T-JACS 2018 Year in Review
This past year, T-JACS continued its growth with the addition of several major features. A prime feature is the Work In Progress Report. This report shows the cost of uninvoiced work as of a given period ending. The ability to generate this report is anticipated to save days of manual effort for your business and we feel that this alone is worth the cost of the software.
Assembled Revenue Assets, or ARA's, deserve mention. ARA’s essentially describe a built item that can be rented out. It allows grouping work and materials into a unit that can be tracked independently of Jobs and Customers. There is more to be done in this space, but we have a good foundation to start with.
Jobs have been given some new capabilities including: Job Styles that allow jobs to be grouped and categorized, Parking and blocking jobs that allow putting aside work that is waiting for an external event, and Prioritization that allows listing jobs in order of Urgency and Priority.
The contact database was reorganized to allow better management between customer and vendor contacts.
Vendor Quotes are an exciting new feature as well. Quotes are built from the specified job materials and forms are produced that can be sent to a vendor to fill out the detail. Chosen quotes are then easily applied back to the job.
Inventory gets a makeover too. Serial Numbers are part of a class of inventory that can be tracked individually instead of as a group. This helps support ARA’s with embedded materials.
For grouped inventory items, Tags have been added to make it possible to separate the same items within a bin. This is most useful for items such as spools of wire.
The My Actions block was introduced to conveniently show actions that should be addressed.
Hours can be deducted from the calculated hours on a timesheet to make it simpler for entry by reducing the amount of timesheets required to accurately represent daily work.
Historical hours for apprentices from previous employers can now be recorded in the Apprenticeship Employee History. This ability fills the gaps in the employee report.
Statistically, we’ve seen 1777 files changed, 56746 lines inserted, 22888 lines deleted, totaling 33,858 new lines of code. This includes the usual bug fixing, general enhancements and tweaks. The amount of little enhancements and fixes are too numerous to list here, but are available as requested.
The main development goal of 2019 is the ability to produce invoices. To support this goal, the release frequency will need to be reduced. Currently, updates are released at one to two week intervals. Four to six week intervals would better support this level of development, while still maintaining frequent enough updates to facilitate good feedback. There will be room in the development schedule to support specific needs of current customers. We are looking for your input on how the software has met your needs and what needs are still outstanding.
As a company, we recognize that we have not done enough to support the training requirements of our customers. We have recently been building out some tools to support this. Through an affiliate, we have begun work to build training videos and will also be preparing web conferences this spring to address training needs.
On behalf of Total Job Asset Control Services Ltd, we thank you for your continued support. We’ve made great progress this year and we are confident that 2019 will be even better.
