jobs mysteriously being marked "delivered"

[Keith]

Hi Hal! How was your Thanksgiving weekend? Mine was very refreshing. Although I was "closed" on Friday, I snuck in anyway and got some personal stuff done.

Here's the mystery- I wrote a job up this morning. Printed the job sheet. Later in the day, I went to the job tracker to update it and the job was not in there. At all. So, I went to Edit Order and there it was! Marked Delivered! The Edit and Trash buttons were greyed out. At the same time, I noticed the same thing with another job I wrote up last week for the same customer. What screen captures do you need from me?

Scared :eek:
Keith

[Keith]

Update! I think I localized the issue. If I invoice a single job, any open jobs for that same customer will disappear from the tracker!

Or... is that intentional?

[Hal Heindel]

Hi Keith,

Thanksgiving was mellow, with only a mild case of stuffing. Spent it with two friends who helped me get the Cobra ready for auction a couple of years ago. The turkey and wine were excellent, the company even better.

Your disappearing job sheets are more a case for Halloween than for Thanksgiving! A while back, when you sent me some of your .TPS files, I duplicated your installation on one of our test machines. It's still there. Unfortunately, I couldn't duplicate the problem on it. See the attached.

Screen captures of the job tracker and the order edit screen would be helpful to get started with this mystery.

[Hal Heindel]

Update! I think I localized the issue. If I invoice a single job, any open jobs for that same customer will disappear from the tracker!
... is that intentional?

Definitely not! I checked it out on your install and was able to duplicate it. If that's happening on a clean install, it's a bug that somehow managed to elude detection all these months. Maybe it was good to keep the Gold on beta for now.

Stay tuned!

[Hal Heindel]

It is a bug, happening on clean installs as well. The good news is that it only affects the job tracker. The jobs are still there, just not showing up on the tracker screen. Should have it fixed in a day or two.

Thanks for the catch, Keith.

[Keith]

Awesome! Thank you! I stumbled upon it because I just decided to start using the invoices from MF for my customers to pay from. When I opened my shop, I promised myself that no job would leave without payment or an invoice. Well, I've been getting sloppy. Currently, like everyone else I assume, we take the job sheet and re-enter the data into QB. That's time consuming; and when your all digital, it's all about speed. Sometimes, the job is out the door before it even hits an MF job sheet!

Soooo...

I thought I would try something different to increase cashflow and production efficiency. Since it is so easy to make an invoice with MF, whoever is in post production can generate and print the invoice when they package the job. THEN, we can enter it into QB at our leisure. But that is the part that scares me- "at out leisure". It's toooo easy to get behind on stuff. Anyway, I figured we'd at least try it, I could think about it till I'm blue in the face and not really know if it will work or not. What do you think? Good idea or bad idea?

:confused:Keith

[Hal Heindel]

Since it is so easy to make an invoice with MF, whoever is in post production can generate and print the invoice when they package the job. THEN, we can enter it into QB at our leisure. But that is the part that scares me - "at our leisure". It's toooo easy to get behind on stuff. Good idea or bad idea?

Good idea to generate the invoice in MF, Keith, even if you occasionally end up importing it into QB a week or two late - what you're afraid may happen.

Cash flow is too important to be put on the back burner, so having an invoice ready to mail out as quickly as possible is still the smart way to go. We used QuickBooks at the Unitac print shop, and that's exactly how we worked it. Once the invoice is out the door, you always have a few days to log it into QB, because at that point, QB serves primarily to track and collect payment.

One of the biggest sink holes in virtually any industry is forgetting to bill. If you mail the invoice and then forget to log it, you won't know when to press the customer for payment, but most of the time, the check will come in anyway. But if the invoice is hiding at the bottom of your "round-to-it" outbox, don't hold your breath waiting to get paid!

[Hal Heindel]

The bug causing job sheets to be marked "delivered" in the Gold Edition has been found and squashed. That, and a few minor improvements, brings us to V2010.1, still a free beta download at

http://www.printfire.com/MFlightBetas.html

Among the improvements: Paper Markups (see the new help chapter) (http://www.morningflighthelp.com/paper_markups.html), Proofs for Digital, and more explicit tags for product categories. Because all Morning Flight editions use a common code base, changes to one edition automatically cascade throughout the rest, including the forever-free version.

http://www.printfire.com/Images/Forum_DigitalProofs.jpg

http://www.printfire.com/Images/Forum_PRD_Cat.jpg