Cogitate Inc Newsletters Here you can find archives of our newsletters and other important information. 8 July July 2016 Newsletter By SuperUser Account newsletter 0 Comment Pursuit Of Maintenance A little bit ago we were working on the development of the new inventory and work order/preventative maintenance program. One of the road commissions supervisors asked us to look at the VMRS. VMRS? What is that you may ask like we did. It is an industry standard used for vehicle maintenance developed and maintained by the ATA (American Trucking Association), but let them describe the system better. Developed by the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC), the leading voice on industry best practices, VMRS™ is the universal language of maintenance reporting—the vital link between the shop floor and management. ATA’s VMRS helps you create a single process to: Simplify, Clarify and Unify with ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards Create a Single Concise Method to Manage Fleet Assets and Analyze Maintenance Operations and Costs Document when, why, and how maintenance is performed on equipment. Improve equipment and parts inventory control. Identify where money is spent. Help control costs and create greater efficiency. Manage a wide variety of equipment, including trucks of all types cars, buses, vans, construction equipment, and more. We would like to fully embrace the methods and codes that this system entails. But before we spend any more time, is this what the maintenance and inventory people want? So please check out the VMRS system and let us know, via email to president@cogitateinc.com, what you think. George Loescher, President Read Full July 2016 Newsletter Pursuit Of Maintenance A little bit ago we were working on the development of the new inventory and work order/preventative maintenance program. One of the road commissions supervisors asked us to look at the VMRS. VMRS? What is that you may ask like we did. It is an industry standard used for vehicle maintenance developed and maintained by the ATA (American Trucking Association), but let them describe the system better. Developed by the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC), the leading voice on industry best practices, VMRS™ is the universal language of maintenance reporting—the vital link between the shop floor and management. ATA’s VMRS helps you create a single process to: Simplify, Clarify and Unify with ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards Create a Single Concise Method to Manage Fleet Assets and Analyze Maintenance Operations and Costs Document when, why, and how maintenance is performed on equipment. Improve equipment and parts inventory control. Identify where money is spent. Help control costs and create greater efficiency. Manage a wide variety of equipment, including trucks of all types cars, buses, vans, construction equipment, and more. We would like to fully embrace the methods and codes that this system entails. But before we spend any more time, is this what the maintenance and inventory people want? So please check out the VMRS system and let us know, via email to president@cogitateinc.com, what you think. George Loescher, President Read Full July 2016 Newsletter Attached Files July 2016 Newsletter 910.32 KB Related Articles March 2016 Newsletter The Windows 10 Free Upgrade Is Nearing Its End! Windows 10 was released on July 29, 2015 and is a highly recommended operating system upgrade. Microsoft is currently helping out by giving Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 users the chance to upgrade to Windows 10 for FREE until July 2016. With that being said, there is a limitation to this upgrade offer: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows RT, and all Enterprise versions of Windows are not included in this upgrade offer. Where does Cogitate stand on this? We recommend that if you are looking for new hardware in the near future to purchase new PCs with Windows 10 already installed. For those of us who are not looking for new hardware, if you are running Windows 7 then we recommend performing the Windows 10 upgrade as soon as possible so that you can take advantage of Microsoft’s great offer if you qualify. All of our current software including the PFA Works Timecard application is supported on Windows 10. If you would like to learn more about Windows 10 and the FREE upgrade offer, please take a look at the following link: https:// www.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-10-faq Read Full March 2016 Newsletter July 2014 Newsletter Budget Calc Updates For those of you that are using the Budget Calc Reports, we have made a couple of changes to the program. The first change we made is to make the first column, usually used as the description column, to 250 characters. If the description ends up wider than the standard column width, it will now wrap to the next row. The other change we have made is related to printing with bars. As many of you know, in the past you needed to access the parameters tab in the print screen to answer the question on whether to print with bars (which means shading every other line so it’s easier to follow numbers across the columns). We have now made an option under the EDIT TITLES area where you can check the box to keep the shading all the time. Once you click that box, you will also need to SAVE the regular file so the shading becomes permanent. We have made a short video for you to see these changes. You can check it out in the training section of Pro Fund Accounting under Budgets. If you have any additional suggestions for enhancing Budget Calc, please feel free to send them to Julie at julie@cogitateinc.com. Read Full July 2014 Newsletter July 2015 Newsletter The Economics Of Hamurabi Yes, that’s not the correct spelling. It should be Hammurabi. The shortened version is because very early computers only allowed 8 character file names. That was back in the day when every byte was a precious commodity and Hamurabi was a just a small computer game. The game was very simple, the player must tell Hamurabi how to allocate resources and manage the city of Sumeria. A city has population, acreage for farming and grain in storage. The player can buy or sell land. More land needs more population to tend it. More land brings in more food which can attract more people or can be used for storage. Droughts, rat infestations, and variable harvests are random events which are beyond the player’s control. If one is wise, the kingdom grows and prospers, if not, people starve to death and the kingdom shrivels. It was remarkably difficult to play wisely even with the trivial number of parameters, and the game would perhaps mock you for starving so many people or maybe make you emperor because you made your kingdom prosper. It was Econ 101, or maybe Econ 1750 BC. In fact, emperors, kings, chiefs, dictators and others played this game throughout recorded history and even up to the present day. There was no rule book or set of theories to guide the leaders of humanity on how to make the best economic decisions. Until 1776. In an amazing coincidence, Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in the same year that America declared its independence. He discovered and explained an economic theory and America turned out to be the laboratory that proved it. Simply put, the best decisions for an economy are made by the sum of all individuals each making decisions that they deem best for themselves. He called that the "invisible hand" that would guide an economy to the best outcome. A necessary ingredient for people making their own decisions is freedom and that is why America became the laboratory and our prosperity is based upon the remarkable success and power of the "invisible hand." All this is generally accepted over much of the world but not everywhere. There are many countries where economies are run by the direction of strong men, politbureaus and even kings. They believe their decisions are best and they try to handcuff Adam Smith’s "invisible hand." There are also many individuals across the world who enviously look at the top down decision making because they see high speed rail systems, titanic sky scrapers and all the citizens happily working towards a single goal. But all this economic theory and practice is giving me the same headache I got in Econ in college. I don’t know how anyone gets through this stuff without going crazy. I guess I should just remain an invisible part of the "invisible hand" and do what I think is best for me. Right now that means I’m going to play some mindless computer game to ease my mind. But not Hamurabi! Read Full July 2015 Newsletter January 2016 Newsletter Changing Service Codes UtilAbility provides several utilities for various tasks that aren’t necessarily part of your typical day to day operations. We have talked about some of these utilities before. Many of them were designed to allow you to make changes to several records at once, where it would otherwise be difficult or time consuming to perform these changes manually. Today we are going to discuss the Change Service Code utility. This utility does exactly what its title says. However, this isn’t necessarily as simple as it sounds… Have you ever thought about changing the code you use for a particular service? Maybe the code isn’t working very well for some reason or you were never happy with the one that was setup in the first place and you simply want to use another one. You may have thought about changing such a code, and then decided that it’s not worth the trouble. To make a change like this you would have to change a lot of records from many different tables. In fact, changing a service code currently affects as many as nine different tables within the UtilAbility database and some of these may include thousands of records that would be affected by your change. Fortunately, UtilAbility does all this for you. You don’t have to think about tables and records let alone make any manual changes. You simply supply the old service code and the new one. UtilAbility will change all references from the old code to the new one in every table and every record as necessary. You can find the Change Service Code utility and other helpful utilities under Tools|Utilities from the menu on the main screen in UtilAbility. Please take a look at these as they may save you a lot of time and effort. If you have any questions about Changing Service Codes or any of the other utilities, please see the UtilAbility help documentation or contact our support staff for more information. Read Full January 2016 Newsletter April 2016 Newsletter Pro Fund Accounting Evolution I was at the coffee shop and was surprised to see how young many of the patrons were. Looking around the place and observing the next generation interacting with their devices, I wondered about the lack of person to person contact that is missing. As I was finishing my large overpriced coffee and remarking to myself ‘I just don’t get it’, I remembered when my father would say that about me when I would play the Atari videogames on the TV for hours. Since the generations have evolved, we are beginning the evolution of the entire Pro Fund Accounting software. The last few months many of the changes we made have been related to the ‘insides’ to enable the software to gradually evolve. A key component of the changes will be the input we get from our customers. I know you are all very busy and do not want a lot of change in your life. With this in mind, we will be evolving small pieces of Pro Fund Accounting. Communication with you will be through email, webinars, real phone calls and yes, even text messages, about each piece that will be changed. We want to allow you time to share your thoughts so we can factor those into the software before we change it. This brings me to the first part we will evolve and that is security. We will be sending out more information soon, so be ready. Read Full April 2016 Newsletter May 2016 Newsletter FIXING POST CASH RECEIPT MISTAKES in UTILABILITY If you accidentally make a mistake while posting cash receipts, there a few simple ways you can correct them. Below are some common mistakes and how to correct them. One of the more common mistakes is posting your receipts using the incorrect effective date. As you may know we suggest separating your receipt dates into separate journals since the journal title is automatically created based on the date of your first entry. If you discover that you are using the wrong effective date while you are still posting cash receipts, rather than changing the effective date and having multiple dates within the same journal, go ahead and continue posting the rest of them using the same date. After you are finished and have closed your journal, you can run the Change Various Journal Values utility to change the effective date for all the receipts within the journal along with the title of the journal to reflect the corrected effective date. Another common mistake is posting an incorrect amount. If you post an incorrect amount to an account and you catch it right way while you are still in your post session, you can simply undo the posting for that account and then repost it. Please note that this will remove any postings to that account within that journal. If you have already closed your journal, you can simply modify the incorrect receipt transaction(s) within Transaction Maintenance. Finally, you may have accidentally posted the receipt to the incorrect account. If you catch that right away while you are still in your post session, you can simply undo the posting for that account and then post the receipt to the correct account. If you have already closed your journal, you can simply delete the incorrect receipt transaction(s) within Transaction Maintenance. You can locate any transaction using UtilAbility Central. You can then reopen the Post Cash Receipts utility and post the receipt to the correct account. While this will be posted in a separate journal, you can still group your receipts by date to include the corrected receipt with the other ones from the original journal when running reports. UtilAbility allows you to easily correct mistakes; however, if you have any problems or questions please review our UtilAbility help documentation or give us a call and we will be happy to help you. Read Full May 2016 Newsletter Comments are closed.