What's New in MainBoss 4.0: Changes to Reports

This web page lists a number changes to reports in MainBoss Advanced 4.0. For other changes, see:

• MainBoss Advanced 4.0 Overview
• Miscellaneous Minor Changes

New and Revised Reports

A number of changes have been made in reports, including the introduction of several new reports:

• For requests, work orders and purchase orders, a new State History Summary report combines the old State History and Status Stastics reports. (The old reports have been discontinued.)
• For requests, work orders and purchase orders, there are now new reports which organize information by assignee. For example, Work Orders | Reports | Work Order Summary by Assignee creates a work order summary which can be organized by assignee.
  
  Note that grouping by assignee can introduce redundancy into calculated sums (both money totals, e.g. total work order cost, and time totals, e.g. work order duration). For example, if John Smith and Mary Jones both work on a work order, the same work order will appear under "assigned to John Smith" and under "assigned to Mary Jones". This means that MainBoss can't get accurate overall totals by adding up numbers in all the work orders in the John Smith group plus all the work orders in the Mary Jones group. Therefore, MainBoss does not attempt to calculate such totals.
• It is now possible to organize reports according to the actual date that a request, work order, or purchase order was created, opened, or closed. For example, by comparing work order creation and close dates to such data fields as "Work Start Date" and "Work End Date", you can compare actual start and end dates to the estimated start and end dates specified when the work order was created.
• Many reports have expanded capabilities, including more possibilities for grouping, sorting and filtering, as well as new checkboxes for displaying information (in the report's Advanced section).
• A new Work Orders | Reports | Chargeback Activities report lets you see full information from the line items of chargeback records.
• Chargebacks now become inactive when the associated work order becomes inactive. In this way, old chargebacks will disappear from the chargeback list.
• A new Items | Reports | Item Pricing report lets you print information on price quotes and actual prices paid for inventory items.
• In previous releases, price quotes were omitted from drop-down lists when they got too old (as indicated by the active/inactive time duration set for work orders, purchase orders, etc.). Now, price quotes are never considered too old to be listed.
• There are now reports for each possible type of work order resource (items, hourly inside, hourly outside, per job inside, per job outside, and miscellaneous expenses) as well as a report that deals with all types of resources combined. These reports are available under Work Orders | Reports | Work Order Resources. A similar set of reports are available for tasks under Unit Maintenance Plans | Reports | Task Resources.
  
  Some of these reports replace old reports (e.g. Labor History). The new reports provide a more consistent method of reporting this information.
• A new Task Summary report is available under Unit Maintenance Plans | Reports. It provides the same sort of information about tasks that Work Orders Summary provides about work orders.
• A new Maintenance Timings report is available under Unit Maintenance Plans | Reports. It provides information about Maintenance Timing records.
• Grouping options have been added to many reports that didn't previously have them.
• In summary reports, when MainBoss calculates overall totals of time and/or money, MainBoss also calculates averages. For example, in "Work Order Summary", if MainBoss calculates the overall duration of a set of work orders, MainBoss will also calculate the average duration. The average(s) are printed out on one line; the total(s) are printed out on the next line.
• A new Meter Readings History report can display a list of past meter readings for any meter.
• The Unit Replacement Forecast Report has been substantially enhanced. Differences will be most noticeable with units that have blank information fields in the Value section of the unit record—MainBoss now attempts to fill in the blanks with reasonable defaults. For full information, see the online help.
• Items | Reports | Items in Temporary Storage lists any items that are currently in temporary storage locations.
• The Unit Maintenance History report now only takes into account work orders which have already been closed. If you want a report that includes information on work orders that haven't been closed yet, use the Work Order History report, grouping by unit and setting other options as appropriate.
• A new option Report width in pages appears in the Advanced section of every window for producing reports. By default, reports are one page wide (where the page width is dictated by your current printer settings). If a report contains many fields, you can set the value of the field to a number higher than 1; for example, if you set the field to 2, each line in the report will be two pages wide.
  
  In a report preview, you can simply use the scroll bars to look at lines that are too long to fit on the screen. In a printed report, each line of the report will be the given number of pages wide. For example, if you specify a report width of 2 pages, each line will be two printed pages wide. You might then tape pages together to get a readable report.
• Reports related to purchase orders have a new filtering option: "Completed normally". A purchase order is considered to have been completed normally if all the line items were received at the cost and quantity that actually appeared on the purchase order. If, for example, some items were put on back order rather than being delivered, the purchase order would not be completed normally.
  
  Note that "completed normally" doesn't depend on whether the purchase order is open or closed. A purchase order may still be open, even if it has been completed normally. In fact, you can use the "Completed normally" option to find out which open purchase orders can be closed because they've been completed.
• The report that used to be called "Accounting Transactions" is now obtained by clicking the Print button in Administration | Accounting. The table viewer now includes a column showing the type of transaction for each entry.
• Numerous data fields and other objects have been renamed. This includes the following:
  • The heading of the control panel is now "MainBoss Overview" and the section listing your assignments is now called "My Assignment Overview".
  • Right-clicking on entries in the control panel brings up a menu of actions that can be performed on the associated table viewer. For example, right-clicking on the control panel entry for "Units" brings up a menu that includes operations for expanding or collapsing some or all of the hierarchical entries shown in the "Units" table viewer. You can get a similar menu by right-clicking on any entry in the table viewer itself.
  • Units now have a value called "Unit Path" which is essentially the full name of the unit, including any parents it might have. For example, suppose LOCATION1 contains a unit named UNIT1. Then UNIT1's "Unit Path" is "UNIT1@LOCATION1". "Unit Path" appears in various locations throughout MainBoss (e.g. for specifying a unit on work orders).
  • In the control panel, the old Data History entry has been renamed Database Management.
  • Expense categories and expense models are now hidden unless you have licensed the MainBoss Accounting module. If this inconveniences any current MainBoss users, please contact MainBoss Support.
  • The report that used to be called "Accounting Cost Center Report" has been renamed "Accounting Ledger".
• The output for printing expense models has been improved.

In addition, the Export Data operation (from the Export Data button) has been substantially changed. The operation exports data in XML format. In previous versions, this data included all the information that might be generated for the given report, regardless of the options that you've specified. Now, the exported data only includes the information that would be included in the report if you actually printed it.

For example, previous versions of MainBoss ignored any options you might specify in the Filters section—you saw all information from all possible records. Now, you only get information from records that satisfy your Filters criteria.

Field names in the XML now reflect column names and table names as they appear in the SQL database. Each field name is a concatenation of SQL names, unless the name has to be truncated because of XML's name limits (maximum 128 characters for a name).

Charts

Many new charts have been introduced to display information in an easy-to-understand graphical format.

For example, Work Orders | Charts | Average Work Order Duration by Grouping creates a bar graph showing the average duration of work orders as grouped by some option you specify. You might ask for average duration of work orders grouped by work category; the chart would then have a bar for each work category, and the length of each bar would represent the average duration of work orders in that category. Similarly, you might group by location, or unit category, or month, or many other possibilities.

Registered MainBoss customers can obtain the latest version of MainBoss by clicking here.

This version of MainBoss requires license keys dated January 1, 2015 or later. Keys for earlier releases will be considered out-of-date. For appropriate license keys, contact support@mainboss.com.