AFD Postcode
We recently purchased AFD Postcode to test with Move Administer to see if we can help clients speed up data entry.
After extensive testing, we found there to be no problems with AFD Postcode inserting addresses back into Move Administer.
AFD Postcode will help your company run more professionally and smoothly by giving the user fast and easy access to accurate address entry, needing just a postcode.
For more information about AFD Postcode, visit www.afd.co.uk. You can purchase AFD Postcode from there website for as little as £154 and £85 yearly renewal.
Warehouse Locations
A recent addition to Move Administer is the facility to store the location of the container within the warehouse.
Move Administer caters for multiple warehouses by default, allowing bays to be setup for each warehouse. Well now we’ve gone that one step further, allowing each warehouse bay to be setup with stack Height and Depth details.
A container can then be placed into a specific location within the allocated warehouse bay. This is ideal when trying to find 3 empty containers, allowing you to keep a customer’s effects in one warehouse bay rather than spread around the enture warehouse(s).
In the future we are looking to produce a graphical display of a chosen warehouse bay, showing which containers are in each location, making it easier to estimate the time taken to retrieve a container. We are also looking a producing an administration tool for the warehouse manager, allowing him/her to find container locations with ease, without the need of having to work their way through a vast system that Move Administer is, so watch this space for further details.
Hourly Quotations
We are pleased to announce a new addition to Move Administer, hourly rated quotations. This will allow you to create a quotation based on an hourly rate.
Here’s a sneak preview of the hourly quotation.
The PDF consists of 2 pages consisting of a Quotation and an Acceptance. No Additional Services Quotation or Acceptance are produced with an Hourly Quotation.
As with Inland Quotations, free text can be supplied as Included and Excluded options. Below is a sample of the Declared Liability Hourly Quotation, an FSA version is also available.
Comments appreciated, as always.
Help Update
We are nearing completion of Move Administer help and manual.
Having spent a large amount of time capturing screenshots, writing about all additional modules and improvements made to the system, the Move Administer manual has grown to 486 pages!
We have included a full keyword list enabling easier searching and faster navigation throughout Move Administer’s help file.
Move Administer will come with a fully printed manual, but additional manuals are available upon request.
Emailing Quotations
Not only does Move Administer allow you to copy Quotations but you can also Email them too!
By creating an email correspondence you can simply import your email template.
Then you simply link the required quotation to the correspondence (so that the correspondence knows which quotation to use when replacing the vast number of tokens available at your fingertips).
Finally you can select to create a PDF of the Quotation (other options include Statement, Statement (Full), Direct Debit Mandate and Standing Order Mandate, with invoicing to follow soon). You can then choose to send additional PDF’s with the generated PDF, such as terms and conditions, insurance memorandum, etc, and with these you can elect to merge the PDF’s into one solitary PDF or send them as additional attachments.
The final result would look like this, where the linked quotation has not only been turned into a PDF but also overlaid onto the company’s letterhead and then the terms and conditions of contract merged to the end, providing a 7 page PDF.
I’m sure this feature will be used many times over and can only lead to more exciting developments and features.
Enjoy.
Adobe PDF’s
One recent addition to Move Administer is that every report or item of stationery previewed in our Report Preview Manager can now be created into an Adobe PDF by simply clicking our PDF button!
We are sure that this will be an ideal solution for creating easy to email documents of management reports from within the system to sales staff and the like.
Declared Liability
Changes in the way Move Administer handles declared liability are now complete and with our testers for their comments. When we originally added declared liability to Move Administer we simply removed all insurance fields, however since talking with our users we have made the following changes:
Liability can now be calculated and charged as a percentage of the removal charge. Yep, you did read right, charged!
For example, Move Administer allows you to produce a quotation with a Nett moving figure of £500.00. Let’s say that your rate of liability is 10%, therefore your Liability would be calculated as £50.00. VAT is then calculated on the Nett + Liability, with the Total being the Nett + Liability + VAT.
