I think it would be a great feature if you could have certain system actions show up in contact log or to pull up an enhanced/filtered audit trail. For example, it would be nice to see the entire order of events for a work order or customer including the date an item was created, stage changes, POs closed etc in one timeline. It would be nice to see the dates they changed and by who.
A check box to show system events would be a nice feature so that it’s not always showing those events. But it would incredible to see these things:
1. Date created
2. Every stage change (the original stage, new stage, date and by who)
3. PO Create/Closed dates related to customer or work order
4. WO reschedules Including original date and time and the new date and time and who changed.
5. Notes that are entered and what they were and what they changed too.
I am visualizing this as an enhanced audit trail. The audit trail useful for some limited things, but you can’t see an actual order of events and how things or notes change. I imagine this being in a style like the contact log so that you could see things like a stage changing and the customer being contacted as a result (i.e. PO is closed and stage changed to parts received) and then to see the customer was contacted as a result. Or a work order being completed and then that the invoice was sent or a payment was collected or customer emailed as a result. One cohesive stream of events and contacts.
I would love to see this this as well. We are always having an issue with trying to figure out who moved or rescheduled a call. Currently we can only see a work order was edited, but we can not see what they did. They could have just opened it and saved it with no changes. We have no idea what people are doing unless they put in a contact log for what they did but trying to get someone to do an additional step if they are just moving a call to a different tech does not happen.
We also need to see the “Customer:Job” associated with each transaction. For example, we were trying to track down a couple of invoices that were accidentally deleted while working in a smart list, instead of “removed” from the smart list. I have the invoice #s in the audit trail, the day it was created, and the day it was deleted, but nowhere does it list the customer anywhere. If I had that extra info I could go back to an estimate or work order to re-build the accidentally deleted invoices.
It would be nice also if the system auto documented when an invoice was emailed out or basic fuctions like that so we don’t have to go back in and manually document for simple tasks.
Everyone,
When we say yes to one thing, we say no to other things. We have x number of hours available for programming. To do all of these things would take maybe 500 labor hours.
If I were to say yes to this, many other software features and systems would never get done. I am wondering just how this would improve your business lives so much that it is worth approximately 500 labor hours. The fully burdened labor on this would be approximately $54,000. Would that be a good investment for Aptora?
Would you prefer this over something like a customer portal? Is this more important than a full and complete software API? An API let’s you or other programmers write software to work with ours.
This is why we offer the ability to vote, and limit the number of votes, so that votes are not meaningless. These are important decisions.
My goal here, at 8PM sitting alone in my home office, is to give all of you some insight as to what we have to consider. I want you to be an informed part of this process.
Thank you for entering these. This is why I built this system.
-James
James- Thanks for the education. I still want it all. 🙂 LOL . I just also read your reply about the mobile menus and I know that took some time. Nice to see an owner on here addressing customers and not a CSR that cant do anything. No disrespect to CSRs.
Bryan- I wouldn’t let anyone have delete permission. If they had been voided instead, problem solved.
Thanks Jeff.
Everyone,
I wanted to mention that we are rewriting Total Office Manager. We have begun the work. It will be along process – maybe two years. The new system will include what we call Verbose Auditing. You will be able to see changes made on a field by field basis. I am not talking about this project very much publicly. I did want to mention it here though.
Bryan I agree with Jeff. We had the same issue with someone deleting an invoice and caused some issues. We original gave a few of the dispatchers the delete permissions because the guys in the field would keep creating duplicate invoices. (most likely because we have not trained them properly). What we did was changed their permission to void only and they will put a memo in the memo field that says please delete and that way we know we can delete if we want to clean up the list later.
James, I would like to remove my vote for this feature and apply to the API and customer portal. ?