T-JACS 2021 Year in Review
Reflecting on all we've accomplished this past year helps drive our resolve into 2022 to further expand the most desired features in the application. Though our expectations to have a first crack at generating invoices has evaded us, we've made significant progress along the way. Here's a look at how T-JACS has grown in the past 12 months.
Vendor purchase orders received a lot of love with the addition of the foreign currency functionality. That alone required more work in the undercarriage than appears to the eye, especially the care needed in managing the potential for bugs. There were a series of releases over the year, simply refactoring currency changes throughout the application.
In addition to currency, there were numerous refactoring efforts across the application that served to improve reliability, maintenance, and code reuse. That process also flushed out bugs that thought they were safely hidden.
A simple feature that shows the next Vendor PO Number on the Generate PO Number button was added, giving a little more control into what is going on when creating PO's.
We are so thankful to our customers that were patient with us as we worked to clarify Cost vs Price labeling, which included renaming the Materials and Expenses Worksheets and clarified the work being done around managing markups.
Generating invoices took a few steps forward with supporting tables, payment processing fees, shipping dates, carriers. There is much more code under development that will drive us forward in our goal to advance the invoicing functions.
The Inventory Report was upgraded with filters and new columns and serial number tracking was improved in inventory
We made it easier and faster to add items to jobs by implementing the quick-add method that removed the need for a page refresh and streamlined the clunky extra step to reconcile materials from stock.
The ability to distribute expenses across the materials in vendor purchase orders was a huge win, allowing shipping costs, for instance, to be captured with the cost of materials when placing them into stock.
While we're talking about it, you might remember that the Catalog Import function received a few upgrades and fixes.
We made several first steps in Multiple Selling Units. This feature allows catalog items to be tracked individually or grouped into boxes, for example. There is more work to be done in this area, but it acted as a springboard towards Catalog Kits.
Catalog Kits finished off the year with an ability to put catalog items together into a kit. This makes it possible to track multiple items stored and sold together as a kit, or explode them into individual parts and sold as an open box, for instance. The biggest benefit is being able to set a different selling price for a kit compared to individual components, and to be able to track them. Items can be specified on the Vendor PO as a kit, or purchased individually and assembled afterwards. There's some cool flexibility here.
The My Active Jobs block made its appearance this year. It simply makes it easier to select a job that you frequently work on.
The Job edit form gained the ability to edit the Invoice Number and PO Number. Previously, those fields served as a quick way to add an invoice to a job and to see that an invoice was created, so it just made sense to be able to make direct edits in the same fashion.
Job Scopes weren't left out either, with the ability to add file attachments and a Job Type field for employee reports.
Administrators got most of the love this year, so we didn't want to leave out employees that spend most of their time in time sheet forms. To streamline time sheet entry, several things were added to improve everyday use such as quicker copying of time sheets, quick lists to select jobs, and the overall favorite: the "Save and continue day" button.
We are excited to welcome all of our new customers this year and hope to be a critical force in the success of your businesses. Our past customers have received their education a bit more haphazard, so we're happy that we've finally started making instruction videos this year. It's admittedly clunky and awkward still, but our nerd is taking the acting critiques seriously, so hopefully there's some good improvement. Honestly, I think he's hoping to be fired from that job if we can afford an actor that will work for peanuts.
Of the 20 Releases in 2021 from version 4.54 to to version 4.74, there were 2,058 files changed, with 61,820 lines of code inserted and 30,938 lines deleted, resulting in a net increase of 30,882 lines of code. This was a very productive year, with 1,484 man-hours of effort.
We have some ambitious goals for 2022, and our greatest desire is helping you to focus more on simply getting things done and to keep it together.
