The main screen

Let's start with some basics. This is the Home page, which is what you see when you first come into the system. This contains useful information such as the customers you need to contact, and the jobs to be delivered today – and those which have missed their delivery dates - and other maintenance tasks for your attention - just to remind you. You can come back to it at any time by clicking at the top left where it says home page.

The left hand side is the menu. If you make a selection from it the rest of the screen changes to reflect the item you have chosen.

At the bottom of the window are a number of activities associated with this subject, but which don't refer to an individual existing example. In this case we have:

When you make your selection at the top, you'll see a list of the items selected. If, say, you selected 'Litho presses' you would see a list of litho presses. If (in Jobs and estimates) you selected "Live jobs" you would see a list of live jobs. In fact you can see a number of columns of data, which you can see if you scroll it left and right using the scroll bar at the bottom. You can also sort it into different orders by clicking on the column header. You can export the list of items to csv or in Excel format by clicking on the

symbol at the top right hand side.

At the very top of the screen, on the title bar, there is a search box which enables you to limit the selection of the items shown, which looks like:

You can start to enter the job title here - or the estimate number or job number, and limit the search to items whose title includes what you have typed, and/or if you have entered a number, those jobs which have matching estimate or job numbers. Once you start typing here, the selection is not limited to your chosen selection of jobs - in other words even if you have selected, say, live jobs, if you enter '123' you will see the record whose job number is 123, as well as estimate number 123, and the job whose title is 'Sale of goods at 123 Abercrombie Lane' - even if they are not all live jobs.

If this isn't enough for your search, you can use the advanced search screen. This is launched by clicking the word 'Search' next to the Excel icon at the top right/

You can build up complex searches by pressing

to add new conditions, and you can remove conditions by pressing

. The conditions you enter limit the jobs shown in the centre column.

These give different 'views' when they are clicked. 'Right' puts the selected records in a column down the middle, with a preview pane on the right.

'Bottom' and 'Off' spreads the selected records across the screen so that you can see more data columns, and in the case of 'Bottom' puts the preview pane underneath. They also open a 'Job Statistics' window containing two new features. (If you can't see this window, then somebody must have clicked 'Hide statistics'. To show them again, try right-clicking a job in the job list, and you should see 'Show statistics' as an option).

Here you will see, in alphabetical order, a list of all the customers represented by the currently displayed list of jobs. If you scroll to select a customer, the jobs in the centre column are limited solely to jobs for that customer. You can clear the selection by clicking the X to the right of the search box at the top.

This divides the jobs into four quartiles either by price, or if you click the drop-down arrow next to 'Price distribution', you can divide by the jobs profit, added value or quantity. The actual range of each quartile is printed underneath it.

Note that the quartiles are by aggregate value - e.g. for Price distribution, the jobs which make up 25% of the total value that selection of jobs will be shown - the results can be surprising - a few jobs can have a large effect! The number of jobs in each quartile is represented by the height of the column.

When you select a specific item you can double click it to open it, or right click it for a range of activities you can perform it (you can also right click a range of items)

The list will vary depending on what you select, but for instance, if your have Jobs and Estimates selected, you'll see something like:

and Delete deletes the item (with safeguards - e.g. you can't delete a live job, you have to invoice it or un-confirm it first).

The links you will see will be those that are appropriate to the specific items chosen - e.g. you can't confirm a job that is already confirmed, but you can deliver it.

Group by: If you click this you will see that you can group the selected records (in the case of jobs by date, customer etc.)

The left hand icon allows you (if you have the appropriate privileges) to unlock jobs - e.g. if somebody's PC has crashed, it might leave the job in which he was working locked.

The next icon is the button for the 'Driver's seat'. This provides a 'dashboard' utility to show visually how the company is performing.

Next is the 'customer present' toggle. Clicking it will make the customer turn round and face you. In that position the assumption is that the customer is watching you - i.e. looking over your shoulder. In this position, if you are quoting a job, the markup percentage will not appear on the calculations tab of the job desktop, and if you are confirming a job and there is a customer credit problem flagged, instead of getting the message "There is a credit problem with this customer" you will instead get a more neutral message about the configuration of the file!