Friday 8.14.2009 Update on Lizzy™

Well, here we are on another Friday. It never ceases to amaze me at how fast a week or even a year can fly by. The only thing we can do to have any semblance of time is to set goals and try our best to meet them. In this blog I’m going to catch everyone up on what we accomplished this week and where the overall project is at.

Invoice:
The invoice system got an entirely new face lift on the item list and now has the ability to attach items to specific service jobs, add excise taxes to line items as well as a host of other abilities. Sales tax information is learned instead of setup, where Lizzy™ will continue to use previous tax settings for a customer / part relationship, instead of forcing the business owner to go to each customer and set them up manually.

The Service Tickets and Internal Tickets now have the ability to create Jobs and Estimates as well as attaching labor and parts to them. With Lizzy™, instead of having to create jobs and add parts and labor on a special screen like you do in TBA, you have the ability to just add a part to an invoice and attach it to a specific job. The parts are then all listed along with labor, all on a single screen and grouped appropriately. Even the invoice printout has everything listed on 1 screen that can be quickly reviewed and printed, all grouped nicely together.

We are now focusing our efforts on the taxation and payment screens. The payment screen as mentioned in other posts is already finished but is now ready to be tested fully. The taxation processes are written but we’re adding in the final touches for the specialized states and counties that seem to try to make things as difficult as possible for all of us. We hope to have most of that code in place by end of next week and to be able to start testing it.

Mechanics can view their assigned tickets for each day, select them and log time against them with the click of a mouse. They can also choose from various jobs and review their requirements from a single screen.

Further development required for Phase I
As mentioned, next week we will be getting the tax processes finished up as well as starting the final steps towards dealing with special orders. We hope to have both of these items on their way to final completion and ready for testing by end of next week or early the following week.

After the above items are completed the final steps towards Phase I completion will be to include Units and Labor into the Invoice processes. I suspect this will be a 2 week project on its own, possibly more. I will keep everyone up to date on the progress as we proceed.

Well, that is about it, we hope everyone has a great weekend and we’ll see you next week. Thanks to everyone for being patient with us during this process and your excitement during the conversations over the last few weeks has really set a fire under us.