Fleet4Fire Developer Update #3

Fleet4Fire Developer Update #3

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4 min read

Hey Everyone!

The end of the year came and went in the blink of an eye. As of January 1st, we're still moving forward with Fleet4Fire in Beta Testing. Sentinel has been putting our sales tools through the wringer, preparing for the full commitment to QuickBooks Online. Below are the changes we've made over the last several weeks as a result of this testing.

Invoicing Role

Through testing, we found that the number of roles we originally had just didn't sufficiently cover the dynamic structure at each one of your dealerships. To better segregate some of the business's proprietary information from users that don't need it but do need to be able to generate receivables for your company, we created the "Invoicing" role. This role will allow a user access to invoicing flow without being able to get into the Business Reporting module, as well as not being inappropriately elevated to other admin-like functions.

Order Printing

There was a clear need for testing confirmation/comparison purposes to be able to print proposals, sales orders, and purchase orders. Now in the top right of each of these orders, you will see a "Print" button which will take you to a new window with your document ready to print. Along with this change, we altered the flow for printing invoices and work orders to follow suit by pushing the document to a new window for printing.

Save Invoice

We also saw a need to be able to submit receivables without directly sending those documents to your customer. Now all invoices will need to be saved by clicking the "Save" button in the top right. When the invoice has been saved, the ID in the top right will be updated to reflect this invoice being saved. Once the invoice has been saved, printing and email submission functions will be visible and available similar to the previous functionality.

Task Templates

Service saw some love alongside all the sales changes we've been making. We noticed that there are a set of operations that every dealership performs, and typically these operations are performed on a regular period. This led us to develop templated tasks. Along the top of the service module is a button "Template Manager" that will allow users to create tasks as a template which will be available for selection when creating a new work order, or when editing an existing work order. Selecting a templated task will prefill all of the task's data from the template, as well as pull in any parts associated with the template into the "Parts Requested" field. This task can then be added to the work order as a normal task.

Scheduled Events

Templated tasks then were fed into our new maintenance contract/maintenance scheduling system. We reworked the old contract system in its entirety to better fit the recurring need of operations. To set up a scheduled maintenance event, navigate to the specific vehicle in question. When viewing the vehicle's information, there is a tab labeled "Schedule" with a button "Add Scheduled Event". Clicking "Add Scheduled Event" will take the user to a screen to write out tasks (or select from the templates) and set a frequency and start date for those tasks. After a scheduled event has been created, the events will be marked upcoming as they near their next date in the frequency as well as spawn a notification to schedule the work, allowing your service managers and dispatchers a clear view of upcoming pump tests, ladder tests, or any other scheduled event in the Service Module.

Apparatus Information > Schedule > Scheduled Events

Contact Rework

The latest major change we've made has to do with the CRM piece of Fleet4Fire. For the longest time, contacts could only have a single email and a single phone number. After many requests, we restructured contacts such that now a contact can have as many phone numbers or emails as necessary. To view a contact's additional emails or phone numbers, hover over the label in the Customers table to see the value. When attaching additional phone numbers and emails, ensure the different addresses and numbers are labeled appropriately for selection on orders.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading! Going forward, these updates will return to a monthly frequency but as features are released or changed, we will be releasing much smaller and more digestible feature overviews to accompany those updates. Please subscribe if you would like to receive these larger Developer Update posts, or if you'd like to receive the feature overview releases as they come out!

Jake Kowa
President & Founder
Fleet 4, LLC
jakekowa@fleet4.net
https://fleet4.net
(314)
937-5253, ext. 01

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