Motive Power ®

Free Version

Features

Videos

FAQ

Support

Versions

Service

Dealers

Versions

The current shipping version of Motive Power is 3.5.10.
 

Motive Power 3.5.0

• New Feature - The database engine is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express.
• New Feature - Interface to the WorldPac speedDIAL online parts catalog. You can create estimates and build POs at the same time directly from the parts section of the current work order.

V3.5.1

• Internal use only

V3.5.2

• Improvement – Updated the Help file for all changes and added more WorldPac documentation.
• Improvement – Italicized column headings in Reports – Parts – WorldPacParts to indicate sortability.
• Bug Fix – Stopped the RTE that occurred in the WorldPac interface if you deleted the entry in the seconds field in Settings – Third Party – WorldPac.

V3.5.3

• Improvement – Additional information added to Help system.
• Improvement – Renamed Help file to MotivePower3.chm again to accommodate our 3.5 beta users.
• Bug Fix – You can’t delete the WorldPac vendor from MotivePower while the speedDIAL interface is enabled.

V3.5.4

• Internal use only

V3.5.5

• Bug fix – Corrected an error that sometimes caused the Sales Recap Report to miss some of the lines on the weekly and daily reports.
• Bug Fix – Fixed a problem that occurred in the Production Recap when the group selector was set to None.
• Bug Fix - Fixed several places in Settings where a RTE 13 occurred when blanking out a field and then immediately hitting a top row button. This occurs if the user did not do anything to commit the update, as explained in the Rules for a Happy Motive Power Experience. The original data gets restored when you don’t do anything to commit a change to blank. SQL Server is the data engine used and SQL Server does not always tolerate completely blank fields.

V3.5.6

• Improvement – Made change when looking for the get latest invoice function to be sure the latest invoice has mileage entered. If the last invoice was a parts only invoice without mileage the mileage interval calculations might be off.
• Bug Fix – Entering a single quote as part of a search for a catalog item would cause a run time error. Using the same search from within Work Orders had no problem.
• Improvement – Updated Help for this bug fix and added details on Workload balancing and job dispatch.

V3.5.7

• Bug Fix – Found a long-time bug where the wrong operation code was being reported for tech time in some cases. The tech module could be “gamed” when a tech without permissions used the station of a tech with permissions to add himself to a job he was not authorized to do. Since there was no permission to perform a certain operation code that time clock entry would get ignored when the tech report was made. There was no problem with the service writer module.

V3.5.8

• Improvement – Working on version 3.5.7 we found a few other things to tighten up in the manual entry section of the time clock.
• Improvement – Too many users were updating an old employee to a new name instead of adding a new employee and deleting the old employee's permission. This leads to confusion when looking at labor analysis because some of the old employee's jobs seem to have been done by the new worker. We added a scary message to make it apparent you should not do that when adding new workers.
• Bug Fix – The Comments button on the vehicle history screen sometimes failed to display all of the comments.
• Improvement – Updated Tool tips on the Parts line of Work Orders.

V3.5.9

• Improvement – Changed the LogAllOut sign in window to be different from the regular Motive Power sign in window. Some users thought they were in the wrong place when they brought up Log All Out.
• Improvement – Changed the default parts finder search to use the actual oldest and newest dates from invoice history and the parts catalog instead of starting at 1/1/2000 and ending at the current date.
• Improvement – For users that purchase Motive Power by the work order we changed the warning to display the number of work orders remaining. We had different methods depending on how many work orders were available, version, etc. Now there is just one method that counts odwn starting at work orders remaining.

V3.5.10

• Improvement – Enhanced the sort on the Techs directory to subsort on WOID and then Job Sequence. This means that Tech screen will display all work in exactly the same order as seen on the Service Writer screens.
• Improvement – Added a feature to Motive Power Helper to let you enter the name of the Motive Power server computer if the automated search does not display it for you. Many networks have third party security that blocks the built in Windows tools from working properly.
• Improvement – Added information about the Motive Power Helper change and Windows 8 to the Help system.

V3.5.11

• New Feature - Added the ability to block certain job titles from displaying in the work order drop down list. This is done by checking the new obsolete box shown in each job title in the Settings section.
• Improvement – Reformatted the Daily Summary report. Changed the order so the Sales Tax report is second. Changed the text for each section to start on a new page and supplied footers for each page. The changes increased the reliability of the Techs Summary..
• Improvement – Changed the internal formatting of dates in the Excel exports so that dates sort properly when used in Pivot Tables. Previously sorts within years worked right but sorts across years did not.
• Improvement – Updated the Help system to give more detail on modifying the time clock. Users were updating existing entries when they meant to be adding new ones.

Motive Power 3.0

• New Feature - Work Orders Task is Multi-User - More than one user can update the same open ticket at the same time. Any conflicts are logged and can be displayed later. Instead of a system-wide default service writer, Motive Power assigns the current user as the service writer for new tickets.

• New Feature - Parts-only Jobs - You can designate any job on an open ticket as "parts-only," meaning that the job can have no labor dollars, timeclock entries, or sublet items. Parts-only job scoring will never raise warnings about labor or sublet profitability.

• New Feature - Integrated Catalog - The catalog (used for parts pricing) is now inside Motive Power. In earlier versions, it was external.

• New Feature - Streamlined Process for Starting Tickets - It's much easier for you to start new tickets. The vehicle finder has been streamlined, you can start a new customer or vehicle more easily, and you can move an existing vehicle to a different customer during the process.

• New Feature - Access to GarageKeeper Megadisk - You can now import your GarageKeeper Megadisk invoices so that Motive Power can display their contents with each vehicle's invoice history.

• New Feature - More Capable EMail - You can set two new parameters for outgoing email: the SMTP port number (previously fixed at 25) and SMTP Authentication Protocol (previously CRAM protocol).

• New Feature - Easier to Add New Job Titles - It's faster and easier for Service Writers to add a new job title while working on a ticket. You no longer need to go through the Settings screen.

• New Feature - Easier to Add New Customers - It's faster and easier for Service Writers to add a new customer while working on a ticket. You no longer need to go through the Customer screen.

• New Feature - Job Sequence - You can now specify the order in which jobs are displayed and printed on open tickets.

• New Feature - One Executable - Instead of separate Manager and Tech programs, Motive Power 3 has a single executable. The permission setting for Service Writer governs how the Work Orders task operates for each user.

• New Feature - Enhanced Parts Search - The parts search facility within Work Orders now includes parts from your Catalog, which you can choose to copy to the current ticket.

• New Feature - Parts Report Within Work Orders Task - Service Writers can view and print a list of the parts on the current ticket from inside the Work Orders task, without going to the Reports task.

• New Feature - Customer Export - You can export selected customers and vehicles to Microsoft Excel.

• New Feature - Job Description Shown as Tool Tip - When you let the mouse hover over a job title in the list of jobs on the current ticket, Motive Power displays the description of that job. This helps you find the job you want to edit on long tickets with lots of jobs.

V3.0.1

• Improvement - In work orders : added tool tips to the parts and sublet bar, search both paid invoices and parts catalog for parts to use on this job, find sublets from paid invoices for use on the current job.
• Bug Fix - In start new customer the titles were cut off and some of the fields were too small
• Improvement - In search for old customer, the titles of the bottom section that would display the grid did not get bigger when maximized. Even at full screen some columns are scrunched.
• Improvement - Changed email settings and messages, tell end user to ask their Internet Service Provider to provide them with the best settings for business email.
• Bug Fix - Fixed the new Parts report to find all the data it should, some parts were missed on first version.
• Improvement - Changed order on the new parts report and added check boxes to track order and receipt of items.
• Improvement - Made wider Name and License columns on the work order customer finder.
• New Feature - Added search criteria to the catalogue. Makes a part easier to find and prevents unintentional edits in the catalog.

V3.0.2

• Improvement - Added details to the help system relating to the ability to view GarageKeeper 2000 invoices in Motive Power 3.
• New Feature - Added customer report and customer export to the main customer screen. You can view/report/export according to customer settable criteria. 
• Improvement - Added the ability to go Next and Previous through GarageKeeper 2000 invoices and to print a plain text version of those invoices.
• Improvement - Control the major buttons so that they are not lit if the user does not have permission to use that function or if the function is not available until the current task is completed.

