FILEMAKER: Report Custom Menu Reorganization

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright


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Well, the time finally has arrived in my InBizness product evolution to put my reports in sub folders under the Reports custom menu. It really didn't take me as long as I thought. I simply took the previous report that had all the reports in it, duplicate it and then remove the report custom menu items that I don't want.

Here you can see the previous reports custom menu for InBizness.

Here you can see the new reports custom menu for InBizness.

I was even able to add the module specific report sub menu to the modules custom menu.

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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2008 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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InBizness 2.7 Changes For Sales Orders, Invoices, Support and Vendor Bills

SALES ORDER MODULE CHANGES
Added button and custom menu option to save a sales order as a pdf document and allows you to store the document location.
Updated the printed sales order layout to a more streamlined look and feel.

INVOICE MODULE CHANGES
Added button and custom menu option to save an invoice as a pdf document and allows you to store the document location.
Updated the printed invoice layout to a more streamlined look and feel.

SUPPORT MODULE CHANGES
Added the list view for support records and column sort for issue date, customer and status.
Added the ability to create linked events from a support record and a tab to see related events.

VENDOR BILL MODULE CHANGES
Add a button / script that will automatically carry over the line items from a purchase order to a new line item on a vendor bill

InBizness 2.7 Changes For Quotes

QUOTE MODULE CHANGES
Added custom menu, buttons and associated scripts to convert a quote to a sales order

Added a link from quotes to leads, now leads can create quotes, because of this ...

Instead of showing related client address information, created address fields that auto enter either lead or client address information.

Added button and custom menu option to save a quote as a pdf document and allows you to store the document location.


Updated the printed quote layout to a more streamlined look and feel.

InBizness 2.7 Changes For Proposals And Leads

PROPOSAL MODULE CHANGES
Discovered a need to build proposals that do not have a dollar amount assigned to any of the listed milestones. This helps lead the way to creating a type of requirement proposal to list milestone needs before assigning a dollar value to them. I updated the proposal to zero out any reference to a dollar amount in those situations.

Added the ability to flag a milestone from a proposal as a template, these can then be found in the new template tab. You can copy a template milestone and paste it directly into the currently viewed proposal.



LEAD MODULE CHANGES
When first introduced, the leads module didn’t have a very robust set of options but it continues to gain more speed with each new release. Here is a listing of the changes made for leads within InBizness 2.7.

Added the key id for a campaign to create a link from a lead to a single campaign.

Added the ability to create a new quote from a lead record and added a tab and portal to show the quotes that have been placed into the system for a lead.



Added the ability to link an existing contact record to the currently viewed lead record.



Added the + button next to the contact name field in the address info section to quickly add that person to the related contacts table.



Added a script / button to automatically create 8 follow up events for a lead record. These events can be staggered over time and can include by phone call and email activities.

InBizness 2.7 Changes For Campaigns, Events, Staff And Timecards

CAMPAIGNS
The campaign module had a number of changes added for version 2.7 and working with campaign events has never been more powerful.

BATCH EMAILS TO RELATED CONTACTS
Added a tab within the campaign module to facilitate sending Batch Email actions to contacts that are related to that campaign record.


After selecting the contacts you want to link, you can type in an email subject, message and even include a file enclosure. You can click a single button to create one email with all the contacts email addresses in the BCC field and transfer that email to your FileMaker compatible email application.

EVENTS
The events module had a few smaller updates, mostly to make the process of entering data a little easier and more productive.

Added button "Add Similar Event" to the Events dialog to create events with the same linked client / campaign.This is very similar to a duplicate record command but allows you to change some of the key fields.

Added a text button next to the event details in the event dialog layout to insert from the last record visited. This can be quite useful when you are entering a batch of events that are very similar in nature.

STAFF
The event and timecard tabs in the staff module allow you to see those related records via a date range. There are a number of buttons that allow you to quickly set the start and end dates. For version 2.7, we added a button in the events & timecard tabs to set the date range to yesterday.

TIMECARDS
Timecard records can be linked to almost every module within the InBizness system. For version 2.7 Of InBizness, we added buttons and associated scripts to view related Campaigns, Staff and Events from a Timecard record.

Contact Module Updates For InBizness 2.7

In the InBizness 2.7 update, there is only one change made to the module overall.

LINKING ONE OR MANY CONTACTS TO A CAMPAIGN
Added a tab in the contacts module that allows you to link a current client or the entire found set of contacts to a particular campaign record.

