Currently Under Development for

Requests Modifications for Release 12

The Requests tables are being changed to make AA-SQL a CRM application. CRM applications are Customer Resource Management. These applications offer functions to aid in the tracking of individuals within a company. CRM tracks contact points with a prospect or customer.

CRM can answer many questions these are just a few. Have you mailed a catalog? When did you last email a catalog? How effective is your salesman at managing leads? What is the status of the warranty work? When should this person be contacted again? Who is to contact the customer? 

In past versions of AA-SQL it was necessary to have multiple customer records to email customer contacts within a company. Multiple email addresses could be stored in the customer record but retrieving them if a lot of addresses were stored was cumbersome.

Also, the person maintaining the email addresses would have to have access to the customer table. Customer table access is not desired for security reasons and because of the potential risk of inadvertent changes. By adding a Contacts table it is possible to maintain a "customer like" list for the purpose of mailing and other contact.

Contacts Table Please Email Support@udsgis.com with your comments

The fields in the above table will be used to track the contact personnel within a company. This record can be used in place of the customer record ordinarily used in conjunction with the Requests table. It is also laying the ground work for on line applications with user name and password information that will be encrypted before storing in an on line database.

Estimating Modifications for Release 12

Adding more computational fields to AA-SQL Estimating is one of the expected changes coming in release 12 of AA-SQL. Previous version of AA-SQL have factors available for Green Goods, Hard Goods, Equipment, Labor and Subcontract item types. This factor can be applied to the cost the calculate a sales price based on a single factor for each item type. Typicalthe factors could be 1.5 or 2.25 times the cost to determine the price for bid projects.

Release 12 will add the ability to apply two factors to the cost. The theory is that to get a price from a cost the two factors are needed. One if an overhead factor. The other is a profit margin. The overhead factor would represent the cost of the company base costs to the estimate. This should provide a more technically correct comparison of the price and cost.

If an overhead factor is 50% and a profit factor is 50% then in all previous versions of AA you would have had to multiply 1.5 times 1.5 outside the estimating system to come up with a single cost factor of 2.25. Although mathematically it is equivalent to a 1.5 overhead and a 1.5 profit margin, it is more difficult to determine your actual profit on a job because the overhead could possibly change during the year or the profit margin could be adjusted because of the job type. A single cost to profit report may not represent those other factors.

Look for this section to describe changes to tables in the near future. Your comments are appreciated. Contact support@udsgis.com with your comments.