OFFICE EXPRESS HELP ASSISTANT

Professional Software for Professionals

Scheduling Jobs Part 2

SCHEDULING A JOB THAT IS DONE ONCE A YEAR

If you didn't put a checkmark in the box from the previous screen, this is the next page the wizard will display. We will cover the fields in the wizard page here…

If you know the exact date the job will be done, enter it in the Date field. Most of the time you will leave the date field blank.

Next choose a Job Code for this job. If you are not familiar with job codes, review the section on About Job Codes.

The next fields are Price and Tax Rate. If you haven't defined the tax rates for your area review the lesson on Getting Started at the beginning of the tour. When you are done with this page in the Wizard, click the Next button in the Wizard to continue.

SCHEDULING A REPEATING JOB

The image below is the page of the wizard that you will see if you checked that the job is done more than once. Because the job is done more than once the wizard will need to know some information on how to reschedule the job. We will cover only the fields that are unique to this situation.

The Start Date is an arbitrary date Office Express uses when rescheduling jobs each year. At the begining of each year, Office Express reschedules all your customer jobs automatically. When a job is done more than once a year, the start date is used to set the next date during the rescheduling process. Note that the date is arbitrary and does not need to be the exact date. If you season begins in March, set the Start Date to 3/1.

The Next Date field is the date the job is scheduled to be done next. If you are not sure of the date, put a 'ballpark' date in this field. You can change the date later on.

The Yearly Countdown and Left this Year fields are counters for how many times you do the job each year and how many are left to do. For example, if you have a contract with a customer to do 30 weekly maintenances, after the 30 have been completed the customer will no longer show up on your maintenance route sheets.

The Frequency in Days field and the Skip Weekends? field are for calculating the Next date each time the job is done. If you do the job every 10 days then enter 10 in the Frequency field.

If you want Office Express to move the Next Date to the next Monday if the Next Date falls on a weekend, put a checkmark in the Skip Weekends? check box.

The Max Per Year and the Price Over Max control the price of the job. If you want the job price to change after a certain amount of times, enter the number of times in the Max Per Year and the new price in the Price Over Max field. For example, you could have the price for 5 visits at $25.00 and all visits after that the customer would get the job for $20.00.

OK. The toughest part is over. Don\'t worry too much about getting the dates right, Office Express has features that will allow you to quickly change the dates for all customers at once.