Friday 9/4/2009 Lizzy&trade Update

One thing stays consistent with each passing week is how fast they fly by. In today’s blog I’m going to catch everyone up on where we are and how we’re progressing. We’ve also added a few more people to the development team in the last few weeks that I’d like to mention. Noel Jacques has joined us to help out with the hardware and Linux side of things. He’ll be the one getting the onsite appliances ready for everyone as well as helping me out with all the Linux servers going forward. He’ll be able to take a lot of the extra load off of me related to all of our web servers going forward, freeing me to spend more time with Lizzy™. He’ll be working very closely with me on a number of fronts and I’m very happy he’s decided to join up.

Michael Hiet is our other newbie and while still on contract at the moment, we hope things work out so that he can join up as well in a few months. He’s currently working with Elyssa putting the finishing touches on the payroll module that’s built into Lizzy™ so that we can start deployment on that very soon.

Now for the juicy stuff:

This week has seen a lot of things happening, although I have to admit, not the specific things I wanted to happen. We put the finishing touches on our tax reports so that they now create accounts payables when you process them and tested all of those processes to be sure everything was working correctly. We’ve added a really cool feature to the General Ledger that allows Lizzy™ to display general ledger notes in whatever language the person happens to be viewing it in. This not only removed a lot of duplication in the General Ledger, but it also completely removed the long description fields that get into the database tables, allowing the overall system to take up much less disk space as well as providing added flexibility.

The inventory locate control has been upgraded with a new paging system and the invoice items list now sports a new popup locate system that allows you to see items as you type them, choose from the list or page through the different items in the category you enter.

We’ve spent a good bit of time cleaning up some of the controls in various places. For example, TBA allows you to select from 5 different tax rates to place on an invoice, Lizzy allows for an unlimited amount and has a new control that allows you to choose the tax rate you want to use, from a drop down, and then add it to the invoice. If you don’t want the tax rate on the invoice then you simply remove it by clicking the small trash can. Lizzy™ will recalculate the totals for you automatically as well as automatically remember what taxes you used for the specific customer, so that next time she can set everything up the same.

Instead of Jeff and I both hitting the special orders this week, Jeff has been working on a really cool addition to the invoice that will allow you to build up really advanced jobs that can be added to the invoice with the click of a button. When added, they will automatically pull in parts, labor and materials and automatically associate them with the respective jobs. While this may sound a bit like the one currently in TBA, its not. You’ll have to wait to see it, to fully understand why we think it’s so much more.

That leaves me working on Special Order processing this week among everything else. I’ve finished the internal processing of the orders, have all the tables built and should have it completely finished except for a few visual displays to help you work with them. All of the underlying code should be finished and tested by Tuesday, yes I’m working over the holiday.. 🙁 I’m actually hoping to have most if it done by tonight.

Next week it will be more of the same. We’re hoping Jeff will have most of the Job builder done by next Friday, I’ll have special orders finished and we’ll be gearing up for the Units the week after. We’re now a couple weeks behind my original schedule, but I think in the end we’ll be much farther along. Some of the things we stopped and did this week are going to contribute to the system running even faster than it already does and will allow it to take up much less disk space. So when we run into things like this along the way, its just better all around for us to slow down and get a little side tracked, so that we can provide an even better product once we’ve finished.

If this Friday’s company meeting was any sign of things to come I am very excited. The employees finally got a short demo of some of the features already available in Lizzy™ (yes we’re hiding it from them too;-) and you could feel the excitement in the air. Everyone here is as ready to get Lizzy™ into your dealerships and companies as most of you, and we’re getting closer by the day.

See you on the other side,

–glenn