Daynote ,Svenson

MM-xx     Thursday

2000-01-19

It's mainly cloudy and dry, with temperatures down to a cool 3°C. With mainly dry I mean there were a few short patches of rain but nothing remarkable. That there was no sun at all isn't remarkable either.

We got into a discussion, first with Jan and Pieter included but continued later with only Theo and Peter (and Ronny of course). The issue this time was the way we handle offers. We don't have a separate program to create offers in TeleSales, only an order entry program. At the end of entering an order the user can decide to save it as either an order or an offer (or even as a contract). The problem is that we store offers in different database tables from orders.
For an order we save (amongst other things) the unit_sales_price, the quantity and the taxable_value. On screen we present these fields in addition to the net_value (unit_sales_price times quantity) and the amount of the conditions (net_value minus the taxable_value). For offers we only store the unit_sales_price and the quantity, so we cannot display the taxable_value not the amount of the conditions. Currently we display zeroes. Of course we can recalculate all the values, and we do that just before saving the order/offer or when the user requests it via a button.

This seems to be confusing for users. And really it is a bit confusing. They are entering data and just before they save it all the values are correctly displayed. If they subsequently open the order/offer again some of the data seems to be lost sometimes (if it was saved as an order all values are saved, is it was saved as an offer some values are lost). To add to the confusion it is possible to have order lines with zeroes as correct values (somewhat like Tektronix giving black toner for free with its colour printers, if you order it you get zeroes for prices).
After more than two hours discussing we came to the decision to recalculate before displaying an order/offer. I assume we all knew that that was the only way to get the correct values displayed in all conditions. It only took about two hours to get it worked out.

While we were discussing Robert called from Belgium with a problem. When I finally called him back he had solved the problem along with some other problems. We send out PRS'es (Problem Report System)....

<asside> it should be a PR from Problem Report but they are store in the PRS and are identified with a PRS-number which consists of "PRS" followed by a five digit number. So we are always talking about a PRS in stead of a PR </asside>

Yea, I like that. You just wait and the problems disappear.

Adios