V3.0.3

• Improvement - Handle the possibility that an export to Excel produces more data than Excel can handle. Error error -2147467259 is the indication of an Excel overflow.

V3.0.4

• Improvement - Work Orders did not always maintain the correct job sequence after deleting a job from a ticket. Improved to handle the complications introduced by the ability to sort jobs.
• Improvement - Update the Help system with details of the new features: parts lists, conflict log, customer export, and find parts.
• New Feature - Bring along core charges in all cases of lookups from old invoices and Work Orders. Remind user that they need to check the core. Motive Power has no way of knowing if you sold two items with the same part number but only one of them had a good core.
• Improvement - Changed the personnel setup so that employees without permission to run work orders do not have a second tab of work order permissions.
• New Feature - requested by Top of the Hill, we made tool tips for the jobs shown in the job title to show the beginning of the job description.
• Bug Fix - The Reports | Log | Conflict Log gave an error if any of the fields were null.
• New Feature - Added the ability to exclude the parts from finished jobs when looking at the new Parts List feature.

V3.0.5

• Bug Fix - Fixed shortened fields on the Tech Jobs page.
• Bug Fix - If you clicked Add Job on a ticket with no jobs you sometimes got a message " The job you wanted is gone, some other user deleted it". Fixed to not reposition to the current job if the ticket has no jobs.
• Bug Fix - Fixed the Parts only switch to disable it when a ticket has no jobs.
• Bug Fix - In the new ticket dialogues, disable more buttons to make it clearer that nothing else can happen until the new ticket discussion is finished.
• Improvement- revamped the start new ticket to make it really easy in the normal case of starting a new ticket for an existing customer/vehicle combo.
• New Feature - Added the ability to move a vehicle to a different customer to the Start Ticket process.

V3.0.6

• Improvement - Adjusted the width of the How To page so the Rules box text wraps nicely.

V3.0.11

• Improvement - Added more details on multi-user interaction in work orders and explanation of the differences between service writers and non service writers.
• Bug Fix - Conflict tracking sometimes indicated the conflict was in parts when it was in sublet.
• Bug Fix - On Jobs view if you deleted all jobs and then hit delete again you would get an error 3021.
• Bug Fix - Adding a new customer would sometimes get an error 3219.
• Bug Fix - Occurrences of a non service writer doing a direct time clock update and then seeing service writer directories. We didn't allow for the fact that some users would let a non manger or service writer directly update their own time clock entries.
• Bug Fix - Intermittent error 3219 when going back to the customer screen after viewing invoice history.
• Bug Fix - Screens did not always look right after you had a conflict on phone numbers when two or more people were updating phone numbers for the same customer at the same time.
• Improvement - When a tech go to close Motive Power it now checks to see if that tech has a time clock running instead commenting on whether any time clocks are running.
• Bug Fix - We found that the person who loses during a conflict (has to look at the current state of the data and deecide if they still want to make changes) is now looking at the first record of the dataset instead of the previous record.
• Bug Fix - We found that if you lose a conflict when in the multiple vehicle view you would be repositioned to the first record instead of the previous record.
• Bug Fix - If you started a new work order, went to the Info page and then the Jobs page, did not add any jobs, and hit Delete you got a error message referring to a deleted row or row marked for deletion.
• Bug Fix - You might get an error "row handle referred to a deleted row" when deleting an entire work order. You don't get dumped out of the program and the delete has been done
• Improvement - Instead of letting the conflict mechanism work we specifically disallowed deleting, converting or finalizing a ticket with more than one user logged into it.
• Improvement - We now give a warning that somebody else is still making changes to this ticket if more than one person is logged into the same ticket when you Total the ticket.
• Improvement - Eliminated the automatic pop up of Add a Job when you go to job tab on an empty ticket. IT sometimes showed up before the jobs panel appeared.
• Bug Fix - You can no longer clicked Finished on a job with any active time clocks.
• Bug Fix - The QuickBooks settings area was not changing away from the alert color after you selected a valid QuickBooks item for the non-charge customer .

V3.0.14

• Improvement - Changed QuickBooks interface so the only way to match up accounts is to pick them off a drop down list of QuickBooks accounts and/or items. Previously it allowed you to enter the QuickBooks accounts if you knew them. This caused end user frustration and was hard to support so we simplified it..
• Improvement - No longer display the QuickBooks setup screens until after Motive Power resolves the accounts by conversing with QuickBooks. People were changing/updating accounts in the few seconds that the place holders were displayed

V3.0.16

• Bug Fix - You might get an error 438 when pressing the Warranty button on the customer form.
• Bug Fix - If a non service writer added a job, found no exact match and picked the Generic Job he would then see service writer directories.
• Bug Fix - After adding a new customer in the customer form some users get shown a different customer.
• Bug Fix - When pressing Show Duplicates when adding a customer some users were shown the previous set of customers from the last search instead of the duplicates.
• Improvement - Changed to skip the warning checks for users that do not have Daily permission to improve performance
• Bug Fix - Sometimes looking up the latest parts price via the button in the parts grid would bring up information on the previous part. It was being caused by parts on paid invoices that did not have vendors.
• Improvement - Several shops requested that we put the fields in Sublet into the same order as the fields in parts.
• Improvement - Changed the tool tips on job titles to take out blank spaces and line feeds and limit the length of the tool tip to 128 characters.
• Improvement - Changed the city, state, and zip fields in customer to be highlighted when you come into them, ready for editing.
• Bug Fix - If you added a job, immediately changed the job time to zero and then deleted the job you got a Data Access error.

V3.0.18

• Bug Fix - If you set the default number of invoices to print at finalize to zero you would get a run time error if you pressed Finalize and Print. This button is no longer active if you set the default number to print to zero.
• Bug Fix - You would get a run time error "Command text was not set for command object" if you started Motive Power 3, went directly to the major customer button and added a new customer with a unique name.

V3.0.19

• Bug Fix - Make changes to event handling to stop error that sometimes occurs when starting a new customer.
• Bug Fix - Show duplicates did not work properly is there was a single quotation mark in the customer name.

V3.0.20/21

• Bug Fix - If you pressed Show Vehicle from the customer finder and the highlighted line did not show a vehicle associated with that customer you would get a run time error 13.
• Bug Fix - Customer names like D&G Company would show as D_G Company on the vehicles page.

V3.0.22/23

• Bug Fix - The part type dropdown on the tech screens was changed to work like the same field on the service writer work order.
• Bug Fix - Changed the vendor dropdown on the sublet grid to work the same way as the dropdown on parts by accepting more than one character.
• Bug Fix - When making the sublet fields match the parts fields we inadvertently did not get the vendor in the correct position.
• Bug Fix - You might get run time error 6149 Invalid Bookmark when a Tech punches in on Directory | MyJobs and the list of jobs has been changed recently at another station by adding new jobs for that tech or by marking a job finished.
• Bug Fix - We noticed that the 3 checkboxes in the Warranty Provider area of the work order did not appear disabled when no warranty provider was selected.
• Bug Fix - If you choose a vehicle from the customer finder you will see the vehicle correctly. If you then clicked customer and then warranty you would see the warranties correctly. When you clicked Return to Customer you would see the vehicle instead of the customer.
• Bug Fix - If you clicked Finished on the current job, immediately clicked Settings, and then immediately clicked Work Orders, you would get a run time error 91.
• Bug Fix - There have been some random error 91 reports that we have been unable to duplicate. We changed the way the Finished, Do Not Remind, Labor Tax Exempt, and Parts Only switches communicate with the SQL data.

V3.0.24

• Bug Fix - You might get an run time error 5 going into the Daily task repeatedly if you had set a limit on the number of printed reminders to send at one time.
• Bug Fix - When you entered alt+E to start an estimate after finding the old customer it would highlight the Estimate block instead of starting an estimate.
• Improvement - updated documentation on the How To page to make it clearer and a better match to the changes in Motive Power 3.
• New Feature - parts pricing automatically gets updated to the latest price in the system for that part. Latest price comes either from a paid invoice or the parts catalog. It is the same as if you clicked the price updater at the end of the part number field every time.