Client Module Updates For InBizness 2.7

In the InBizness 2.7 update, we added a number of smaller enhancements within the Clients module to link even better with other InBizness modules.


LINKING TO AN EXISTING CONTACT
A contact may be involved with many clients vendors and even leads. With InBizness 2.7, we added the ability to link an existing contact record to the currently viewed client record.


Clicking the Add Existing Contact button will bring up a dialog listing of current InBizness contacts. From the list, click an Add button and that contact will be linked to the original client records.




CLIENT TIMECARDS BY A DATE RANGE
We already had a tab that allowed you to see the timecard records associated with a client record. In the InBizness 2.7 update, added a new tab & portal that allows you to see the client timecard records between a start and end date range.

The Reports Menu Continues To Evolve With Inbizness 2.7

This is probably going to be a staple for many a future update because we continue to uncover the needs for more and more reports over time. Sometime in the near future, I expect we will introduce sub folders by module but we are not quite needing that yet.



Invoice Module: Fiscal Quarter Report In CrossTab format
This report allows you to see a year at a glance and each quarter is broken down by quarter in four rows.




Timecard Module: Billable Timecards By Month / Week Report
This report allows you to view timecards that are billable broken down by month. It is further broken down by weeks of the month. Many weeks are spit across two months, so it is possible you will see two lines for week 23, if that week is broken across two months.



Payments Module: Payments By Month / Type & Payments Module: Payments By Day / Type
These reports allow you to see payments broken down into month or day and by type. The monthly report is more for analysis and the daily reports can be helpful in reconciling daily deposits.

FAQ: Blending Into An Update

QUESTION: How do I incorporate my changes in the version of InBizness I purchased with a new version that comes out? Are you sure my changes will be compatible with your new features.

ANSWER: A FileMaker Developer that offers open FileMaker solutions, has a more difficult enhancement path than others. That is because our users probably have already implemented design changes of their own. Their changes may not work well with our enhancements. We don’t have the ability to easily integrate the changes our clients have made to a previous version. There is no easy way around this problem.

As an open framework developer, all I can do is try to explain what is within each update. If you decide to purchase the update, there will need to be a blending of the two. In most cases, users have a copy of FileMaker Advanced and they harvest the code from the update and place it within their version of InBizness. After doing the appropriate testing, they roll out this new blended version to their users.

InBizness 2.7 Non Module Specific Overall Updates

Overall changes are not module specific and sometimes are not that grand on first look. This includes custom menu changes, value list updates, custom menus, global fields and the like. Again, not that grand but can have a huge benefit to the overall system.

New Searches custom menu to automatically take you to a saved search in an InBizness module. In the 2.7 update, we only added the saved searches for the purchase order module but that is just the tip of the iceberg and this feature is sure to grow over time.

Added the ability to click the icon in form and list views to quickly install the FileMaker menu set for Full Access users. So you don’t have to use the FileMaker Advanced custom menu option to get back to the standard FileMaker menus.

Added a new value list called Contact_type that has the options of client, lead or vendor.

Added a global field that has the company address information on one line, without any carriage returns. This was used in the reworking of many of the transaction printouts.

To help support more role based features, added fields to track what privilege set created and modified records in each table.

Added a new custom function from briandunning.com / Ilya Shuvalov called IsWebClient. This hasn’t been used within InBizness 2.7 but I imagine you can see where this is going in a future update. FileMaker Instant Web Publishing is a great feature but it has a few odd quirks that would likely require a unique layout for each module to support web enabling features. So being able to determine in a quick method if a user is using FileMaker or a web interface can become key in many of the navigation operations.

Added a button and script to allow the printing of topics from the InBizness help module.

Added a table and process to capture staff user session log in data.


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HERE ARE SOME SNAPSHOTS OF THE ABOVE LISTED UPDATES
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Here you can see the new custom search custom menu.


/>Here you can see the icon in the header in form and list views. This is now a button that will install the standard FileMaker menu set verses the InBizness custom menu set.


Here you can see the contact type value list. This helps you identify contacts based upon what module they are currently associated with.


Here you can see the new single line address global field that is used in the revised printouts for invoices and other transaction based modules.


Here you can see the fields we are using to track what privilege sets created and modified a record.


Here you can see a quick look at this new custom function for tracking the current client session.


Here you can see that we actually have printing capability to help topics. This would be used more for your internal help documentation for your customized version of InBizness. Most help information about InBizness (the framework application) is online.


Here you can see the table that we use to capture staff log in and log out history. This snapshot is from the IT dashboard.