When the Quotation is printed the customer see’s the basic removal charge at £550.00 + VAT. When the Quotation is accepted the invoice generated will have a Nett figure of £550.00. There is no mention of the £50.00 Liability to the customer.
You also have a checkbox which if ticked will print that ‘extended liability’ has been included, and the extended liability can have it’s own valuation cover that is different to the standard cover on a per product basis (Inland, European, Commercial, etc).
This new way of dealing with Liability allows you, the remover, to claw back some of that lost insurance revenue. And although on the example above £550.00 would be posted to the sales code assigned to the Quotation, Move Administer will have reports to show the breakdown of accepted Quotations, so you can then see just how much Liability revenue was charged in any period, allowing you to adjust your sales turnover figures accordingly.
The ‘new’ liability rate can also be charged for additional services offered, and when it comes to Storage you can charge the Liability as a percentage of the weekly rate or a percentage of the declared valuation.
Fingers crossed that our ‘Declared Liability’ testers find this a great addition to Move Administer.
Stationery: Storage Quotations
Here’s a sneak preview of the Storage Quotations.
Each PDF consists of 2 pages consisting of a Quotation and an Acceptance. The Storage Quotations proved a right design challenge to keep inline with our other Quotation forms, as they left lots of unwanted white space!!!
To alleviate this white space we remembered people in the past saying that they would like to type free text notes onto Storage Quotations. So with that in mind we now allow the user to enter Included and Excluded options, just like you can with our other Quotations.
First up is the layout used for those who are regulated by the Financial Services Authority and can therefore offer and charge for insurance cover.
Next we have the layout used for those who offer extended liability.
Comments appreciated, as always.
Web Updating
A new feature was implemented in Move Administer recently, web updating!
Web updating is becoming more and more popular amongst software today, so we decided to jump onto the band wagon too.
Basically, rather than sending out updates of Move Administer on CD, we now upload the latest version to our web server. On the Help menu of Move Administer there is now an option to ‘Check for Update’, and when selected Move Administer will run our web update client, which communicates with our web server to find out if a newer version of Move Administer exists, and if so will ask if you would like to download and install.
The great advantage of our web update client is that it will only download those files that are newer, so although Move Administer currently consists of 40Meg of files, it may only need to download 2Meg of newer files, and even then the files will be compressed using compression comparable with WinZip.
This feature was put into action today amongst our testers and so far so good, with those upgrading finding it a very simple and efficient process indeed.
An enhancement to this which we are thinking of implementing is running the web update client automatically every ‘x’ number of days, alerting the user when a new update is available, rather than waiting for the user to select the ‘Check for Updates’ on the Help menu – but one step at a time eh?
Testing, Testing, 1. 2.. 3…
Since we announced Move Administer back in April we have been inundated with regular calls monitoring our progress from customers of old, and potential new ones to whom we have been recommended (thanks everyone).
Well the finishing line is getting forever closer and I’m pleased to inform you that Move Administer is currently installed and being tested in 7 companies in 8 sites at various locations around the UK (with another being installed this week), re-uniting Richard and I with customers of old.
Testing on Move Administer commenced early in August, and reports to date have been nothing but positive. Many new ideas and enhancements have been forwarded to us, although, and I’m very pleased to add, hardly any bugs, and those reported have only be minor!
Some of the ideas and enhancements have already made their way into the final cut of version 1, and the rest have produced a list as long as my arm, again! This is mainly due to experimenting with new ideas, where those testing would like to take the ideas even further.
Most of our testers have also taken up our offer of converting their current data with great success, which has made testing very easy for them. We currently have a data converter for one of the existing systems available on the market today, with another 3 data converters underway very soon. So, whichever system you may want to jump from, we may have a data conversion solution for you.
We are keeping the names of our testers very close to our chest indeed, as we don’t want to upset the apple cart between them and their current suppliers, but we will announce them in a press release when the time is right.
But, at the time of typing this 2 of the testers are aiming to go ‘live’ on December 1st, with 1 of them running in excess of 25 users!!! YIPEE