V3.0.25

• Improvement - We had reports that the date of manufacture does not always show the first time after being displayed directly from the search screen. We made some changes to make this video artifact less prominent.
• Improvement - We had reports of a Date Anomaly message indicating a problem between the date of the system, the data, and the program. This problem showed a difference of less than a second, caused by the threaded nature of the process so we added some leeway to the evaluation.
• Bug Fix - A tech that did not have permission to add themselves to jobs on work orders could get around that from the all jobs list. This has been fixed.
• Bug Fix - If you updated just the charged labor time or dollars field and left the field without hitting enter the program would not update the other half of the pair. This was being caused by not committing the update. If the pencil still shows at the beginning of a grid line, or if the field has developed a surround or the cursor is still blinking in that field, the update has not been committed.
• Bug Fix - The check number label and textbox on the finalize form were enabled even though a payment type requiring that information had not been selected.

V3.0.26/27

• Improvement - major work done to speed up the preview and print functions for longer invoices. Long tickets now print in 1/4 of the time they did before.
• Improvement - Increased the size of the part type dropdown to match the sublet dropdown.
• Bug Fix - When viewing the vehicle screen in work orders, entering alt+H for History would highlight the History button instead of opening the history.
• Improvement - We originally decided it would be beneficial to keep the email message from the last estimate you emailed. End user feed back said otherwise.
• Improvement - Changed the ignore punctuation check box below the phone number field in the customer search screen to ignore punctuation both in the stored data and in the current field.

V3.0.28/29

• Bug Fix - If you had the totals window open and somebody at another station made a change to the work order that affected the supplies charge you would get the right total but the screen would show the wrong amount for the supplies charge. In this same situation you might get an error calculating totals.
• Improvement - In cases of a conflict like this another user may have changed items on the Info tab so the first user will be shown the info page to check on those changes.
• Improvement - If you got the "somebody else is in this ticket" message you saw computerese placeholders where you would expect to see dollars figures. This is now blank until you respond to the message.
• Improvement - The area for an additional message when emailing an estimate didn't clearly show limits and you could create a longer message than could be sent. We changed it to stop when the program calculates that it is likely that the message has gotten too long to fit.
• New Feature - If you select a best phone on the Info page, that phone number prints on the work order.
• Improvement - Changed the report to Find Parts on Finalized invoices. The primary sort is part number. The secondary sort used to be part type. It has been changed to sort by date finalized.
• New Feature - Added an Estimate button to the vehicle history screen to provide a more direct way to review old estimates. It could be done through the order log but this is much quicker.
• Improvement - Did more work on the speed and presentation of the work order printout.

V3.0.30/31

• New Feature - You can now drill down in the service writer Scheduled Work directory. By clicking on the intersection of a worker and a date you can see the work load for that person for that day. The details show the bid time on each job, the time accumulated so far (including time from currently open time clocks) and the time left to go on the job. This time is figured by considering the bid time as the target time for analysis. Time calculations include time for other techs assigned to this same job. You see all the time spent when considering a job. This feature makes it easy to balance work loads among different techs as well as help insure that you meet the delivery times promised. When looking at the current day, all jobs that are in danger of not being done in time and those which are already overtime are displayed in your alert color. On the other days in the calendar, any jobs that are already over time budget show in the alert color.
• Bug Fix - You could get a run time error 3021 when using the parts price updater if your finalized invoices contained parts without part numbers.
• Bug Fix - After the major change to the work order printout we found that the third party authorization printed in the wrong place.
• Bug Fix - The third party authorization would still print if you entered something into those fields and then deleted those entries.

V3.0.32/33

• Bug Fix - Tracked down the intermittent problem of displaying the wrong vehicle and/or customer from the major button Customer. After displaying service history for vehicle A and then displaying customer B you would sometimes get shown the vehicle from customer A when you went to the vehicle screen.
• Bug Fix - Tracked down the intermittent problem of displaying a customer or vehicle from the major button Customer, going to any of the major buttons besides Settings and then returned to customers and finding that you got shown the last customer instead of the one you just picked in the search.
• Bug Fix - There was no keyboard shortcut on the Who Else button in the work orders Info tab.
• Bug Fix - Testing the new work load balancing feature in Scheduled Work with some customer data sets we found that the summary numbers did not always match the details shown.

V3.0.34/35

• Bug Fix - We changed the order of the sort on work load balancing for a single tech to show in the order promised out the door. It had been in military time and we neglected to re-sort that data when we changed it to AM and PM.
• Bug Fix - Fixed the "error adding job" that occurred when a tech added a new job, the job was a 100% match, and the job contained parts.
• Bug Fix - You would get a run time error "Violation of unique key constraint" if you removed an attachment from a work order and then tried to re-attach the same file you had just deleted.
• Bug Fix - You would get a run time error "Row cannot be located for updating" if someone was manually updating a time clock entry and the job got deleted at another station before the time clock update was committed. We saw the potential for other problems in this area. We made a change to prevent deleting a job while someone else is in the same work order.

V3.0.36

• Improvement - same features as version 3.0.36. This is the first stand alone installer for Motive Power 3

V3.0.37/38

• Improvement - Once a service writer has started to convert an estimate to a work order there is short period when someone else can get into the work order. This happens during the time the image of the estimate is saved to the hard drive. We made this time as short as possible and changed the error message to show that the estimate has been converted at another station.

V3.0.39/40

• Improvement - Updated the help system to show the changes in the new installer.
• Improvement - Changed some of the command buttons displayed when you are in the middle of a Move Vehicle operation to make things clearer when you use that command.
• Bug Fix - When using the Move Vehicle command some screens did not repaint completely.
• Bug Fix - After using the Move Vehicle command the vehicle shown would vary depending on the search criteria you used to find that vehicle. Sometimes you got the original customer and sometimes you got the new customer. Now it stays with the original customer. The customer you moved the vehicle to is still shown on the search form so you can get there easily.

V3.0.41

• Bug Fix - Take care of intermittent errors that occurred while Motive Power was assembling data for the Scheduled Work view. This sometimes happened when that button was clicked or when the service writer went to Directory and Scheduled Work button was down from last time.
• Improvement - The Detail Profit report was very slow. We changed way the query was processed and made it much faster.

V3.0.42/43

• Improvement - We liked the way the changes to the Detail Profit worked so we made the same change to most reports.
• Improvement - If you clicked on the repricer on a parts line and got the message that the part number was unknown you often did not see the cursor until you left the field.

V3.0.44

• Bug Fix - If you deleted the date of manufacture from a vehicle you would often get a Multistep operation error when you went to a different section of the program. We changed it to restore the last date in those cases.
• Improvement - The phone number grid did not always display a cursor when you tabbed into the phone section of a customer that had no phone numbers.
• Improvement - If you were in the vendor section of dropdowns and enlarged the screen and then shrunk it some of the characters in the titles on the right side of the screen might be truncated.

V3.0.45

• Improvement - Made it possible to completely delete the model year or the date of manufacture of a vehicle without getting a system message.
• Improvement - Changed the dropdown default item to Job Titles since that is what people are using most often.

V3.0.46

• Improvement - Apply the service writer work order improvements from versions .40 to .45 to the big Customer button and to tech work orders.

V3.0.47

• Bug Fix - You would have problems starting tickets and paying tickets if the notes to customer or work needed fields had non-printable characters in them from the previous invoice for this customer.

V3.0.48

• Bug Fix - We changed the data format of some drop down fields to stop the message about multi-step operations

V3.0.49/50

• New Feature - Gave service writers the same ability to sort out the work orders they are responsible for as the techs had by adding and All or Mine button to the work order directory.

V3.0.51

• Bug Fix - Motive Power was not saving changes made to the SMTP port once the service writer/manager left the setting area.

V3.0.52/53

• Improvement - Updated the Help system for all previous changes
• Improvement - Changed the MPHelper program to be friendlier
• Improvement - Updated the installation program to make the order of events and commands clearer
• Improvement - Made the tab order more obvious on the Customer screen because there was not always a field highlighted when the tab order took you through an empty phone grid.

V3.0.54

• Bug Fix - Change the way security permissions are handled because techs that were not given permission to get into the time clock often could.

V3.0.55

• Improvement - Changes were made to the installer program because testers routinely missed a critical step so we built the handling of that into Motive Power itself.

V3.0.56

• Improvement - Added an error handler to catch a file name containing an illegal character before the operating system throws an error. This stops an error RTE 52 that kicks you out when trying to displaying an old invoice that has a corrupted a file name due to a hard drive problem or power problem.
• Improvement - Rapidly adding more than 5 long attachments sometimes causes a failure. We found that the problem is related to OLEAUT32. We changed the process to use several separate steps which is slower but helps with the problem.
• Improvement - Changed the way the program closes sections as well as the whole program to match current best practices.
• Improvement - Added an program group menu item ElevatetoUninstall to make sure you can do an uninstall. High security settings on Vista and Windows 7 might otherwise prevent the removal by users who are not sharp with Windows security.

V3.0.57

• Improvement - Changed the installer program to work better with Windows 7. We reversed the order of writing some items to the registry. This makes it possible to re-run the installer easily if it encounters an error on the initial install.

V3.0.58

• Bug Fix - Changed the area that allows you to attach a message to an emailed estimate or work order. Sometimes double quotes or mismatched quotes would cause a problem when the mail went to the next level and got rejected for ill formed HTML.
• Bug Fix - If you had a job with no parts, sublet, or time clock entries and you set the amount or hours to 0, you could not mark the job parts only until you committed all updates to hard drive by leaving that job.
• Improvement - Changed the tab order to be sure that the Parts Only box appeared in the proper sequence when keyboarding.
• Bug Fix - Changed the operation of the Parts Only switch to be sure that the associated Hours and Amount fields always got updated. The switch did not get focus the second time around if nothing else had been clicked since the first time.
• Bug Fix - Changed the customer maintenance to fix a problem. After deleting a customer and clicking on the next or previous customer arrow the old customers phones would still be displayed.

V3.0.59

• Improvement - Changed the Reports |Logs button to display the QuickBooks log if it has anything in it previously it did not display if the QuickBooks interface was not turned on.
• New Feature - Enabled use of QuickBooks Simple Start by relaxed the requirement that Motive Power Labor dollars go to a QuickBooks Service item and Motive Power Parts dollars go to a QuickBooks Non-Inventory item
• Improvement - Worked on the error message produced when Motive Power 3 asks to access QuickBooks but QuickBooks has not been started.

V3.0.60

• Improvement - Updated the Help system to include Simple Start. QuickBooks Pro 2004 is now the oldest version that works with Motive Power 3.
• Improvement - Widened the main Motive Power windows by 7 pixels. Some video card/driver combos did not display the entire right edge in Windows 7 and Vista.

V3.0.61

• Bug Fix - Comments on the Customer and Vehicle tabs of Work Orders failed to update consistently even when tab was entered.
• Improvement - Added the ability for the service writer job scheduling window to display jobs on a ticket in the current sort order. They had been displayed in the order entered.
• New Feature - We had a request for the tax collected report to provide an invoice by invoice recap. We added an Export to Excel to do that report.

V3.0.62

• Bug Fix - Updating the Type or Tax Type from the main Customer button failed if you made and update and then immediately clicked on Search.
• Improvement - Provided a way for the program to update the copyright year automatically as needed.

V3.0.63

• New Feature - The last new feature on the Motive Power 3 list is the ability to split the current work order by moving some of the jobs to another work order. This could be another open ticket for the same vehicle or could be a new estimate or new work order. Now any jobs that the customer does not approve can be put onto a new estimate to deliver on the Motive Power promise of only writing up a job once.
• Bug Fix - If a tech added a job to a work order and then immediately went to another work order, the job picked on the first work order would not be on the list of jobs available to the second work order. We never tested the specific function of a tech adding the same job to multiple tickets without doing anything else in between.
• Bug Fix - There were two items on the totals screen, Partial Payments and Parts List that both used P as the keyboard shortcut letter.

V3.0.64

• Improvement - a tech without permission to add/edit/update the job description and/or job comments was unable to view the entire contents of those fields if the vertical scroll bar developed. Keystrokes made inside these fields by techs without permission will not do anything.
• Improvement - we expanded the information available on the vendor drop down in work orders to include phone number and email address.

V3.0.65

• Improvement - Work orders for customers were hard to find in the directory of work in progress when the two names used were two different last names instead of a last name and a company name and the service writer was not aware of it. We added the second name and keyword as the last two fields on the directory. We did the same to applicable directories in the main Customer search.

V3.0.66

• Improvement - We added a drop down list on vendors in the work orders parts list. Now you can find parts for a single vendor in addition to seeing the parts for all vendors.
• Bug Fix - If you used the Split command to move a job onto a new ticket and then moved that job back to the original ticket and then deleted the new ticket you would get an error "Cannot delete estimate."
• Bug Fix - When using the export from the main customer search screen the Date of Manufacture was shown as a Julian date instead of the month/day/year format.
• Improvement - We added an ignore punctuation option to the customer finder that comes up when starting a new ticket to match the way it works in the search from the main Customer button.

V3.0.67

• Bug Fix - Updated the Excel model for calculating tech overhead in Personnel because the non billable hours field was not being included in the calculation.
• Bug Fix - The tool tips for the icons on the Shop Heading on Settings | Invoicing were shifted to the left.
• Improvement - Added the ability to override the email address when sending an email from work orders. This takes care of problems when the customer is not reachable at their normal email address.
• Improvement - Added the ability to send an email from work orders without including the current estimate or work order as part of the email.
• Improvement - Made changes to allow the report writer to split long job descriptions more easily. The original settings were chosen for format consistency. The previous setting attempted to print all jobs in order and that did not happen sometimes when the report writer decided to make it fit on a page without breaking up a long field or job.
• Improvement - We took out the clock section from Reports | Sales | Tax Collected since the report is for invoices finalized on a range of dates and each day runs from midnight to midnight.
• Improvement - The Text Blocks found in Settings | Invoicing | Text blocks will no longer take up any space on the printed work order or invoice if they are not filled in. The legal language required in Florida and Chicago takes up so much of the invoice that we needed to save space for customers in these jurisdictions.
• New Feature - Tech directories now show jobs that must be delivered today in the techs chosen alert color. We had reports of techs doing the next job on the list without checking the date and time promised.
• New Feature - We added the ability to find a single work order ID or invoice to the main Customer search. The Vehicles with History tab now includes these choices.
• New Feature - We added the ability to see the average miles per month driven on the vehicle screen in work orders and in the main Customer task. Mileage is shown by lifetime, last x months, and last x invoices. All three of those ranges can be altered when looking at average mileage for that vehicle.

V3.0.68

• Bug Fix - When manually entering a different email address on the Total form the log entry was for the original email address and not the manually added address.
• Bug Fix - Reset of the selectors on the customer search screen was not resetting the new radio buttons for invoice and work order ID.
• Bug Fix - The default number number of months on the miles per month feature was showing the interval between the first and last invoices instead of the first invoice and today's date and mileage.
• Improvement - Updated the context sensitive help system for the newest features.

V3.0.69

• Bug Fix - If you printed an estimate that had no jobs on it the work order ID did not show on the printout
• Improvement - Added a tool tip to the most recently used work order drop down. If your customer had an extra long name you could not see the work order ID in the most recently used box
• Improvement - Changed the printed post card reminders to be more reliable. If the individual vehicle reminder contained a lot of services it could result in the postcards after the extra long one being misaligned and unusable. Now it prints a message that other services are needed if more than 4 services are needed.

V3.0.70

• Improvement - We saw potential problems if a user made a change that resulted in there being no Cash payment type so we made sure it always exists.
• Improvement - If you use QuickBooks and have warranty providers you would get an error when finalizing if the warranty provider did not have a good QuickBooks account. We added an explicit message to guide you in that situation.
• Bug Fix - You might get a run time error if you had only one payment type enabled, that payment type was set to require entry of a check number or other detail, and you tried to finalize a work order that had a total of zero.

V3.0.71

• Improvement - Fixed a cosmetic problem in work orders. The parts and sublet type fields would echo a number on initial entry that changed to the correct type after another field in that part or sublet was updated.
• Bug Fix - If you did not pick a sublet type at all the description field would echo the first item in the drop down list instead of the default sublet type.
• Improvement - Changed the default in parts and sales exports to check the box "Include operation names instead of codes".

V3.0.72

• Improvement - When you are in work orders at the first field of a parts line the program would initially echo the part code rather than the part description. It would change to the description when you went to the next field. Now it always displays the description.

V3.0.73

• Improvement - Updated the Detail Profit report to add labor hours totals for each job and for all jobs on the report.
• New Feature - We added a new report called the Tech Report to the Timeclock section. This gives a breakdown showing clocked hours and billed for each tech for the period requested. Labor is shown by operation type, by job, by invoice and overall. Warranty provider time is shown as well so you can adjust billed time credited for comebacks or other issues.

V3.0.74

• Improvement - Added the Work Order ID to the new Tech Report so techs can verify that they are paid for the correct amount of time. Invoice number is not assigned until pay time so techs track the Work Order IDs.
• Bug Fix - We regularly round all dollar figures to two decimal points to prevent rounding errors. We found that we missed applying the rounding to the initial labor charge on a generic job. Shops with labor rates like $79.37 an hour might have had a problem. Invoices with more than one generic job might have been off by a penny on the overall total.

V3.0.75

• Improvement - We added to the export ability of the Work Order Parts List. You can now export that list as an Excel workbook. This was requested to help with jobs where the parts will not be seen for along time. If you negotiate to get parts made or need a while to find rare parts the Excel model gives you a place to keep track of details of this process.

V3.0.76

• Improvement - We changed the default in Setting | Invoicing to Score/Finalize. The previous default was Shop Heading. Some users would start typing before they realized they were in Shop Heading. This often resulted in the loss of some or all of the heading format.

• Bug Fix - We made a correction to the Time Clock Details report. It was not printing the total for the last day prior to printing the overall total.

V3.0.77

• Improvement - We added more settings to the e-mail configuration. This provides support for both TLS and SSL security used by web mail hosts like Google and Microsoft. Previously you needed to install the Stunnel proxy to send email from Motive Power to web mail hosts.

• Bug Fix - When adding a new customer or updating an existing customer from within Work Orders the details on the MRU (most recently used work orders list) did not change until you changed work orders.

• Improvement - We added phones to the list of items that transfer from the default customer to the new customer when you add a new customer.

• Improvement - We added vendors as a selector in Reports | Replace Parts. This makes it easier to place stock orders with vendors that you order from occasionally or when you hit their minimum.

V3.0.78

• Improvement - When you changed the warranty liability on parts from one warranty provider to another the program would not display the changed prices until the next time you displayed that job. Now it makes the on screen change immediately.

• Bug Fix - If you updated a selling price and then went to the Settings button without updating something else on that screen or pressing the tab key, the update to the selling price would be lost.

V3.0.79

• New Feature - We added a new report in the Sales section. The old Sales Recap covered what was produced in the shop exclusive of rebates, discounts, etc. The details explaining that are shown on the report page but many users missed it and had a hard time reconciling the difference between the Daily button summary report and the Sales Recap. We changed it by adding another report called Production Recap. We split the functions of the old Sales Recap between the new Sales Recap and Production Recap reports. The Production recap has the totals less the discount, taxes, etc. The Sales Recap figures match the totals you get from the Daily Summary report.

• New Feature - We added a new Excel model to the Export section for analyzing your warranty provides and costs. It has the same basic layout as the other Sales and Parts exports, limited to looking at invoices for warranty providers.

• Bug Fix - We fixed a problem that sometimes occurred after adding sublet items from the search bar. You would lose all or some of the details of the last item added if you left work orders without doing anything else after picking the sublet item from the list of items.

• Improvement - We added Name 2, Keyword, Keyword2, Charge Allowed, Pricing Type and IsWP (Warranty provider) to the list of items you can choose to sort and subtotal by when exporting sales, parts, or warranty to Excel.

V3.0.80

• Improvement - We re-wrote the Tech Report after one shop reported that it stopped working for them. We could not reproduce the problem but taking a different approach restored the capability. New features in version 3.0.79 caused the problem.

• Bug Fix - The Job Title and Job Group selectors on the Warranty Provider Invoiced Sales report was failing with an error 13.

V3.0.81

• Bug Fix - The Scheduled Work view in the directory failed to show the job details when clicking on the hours cell. This happened when the open work orders file grew to over 8,000 jobs.

V3.0.82

• Improvement - Added a warning at finalize time when the work order has a job with more than one tech and at least one of those techs has no timeclock hours.

• Bug Fix - Fixed the Techs Report to work properly on jobs with more than one tech assigned and no timeclock hours for any of those techs. If any or all of the techs had timeclock hours there was no problem. In the problem case all techs got credit for the whole job.

V3.0.83 - this is the last version of Motive Power 3.0.xx, next release is 3.5.5

• Bug Fix - You sometimes got an "error in cell text expression" while trying to preview the Techs Report. SQL Server was not handling the jobs with no tech assigned in a consistent manner. We changed the query to eliminate this problem.

Motive Power 2

• These are the basic changes made to Motive Power Manager between Motive Power 1 and Motive Power 2
• Improvement - Updated the data access components to ADO version 2.8
• Improvement - Changed the SQL Server log in for read only report access. Real data: user is MPReports, password is MotivePower! Learn data: user is MPReportsLearn, password is MotivePower!
• Improvement – increased the length of the Phone number contains selector on the Customer Search form from 10 to 20 characters. Added a box to let you ignore punctuation in the layout of the phone number when searching.
• Improvement - Updated the data access components to ADO version 2.8
• Improvement - Added a check for extra characters or line feeds at the end of Customers street address. Ask user if it was intentional and strip off the extras if not.
• Improvement – Made changes to the Customer and Work Order screens so they look better when run in full screen mode.
• Improvement – added an additional decimal point to the tax rate field because some jurisdictions went to tax rates requiring 3 decimal places.
• New feature – Added a check of the software version number to the login process. If you have to re-install the program this makes sure that you are not installing an obsolete version.
• New Feature – When starting a job on a work order the program warns the user if the make, model, and year of the vehicle are blank.
• New Feature – Added switches to Settings | Invoicing | Score/Finalize to let the shop require the capture of license/ VIN and/or Make, Model and Year before a work order can be finalized
• New Feature – we changed the outgoing e-mail client to use different software because of the number of ISPs requiring separate authorization to send e-mail
• Improvement – we changed the software that does some of the report formatting because of installation problems on some machines

V 2.0.4

• Bug fix - Found by MJS in Motive Power 2 in the work order directory. You’d get a Run time error 381 when pressing [Cancel] if there’s nothing in the Most Recently Used list (like when the files are brand new).
• Improvement - We added an optional limit on the number of e-mail reminders to send at a time for shops with ISPs that label their outgoing email spam if they send too many at once. We put it on the send Reminders screen instead of in Settings to make it obvious.
• Improvement - We added a [Print A Sample] button to Reminders | We Send | Printed panel. This allows users to test their postcard settings by printing a sample.

V2.0.5

• Bug fix - In Reminders we put the focus back on the button when you come back after hitting the new Print A Sample button. This puts focus back where it needs to be in case the user presses F1.

V2.0.6

• Bug fix - We re-evaluate the Most Recently used work order list after adding a new work order. The list is resorted to be sure that the new one will be first. Jay’s found a bug where the newly-added item was the one Deleted from the dataset, because we can’t count on the sequence. This was caused by a difference between SQL Server 2000 and 2005.

V2.0.7

• Improvement - When you go to Reports | Custom, we now recreate the read only user and password to be sure the new password, MotivePower!, is right. Required by change from SQL 2000 to SQL Server 2005 security.

V2.0.8

• Bug fix - Daily sometimes had the wrong tab forward when you first went in.

V2.0.9

• Bug fix - If you don’t use a make in your default vehicle (make is left blank) you’d get an RTE 94 if you tried to drop down the list of makes from the vehicle screen in work orders.

V2.0.10

• Bug fix - In the customer screen, the first time you selected a Make where it had been blank before, the Models dropdown was not always populated properly.

V2.0.11

• New feature - added call to MPHelper program if we can’t connect to MPower2 or attach the database. MPHelper looks at your network for a shared MotivePower2 folder and a CAI2 instance of SQL Server.

V2.0.12-.14

• New feature - worked on integrating MPHelper to handle either the installation of SQL Server 2005 Express (Full install) or assisting the user to select the right registry settings (Client installs).

V2.0.15

• Improvement - in Work Orders: when you press the […] button in the Parts grid, Motive Power 2 looks in both invoice history and the Catalog, and uses the later price if both exist.
• Improvement – Handle error 94s coming back from QuickBooks Pro or better. This was happening in Settings | QuickBooks when user pressed [Validate Accounts] before setting up any accounts.

V2.0.16

• Improvement - Now gives error message if [Print] fails on a ticket. There are some fields that the report writer cannot split across pages. Includes suggestion to trim some long text fields.

V2.0.17

• Improvement - Changed email authentication to Login because of ISPs with faulty CRAM-MD5 SMTP authorization.
• Bug Fix - Fixed an error that displayed the see4VB error message instead of the Motive Power message.

V2.0.18

• Improvement - Operation codes are now all upper case for better consistency. This is enforced by Motive Power in Settings | Personnel | Operations
• Improvement - Uses are now warned if they try to run a script file from a client station. RunMe.SQL and other custom scripts must be run at the server
• Bug Fix - Settings | Reminders had the second tab forward initially, it should have been the first tab.

Motive Power 1

• This was the first production version of Motive Power.

V1.0.1

• Improvement - the Help system by eliminating spaces between links, adding links to some of the earlier topics, and removing some visible tables.
• Bug fixed - On Work Orders printout, fixed the missing upper line on the second comments box.
• Improvement - On the Add Job form, program changed so that pressing ENTER in the grid goes to the next column like the other grids. This leaves either the current line or the next line selected, so that if you press ALT + A the job is added to the ticket instead of generating an run time error message.
• New feature - Add the table Tag History to the empty data files.

V1.0.2

• Bug fix - If you modified the Hours on a job on a ticket and then pressed the Directory button, your changes were not being saved in all cases.
• Bug fix - When you finalize and print a ticket you get separate pages for the warranty providers. This was not working on the Print Preview.
• Improvement - warranty providers invoice format.

V1.0.3

• New feature - Added a Total Sales button to the Customer screens. Default is last 12 months of sales. Users can select different dates and it will recalculate the totals.
• New Feature - Added more selectors to the Find Customer form:
  Pricing type
  Warranty Provider (Either, No, Yes)
  Charge Allowed (Either, No, Yes)
• Bug Fix - When starting a New Customer, Motive Power was copying the DoNotRemind status of the default customer to the new customer. New customers should get reminders by default. You need to turn off reminders for a new customer explicitly.

V1.0.4

• New Feature - Added new Report form/button called "Pivot" for now. It exports all jobs on finalized invoices to Excel and makes a pivot table.

V1.05

• Improvement - Made the form load faster when you hit the large Reports button for the first time.
• Improvement - Added selectors and a list preview to the Excel pivot form. Enhanced the pivot table too. In this version, almost all combo boxes are populated from current tables when form loads. Exception is Customer Cities, which fills itself from first time user drops down the combo (if ever).

V1.06

• Improvement - Changed all dropdowns on the Excel pivot form to fill themselves from invoice history the first time each is dropped down. Combos that have not yet been filled say "All"; those that have been filled say something more specific, like "All types".
• Improvement - Changed the grid on the Excel pivot form to contain more fields, similar to the Excel data sheet except without the last two columns of JobTotal, and JobProfit because Excel calculates those.

V1.0.7

• New Feature - Finished the new Reports | Export form, including the ability to write a tab-delimited ASCII file.

V1.0.8

• Improvement - Customize the Help system for the new forms.
• Improvement - Changed the new Export Invoiced Sales form to look up the latest finalized invoice and initialize the To date selector to that date. The From date selector is 3 months earlier.
• Bug fix - If you didn't get any hits (when you pressed the export to Excel button), you could change the selectors after that but still get the no hits message even though there should be some hits after your changes.

V1.0.9

• Improvement - Removed internal references to Office 10 type library. It might cause trouble for folks who don't have Office XP.
• Improvement - On Settings | Dropdowns, have Makes/Models tab up initially instead of Parts Pricing.

V1.0.9se (was shipping version until 2004)

• Improvement - Upgraded the SQL server components for all bugs and security enhancements provided by Microsoft in the SQL Server Service Pack 3.

V1.1.0

• New Feature - First version with real-time connection to QuickBooksPro 2002 or later
• New Feature - On the Settings | QuickBooks screen, changed the logic to reload the drop-down portions of the combos. This will be helpful when user bounces over to QuickBooks to add accounts during setup.
• Bug fix - If you pushed the [E-mail the Reminders Now] button and no e-mails came out because none were due, Motive Power didn't change the Last E-mail Reminders date shown on the Daily screen and disappear the cloud on Daily button. Changed the table for E-mail reminders to fix this for both e-mailed and printed reminders.
• Bug fix - Advancing the reminder sent date didn't make cloud disappear if it was the last warning. User had to refresh form to make cloud disappear.
• Improvement - Changed the find customer form to put focus in grid after Search. Once you'd clicked in the grid, pressing [Enter] used to take you to next column; now it displays the vehicle or customer detail and arrow keys work.

V1.1.1

• Improvement - Some customers were correctly rejected when exporting Motive Power customers to QuickBooks but it was hard to tell why. Documented more details to help in these cases
• Bug fix - After exporting Motive Power customers to QuickBooks some error messages were received. Changed the export/import for better handling of embedded single and double quotes
• Improvement - You see a count for the number of customers who match your criteria in the customer finder. If you run through them you may find the true number of customers is lower. This is because we're counting the join between Customers and Customer Phones. We are improving the documentation on this point.

V1.1.2

• Improvement - Cities were not in alpha order in dropdown on Customer Finder. Now they are, but it is a little slower if you have thousands of cities in your files.
• New Feature - Added a State dropdown to the Customer Finder, on first and second tabs. It lists only State values actually used.
• Bug fix - On the first tab of the customer finder, if you specified a Customer Keyword along with any of the other Customer criteria, you found no customers.

V1.1.3

• Bug fix - When finalizing an invoice with 0 in taxable and non-taxable parts, labor, sublet, supplies, QB was rejecting the invoice. This was because we didn't make a line item on the invoice (because all would have been zero). Changed to make a special line item in this case, with the Description of No charge from Motive Power and 0 amount.
• Bug fix - Invalid QuickBooks transactions could be generated when a ticket had no actual sales tax, and QuickBooks was set to use sales tax. Motive Power can handle the invalid zero-tax item. Fixed the interface.
• Bug fix - If you had turned off the scoring warning at Finalize, then the scores weren't being calculated unless you happened to look at the Score first. Then you would get "Error trying to save invoice scores. Object variable with block variable not set."
• Bug fix - Clicking on the heading in the Job Titles grid didn't resort the list.
• Bug fix - The ending date on the Parts Finder was not inclusive, like "to." Fixed to be like "through." Fixed same flaw on Sublet Finder.
• Bug fix - If you deleted the last Job Title in the list, you'd get an error 3021 and the page would be useless thereafter until you restarted Motive Power.
• Bug fix - In the Reports section, under QuickBooks log, you couldn't always use the arrow keys after selecting the grid. I fixed that, plus now grid get focus auto when you press List button.
• Improvement - Rephrased the message that tells user invoice wasn't finalized because of QB problems.
• Improvement - Added the customer name to the colored bar near the top of the vehicle invoice history form.
• New Feature - Made changes to the files and reports to enable tracking and printing of up to 25 taxing authorities. The first use of this feature is to provide a version of Motive Power for Canadian GST/PST reporting.

V1.1.4

• Improvement - Added a Custom button to the Reports area. This is to inform users about the availability of custom reports.
• New Feature - Added review of all warranted work from the warranty provider's customer screen. Before this feature you needed to find the vehicle that had the warranty done to it before you could review the warranty invoice.
• Improvement - changed the meaning of the Sales button on the customer form. Now the total includes everything that customer paid for directly. Warranty sales are listed with the warranty provider. Previously the sales total showed all money spent on vehicles owned by the customer, including invoices paid for by warranty.
• Bug fix - Discovered that QuickBooks in not able to handle a negative invoice such as a return or refund. Changed invoices with negative totals to Credit Memos instead. If a customer's invoice has a negative total, the How Paid form will offer Charge as the only payment method, provided he's a charge customer and his QuickBooks Name is valid. This will generate a Credit Memo. If the customer is not a charge customer the How Paid form will pop up a message box telling user about this limitation of QB. He can either Cancel and give the guy a charge account, or proceed with a non-charge payment type. If he goes ahead with finalize, Motive Power generates a printout for the bookkeeper and an entry in our QB log when the QB posting fails.
• Improvement - Added a pre-finalize check to make sure QB has a Subtotal item if Sales Tax is on, because invoice posting would fail without one.
• Improvement - QuickBooks needs different sales tax items for line items than for the invoice as a whole. Added this to the pre-invoice check in Work Orders. On the QuickBooks Settings form, added a comment to the description beside the individual line items and added a check for this to the [Validate Accounts] button. Made the message for missing sales tax items more explicit and added tool tips to both Validate buttons.
• Improvement - If you have only one Sales Tax Authority defined, then it was hard to automatically perform an update on QuickBooks Settings in the Sales Tax grid because you couldn't move to another row in the grid. Now it to updates when grid loses focus.

V1.1.5

• Bug Fix - Changed Reports | Sales so that initial surface really was the Detail Profit Report to match the button.
• Improvement - Changed the tab order on the Customers screen so that it goes like this: Total Sales, Warranties, QuickBooks name.
• Improvement - Added the Warranties button to the Customer page of the Work Orders screen, the same as in the basic Customer form.
• Improvement - added context-sensitive help for new features since version 1.1.0

V1.2.0: Motive Power Manager

• New Feature - Added the internals needed to support multiple workstations running the tech module.
• New Feature - updated the personnel security screens to provide fine-grained read/add/edit of the work order fields for the technician's module.
• Bug Fix - Changed so we always update the WorkOrderTime EnteredBy field to record who was logged in on a straight punch out. We were doing it on an indirect punch out caused by punching in elsewhere. Now we always do it.
• Bug Fix - Changed the Payments Log Report to refuse improper character in the invoice order and work order ID selector fields instead of giving an error.

V 1.2.1

• Bug Fix - Changed to accept QuickBooks Customers with punctuation in the name field.
• Bug Fix - Changed to work correctly when changing a Tech's initials to be the same as another Tech's initials. It worked right in the grid but gave an error if you updated in the grid, but if you did the update in the textbox (right side of screen), you got an error when you tried to move to a different Tech.
• Bug Fix - a few misspelled words were corrected
• Bug Fix - In QuickBooks Associations, if you picked an MP customer from the drop-down list in the second column, Motive Power could crash with an "index out of range" error.
• Improvement - Made the handling of customer name and keyword the same from the customer maintenance area and work orders.
• Improvement - Importing GarageKeeper customer data can now handle a non-numeric Model Year.
• Bug Fix - Bug introduced in v1.2.0 of Manager made problems adding new jobs to an empty ticket.
• Bug Fix - Changed the parts and sublet searches to work right in cases where the vehicle model has not been entered.
• Bug Fix - Changed parts handling on SmartJobs to assign the default parts type to parts being added with a part type that is no longer in use.
• Bug Fix - Changed the start procedure so that it does not matter whether you start a Manager or a Tech module first.
• Bug Fix - Changed the Tech security setting to turn on parts type permission when you give add parts permission.
• Improvement - Write back the record every time a permissions checkbox loses focus to increase data integrity.
• Bug Fix - Changed the exit procedure. After informing you that techs were punched in, Motive Power would sometimes give the message "No jobs found" when there really were some.
• Improvement - Changed the forms to enable better editing of phone numbers and handling of blank phone numbers.
• New feature - Provided a [Count] button on the Customer Finder form returns just the count of how many customers meet your selection criteria, and is not limited to 500 customers in the initial display.
• New feature - Reports | Parts on Ticket has a new selector, Include part type. You can report on the special order parts added to work orders in a specific time period.

V 1.2.2

• Improvement - Changed the caption of the [Open Jobs] button to read [Unassigned Jobs] in the Manager. This should prevent confusion with the Tech's [Open Jobs], which show only unassigned jobs for which the current user is qualified. We also added tool tips to these buttons.

V 1.2.3

• New Feature - added the ability to attach any file to any open work order. This satisfies requests to attach before and after pictures to the repair order. It can be used to attach diagrams or sections of manuals for use by the tech, etc.
• Improvement - Replace the system date with the SQL Server date throughout the program.

V 1.2.4

• Improvement - Changed Search to be the default on the Find Customer screen so that pressing Enter does the search
• Improvement - Moved buttons up from the bottom of the Settings | Personnel | Labor Rates because users missed seeing them at the bottom
• Improvement - Restricted all grids in the Dropdown area to a single selection at a time
• Improvement - Added the current Motive Power version number to the Settings screen because all users have permission to see this screen.
• Improvement - Cleaned up the security screens to make them easier to read
• Bug Fix - Changes so that a person with read-only access to a work order someone else has open cannot add or delete attachments

V 1.2.5

• Improvement - Changed so that you can recover an attachment to an open work order that was accidentally deleted
• Improvement - Changed to access one work order at a time instead of reading the full recordset to improve performance
• Improvement - Added the number of attachments to the button on the Info page so you can easily see if there are any attachments for this ticket
• Bug Fix - Changed so that updates to the Info page are available to other users right away.

V 1.2.6

• Changed to fix a small problem with warranty providers on a work order. If you added a job, chose a warranty provider and checked parts and then pressed add job again right away, the warranty provider information was not saved

V 1.2.7

• Bug Fix - Changed to stop an intermittent problem caused by turning the user switches off and on from the Workers screen

V 1.2.8

• Improvement - Changed to go directly to a job picked from the Active Jobs or Unassigned jobs directories instead of to the top of that work order
  Improvement - Changed the way records are accessed to improve performance

V 1.2.9

• Improvement - added more details to the context sensitive help topics

V 1.2.10

• Bug Fix - Changed the procedure for deleting models to be like deleting makes. That means it restores the original value after an attempt to update it to a blank field. Added a message to remind the user to click on the record selector to delete the record.
• Improvement - Changed several items in Settings | Dropdowns to be smoother when someone tries to blank out a field instead of deleting it.
• Bug Fix - Changed Personnel so that you cannot turn off the user privileges for the current user
• Bug Fix - Corrected an error that occurred when you tried to update the code of a worker with records in the time clock. For now, these updates will be blocked. We will change that in a later version
• Bug Fix - Changed the program so that changes to a user name or code appear immediately on the Security grid and not next time you enter Personnel

V 1.2.11

• Improvement - Added a button, New Worker, to Personnel | Worker and removed the ability to add and update in the grid. It makes things more reliable and smoother

V 1.2.12

• Bug Fix - Fixed a problem that occurred in Personnel | Workers that happened adding a new worker right after editing the Default Service Writer

V 1.2.13

• Bug Fix - Corrected a problem with Canadian invoicing. To get Canadian invoicing to work with the Learn files you need to copy the special report to Motive Power | Learn | BackThisUp | Reports
• New Feature - Added the ability to go directly from the Add Jobs form to the Settings | Dropdown | Job Titles for users with Settings permission
• New Feature - Added a Price button to the Settings | Dropdowns | Job titles page. You enter the Price and Motive Power will calculate the hours. The dollar amount appears on the Price button
• Improvement - Added the hourly rate to the Operation dropdown in Job Titles
• Improvement - Changed the miles and month fields to be highlighted for update when you come into them when settings up Job Titles.

V 1.2.14

• New Feature - Starting a new ticket will automatically place the work needed section of the most recently finalized ticket into the work needed section of the current work order
• Improvement - Changed the Daily | Reminders messages to eliminate confusion about whether the reminders are no longer in the reminder due list
• Improvement - Changed to advance to the next cell automatically when entering a VIN in Customers | Search | Vehicles by VIN
• Bug Fix - Fixed a problem with editing the third party authorization area on the Info form of Work Orders

V 1.2.15

• New Feature - Added a way to get old part information into the Parts section if you have the exact part number. A small button is added to the part number field. After entering the part number either click on the box or enter Alt+Period to have Motive Power look for an exact match in finalized invoices. Messages pop if the pricing information is more than 6 months old or the part had a core charge last time it was sold
• Improvement - Added a switch so you can get either Operation code or Operation name into the export of sales information to Excel
• New Feature - Created a report of vehicle history that does not contain any information about who owned the vehicle previously. This report appears on the History screen for each vehicle
• Improvement - Clarified messages on the Work Orders | Totals | Score to read 'costs or quantities not entered for some items'
• New Feature - Add scheduling help using a Scheduled Work button in the Manager's Work Orders | Directory form. This shows how many hours have been booked each day for each tech and for the shop as a whole

V 1.2.16

• New Feature - Added an invoiced parts sales analysis showing sales by vendor, by part type, for a range of dates. This works like the overall Invoiced Sales report which displays as an Excel pivot table
• Improvement - Added a message "Be sure to add a core charge of this item removed is not rebuildable" to clarify the message when you use the exact part number feature and the part information indicates that there was a core charge last time.

V 1.2.17

• New Feature - Added a parts look-up called Catalog. When you request an exact match look-up on a parts line and the part is not found in a Finalized Invoice, the request will check the Catalog file for an exact match. Catalogs are built by importing of ASCII files or hand entry. The ASCII file can be created by a GarageKeeper inventory file export or other pricing information available on disk or online.

V1.2.18

• Improvement - Advance to Data Version 8
• Improvement - Add the user code of the person logged in to the comment field when a work order or estimate is deleted
• Improvement - Added the capability to update the code of a user that has live records in work order time tracking
• New Feature - Provided an automatic crosscheck to other vehicles when adding or editing the VIN. When possible, the vehicle history will be migrated regardless of the previous or current license or owner. When it can't be done automatically, the user will have to resolve it, but the new feature can print you a sheet detailing both vehicles. This feature required changes so that the default vehicle no longer has a VIN to copy to each new vehicle you start.
• Improvement - Made the work order ID a fixed column in the Reports | Order Log so that you can scroll to the right without moving the work order ID off the form.

V 1.2.19

• Improvement - Changed the parts finder and the sublet finder to keep the Settings and the filtered data after adding an item to the work order. This makes it easy when you want to pick more than one item from the filtered data. Pick Add to ticket, enter quantity and click Search and the search form for that job is just like you left it

V1.2.20

• Bug Fix - Fixed a problem in setting new worker permissions that occurred sometimes depending on what order you followed when adding and editing the new worker.
• Improvement - Changed the Cashbox display so that the Amount column displays properly showing the dollar sign

V1.2.21

• Improvement - Added Tech and Service Writer as selection fields on the Invoiced Sales Export to Excel. This gives you the ability to analyze sales volume and profitability by trying different combinations of service writer, tech, make, labor type, zip code, age of vehicle, etc.
• New Feature - Added a new Report to the Parts Report section titled Find Part. This will look at current work orders for all occurrences of any part number that starts with the string you enter. This provides an easy way to find items that were put on the wrong order for example.

V1.2.22

• Improvement - Added a Details button to the Cashbox to show information about the customer and vehicle for the selected line in the Payments grid.
• Improvement - Added customer Name to the to the list of items shown in the InvoicedParts file when Exported to Excel. Name was also made one of the page fields at the upper left of the pivot table.

V1.2.23

• Improvement - Updated the Help system for all changes made to date.

V1.2.24

• Bug fix - The [Add Job] button on an open ticket worked when the ticket was owned by a tech at a different station.
• Improvement - On the Vehicle History screens, we moved the customer's name out from behind the buttons.
• Bug fix - If you blanked out a discount amount on the Totals page and tabbed away, Motive Power crashed. Fixed to interpret this as zero.
• Bug fix - On the Jobs page of a Work Order, if you changed the in-house comments and then closed Motive Power immediately, your edit was lost. Fixed this type of thing on Work Orders and other forms.

V1.2.25

• Bug fix - You couldn't add the first job to a new ticket.
• Bug fix - On the Work Orders Directory screen, several of the tool tips on the newer buttons were wrong.
• Improvement - On the Timeclock form, the clock for the time in/out view would sometimes hang off the right side of the screen. Changed it to pop up near the top left instead.

V1.2.26

• New Feature – added radio button to Reports | Parts | Find Parts. This gives the ability to find parts on finalized invoices as well as open tickets. The default is for parts on open tickets.

V1.2.27

• New Feature – changed the Reports section to add a Custom page. This will enable users to run custom reports from within Motive Power. This means that users will not have to go to the program group or set up shortcuts to run custom reports.
• Improvement – Make the discount calculators function more obvious. Show more clearly that it is by replacement and not additive.
• Improvement – Add additional data to the information used to calculate and finalize an invoice. This makes it easier to provide custom invoices at a lower price.
• Bug fix – Limit the quantity on a parts line to 9999 so that you can enter a negative 9999 to back out part sold in error. The previous limit was 32,000 but would not accept a negative 32,000.

V1.2.28

• Bug Fix – Corrected problem in Settings | Dropdowns. If you added a new job title or vendor, edited the description and immediately sorted the left hand grid, it would lose the description update.

V1.2.29

• Improvement – We changed the warning about bad mileage entry from a 100,000 mile interval to a 10,000 mile interval after a survey of end users.
• Improvement – Change the discount function to not allow discounts that cause the pre-supplies charge total to of the invoice to go below zero. You can make negative invoices by entering a negative amount in the parts, labor or sublet section of a job. The discount function is not intended to be used for credit memos or returns.
• Improvement – Updated the Help system to explain that drop-down menus are not attached to buttons but appear at the current mouse position.

V1.2.30

• Bug Fix – corrected error that caused the message “Trouble calculating Supplies Charge” to appear when work order had more than one sublet item on a job.

V1.2.31

• Improvement – changed the Parts on Tickets report to default to sorting by Vendor instead of by Part Number to make it easier to use the report to order and track special order items added to work orders.
• Bug Fix – corrected tool tips on the Parts Search and Sublet Search forms.

V1.2.32

• Bug Fix – corrected posting to QuickBooks when finalizing an invoice with 0 total for a non-charge customer.

V1.2.33

• Bug Fix – limited text boxes to 2048 characters for job description and In-house comments on Jobs page of Work Order.
• Bug Fix - you cannot change the name of the Unknown Customer, or delete its name or keyword.

V1.2.34

• Bug Fix – sometimes Work Orders would display the previous ticket instead of the current one.

V1.2.35

• Bug Fix – create the Reports folder if it doesn't already exist.
• Bug Fix - if necessary, recreate the read-only SQL Server login MPReports or MPReportsLearn whenever Reports | Custom is selected.

V1.2.36

• Bug Fix – don't complain about 0 discounts when parts, labor, or sublet totals are negative.

V1.2.37

• Improvement - give a better error message when you run out of new tickets in the Learn files.
• Bug Fix – corrected several tool tips.
• Improvement - pop up the Add Jobs form automatically when you change to the Jobs page on a ticket that contains no jobs.

V1.2.38

• Improvement - in Work Orders, make all the fields on the Jobs page look disabled when there's no job selected.

V1.2.39

• Improvement - added Help buttons to the dialog boxes that warn about login problems.

V1.2.40

• Bug Fix – fixed spelling errors in the Help file.
• Improvement - for free downloads, replaced zip files with self-extracting executables.

V1.2.41

• Improvement - Added a [Comments] button to the Vehicle History screen. Shortened other button captions, moved customer name to the left. Added ToolTips to all buttons.
• Revised Help file.

V1.2.42

• Bug Fix – message "cashbox has never been balanced" whenever none of the partial payments on open tickets had been deposited yet.
• Bug Fix - in Reports | Logs | