New Labor Items spreadsheet and video and more

I hope your week is going well so far.

The last week or so around here has been a little crazy.

It was only 95 ° here in Las Vegas today, well below normal and the Gas prices have been getting lower. We filled up for $3.55 per gallon last Friday and have seen it as low $3.31 per gallon on the other side of town.

I usually make breakfast in the morning for my wife and me and a few days ago I did what I usually do.

I left my wife's breakfast on the counter and yelled upstairs to let her know it was ready.

Then I grabbed mine to sit down and watch TV.

She took longer than usual to come down. I was already finished when she walked over to her plate and found a plate full of ANTS! Oops…

So we spent the next few hours trying to eradicate them.

The next day as I'm making breakfast I noticed water in the kitchen sink. I thought it wasn’t draining because there were some plates on one side that were blocking the drain.

We removed the dishes and it still would not drain. So I grabbed the bathroom plunger and turned on the garbage disposal and stupidly tried to plunge the other side.

All of a sudden boom! The pipes burst, water goes spraying out the front of the cabinet, soaking my pants and flooding the cabinet under the sink and the floor.

Oh what Fun!!!

I took apart the pipes and used a 6 foot snake to try to clean it out, put it all back together, no go, tried multiple Liquid Plummer bottles, no go.

Finally got a hold of my landlord and she sent in the big guns drain cleaning service. He had to go in about 15 feet to the main drain and that did the trick.

Drama over…. For a few days.

So it’s about 6AM Monday morning and I’m downstairs in morning prayer and hear my 23 year old daughter coming downstairs to let the puppy “Kiba” out (Kiba means fang in Japanese).

A few minutes later I hear the door open and then a big bang, and the cats go flying, bells jingling and I’m thinking “what’s going on” So I look up, I don’t see my daughter, then I look behind me, the cats are staring towards the door, then I look down, and my daughter has collapsed on the floor.

I freak!

I jump up and she is laying there on her side, and the floor is hard tile, she is unconscious and her eyes are open.

As I keeled over her and starting asking if she was aright she slowly came back around.

Well thank God, it turns out she just fainted and after a while she was able to get up and eat something.

We figure it was just low blood sugar. She said as she was sitting out back waiting for the dog to finish his business she started feeling ill, like she wanted to lay down. She thought she could make it back inside but just couldn’t make it.

Scared me to no end… the sight of her laying is something I’ll probably never forget. You never want to see your child hurt in any way.

And now on to today's tip…

Shelly, one of our clients was looking for a report to show all the Labor hours and costs even if the Work Order was still open.

We did not include a time clock feature for labor items in TATEMS in order to keep it as simple as possible for technicians to use.

But due to popular demand we will be adding a way to track start and Stop times and dates on each labor item in a future
update.

In the meantime I created this spreadsheet that will let you see all the dates associated with each work order and the
associated labor so I created the spreadsheet profiled in the video below:

It’s called:

Labor on Work Orders Pending and Completed.

And it will link to you TATEMS data and display the following columns:

Equip #
Work Order #
Date Requested
Date To Complete By
Date Completed
First Name
Last Name
Labor Description
Labor Notes
Hours/Units
Cost Per H/U
Total Cost

You will need to have Microsoft Excel to use these spreadsheet and have it link to your TATEMS data.

The video also shows you what you will probably need to do in order to make it work on your computer if you are not running
Excel 2007 or 2010 or if you have a 64 bit version of Windows or if your TATEMS data is on a network then

see this video:

 

You can get the spreadsheet at our website it’s called:

TATEMS-LaborOnWorkOrders-PendingAndCompleted.xls

It’s ready for you online and ready to download here:

http://tatems.com/spreadsheets

It is spreadsheet number 60 in the list on that page.

I hope this tip has been helpful for you.

Have a great Weekend and a Happy 4th of July

Thanks Again

Marc

P.S. If you need a custom spreadsheet let me know below and if you are on Facebook please click the like button… If you do… actually like this post that is…

2 Quick New Videos… Fixing bad Odometer entries

If you missed it I also posted a Video last week showing you a couple of ways to handle Tools or Equipment that you keep on your Trucks or Vehicles

Fixing Odometer Entry Mistakes.

From a previous tip:

I had a customer call me with a weird problem today.

Whenever he ran his mileage report under Reports-More Reports Report Type: Equipment, then select the report called “Equipment Miles/Km Traveled – Hours Run”

he was getting a reading of -26066 miles traveled.

I did a quick scan of his entries via remote access and could not see what the problem was.

So I download a copy of his TATEMS data file so I could have a better look.

What I found surprised me. In the middle of all his entries he had lower odometer reading for a date of Jan 7 2800 instead of Jan 7, 2008
so the report results was always skewed. He also had a current entry April 1, 2009 that had a lower odometer reading by thousands of miles than the one entered just prior to it.

It's an easy fix but sometimes those miss entered numbers and dates are hard to spot.

So…

If you make a mistake, in order to correct it, you can click on the “Update Odometer and Hours” button.

Then you can click the “View All for This Equipment” button to find your mistake and delete it or change it.
After you have fixed it, click the “Update and Close” button.

In the short video below I demonstrate how to delete or edit An Odometer Enter that was entered incorrectly.

I hope this tip has been helpful for you.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Have a great weekend!

How to Track Tools or Equipment On-board your Truck or Vehicle

One of our new clients asked how he could track tools or equipment that is carried on a Septic Tank Truck…

A while back I sent out a couple of emails and then shot a Video that shows and describes to you how to track Tools or Equipment on-board your Truck or Vehicle but it's been buried on our main site.

So I decided to bring it out and re-edit the video, polish it up a bit and provide the text of the tip in this post as well

Here's the Video, it described at least 3 ways you can track Tools On Board:

And here are some written instructions that should help you too.

The simplest way would be to use the notes section for each piece of equipment and just list each tool or on-board equipment associated with the vehicle.

You could then print out all the notes for a piece of equipment by going to Reports-Current Equipment Reports->Notes

You can use that list to go out to the vehicle and verify everything that should be there.

You could also search for the tool to find out which truck it's on.

To do this you would probably want to use some kind of numbering system to identify each tool, especially if you have a lot of the same model of tool.

Then next to the “Search” button you would change the dropdown where it says “by Equipment Num” to Search “by Notes”

Another less desirable way would be to use the Driver History section of the Equipment summary screen. I would only recommend this if you are not currently using that section for actual driver history.

You can also enter each individual tool into TATEMS as a separate piece of equipment and in the “Location” dropdown you could enter the vehicle that it is currently in.

This would also allow you to keep a maintenance schedule for tools that need maintenance.

You could also search by “Location”. To search by Location you would change the dropdown in the search bar near the top of the screen next to the word “Filter” to “by Location”.

Then next to the word “Choose” there is a dropdown showing all the “Locations” in your database. If you were associating a particular tool with a particular vehicle then that vehicles number would show up as a “Location” to “Choose”

Once you “Choose” a Location in the search bar then click the “Search” button. To display all the Tools or whatever is at/in that “Location”

To display all your Equipment again in the Search results list you would change the “Filter” back to “Show All” then make sure the Search text box to the left of the “Search” button is empty then click the “Search” button again.

And…Wala! All your equipment shows in the list again.

I hope this has not been too confusing…

Have a great week and if you're on Facebook or Twitter be sure to Like or Tweet this post or use one of the free bookmarking service buttons we provide.

Oh ya, please leave a comment too!

All The Best!

Marc

P.S. In the video I mention using a separate empty database to store and track your tools on-board. I made a copy of an empty TATEMS database and renamed it, so it won't conflict with your default TATEMS database to: tatems2005be-Tools-On-Board.mdb then I zipped it up. If you would like to have it you can download it by clicking here