.
This is a highly intermittent bug and we haven’t been able to duplicate the circumstances that cause it and hence report it through. It is however very confusing to the user because they effectively can’t access the system at all. Fortunately the workaround fix is pretty quick once you know.
I have now been involved in, with and around three upgrade projects and all have them have been problematic so my advice would be thorough testing and preparation. However, I am also aware of another project that went completely smoothly so I guess you can be lucky!!!
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Inprotech: Contact Addresses
Time goes so quickly. I had an intention of writing an article every one or two weeks as I have a long list of topics but before you know it a month goes by! I promise to do better.
My little article today is about contacts and names & addresses. The Inprotech database has a highly normalized set of data structures where the name is a separate data object from the address, which is separate from the telecommunication numbers. Each of them has their own set of attributes and they can be linked to each other with the goal of only having the information recorded in the database once, removing the potential for extra data entry and error.
The user interface tries to hide this complexity, providing structured input forms that attempt to lead the user to enter the information in a manner similar to how it is provided on paper and then the system builds the appropriate links and pointers. For example, an employee of a company is simply added as a name and the system defaults the address pointer to the company’s address pointer meaning that the address doesn’t need to be entered again. If the employee has a different address this is entered and the software breaks the link. A new address data item is created and linked to the employee. Same thing applies to phone numbers, faxes and the like, although, for direct telephone numbers, the choice is whether to override the number or use the Direct Line number type.
It is then possible to use the advanced functionality to link numbers and addresses to each other and to different organizations and contacts however my experience has been that users generally find this all very confusing and my recommendation is that, unless you are prepared to invest in training and good procedural documentation, avoid it completely.
Of course, with all these high ideals, the human factor kicks in with names added in a variety of different ways over the years simply because of the practicalities of day to day life. People come and go, some are trained, some are not, some understand, some don’t and some care and some don’t.
So the question that was raised: how can you tell if all contact names for an organization are linked to the same address. Here is my suggestion.
Use the Names program as the enquiry tool:
My little article today is about contacts and names & addresses. The Inprotech database has a highly normalized set of data structures where the name is a separate data object from the address, which is separate from the telecommunication numbers. Each of them has their own set of attributes and they can be linked to each other with the goal of only having the information recorded in the database once, removing the potential for extra data entry and error.
The user interface tries to hide this complexity, providing structured input forms that attempt to lead the user to enter the information in a manner similar to how it is provided on paper and then the system builds the appropriate links and pointers. For example, an employee of a company is simply added as a name and the system defaults the address pointer to the company’s address pointer meaning that the address doesn’t need to be entered again. If the employee has a different address this is entered and the software breaks the link. A new address data item is created and linked to the employee. Same thing applies to phone numbers, faxes and the like, although, for direct telephone numbers, the choice is whether to override the number or use the Direct Line number type.
It is then possible to use the advanced functionality to link numbers and addresses to each other and to different organizations and contacts however my experience has been that users generally find this all very confusing and my recommendation is that, unless you are prepared to invest in training and good procedural documentation, avoid it completely.
Of course, with all these high ideals, the human factor kicks in with names added in a variety of different ways over the years simply because of the practicalities of day to day life. People come and go, some are trained, some are not, some understand, some don’t and some care and some don’t.
So the question that was raised: how can you tell if all contact names for an organization are linked to the same address. Here is my suggestion.
Use the Names program as the enquiry tool:
- Enter the company name as the Associated Name.
- Select the relationship “Employs” (this is the system relationship used for contacts).
- Select the Reverse relationship check box (Employs becomes Employs By).
- Remove the Has Code check box (contacts are unlikely to have a name code).
- Check the Fast Correction check box in the tool bar. (Fast Correction was created to allow quick changes to a defined list of names without having to go backwards and forwards between screens).
- Enter.
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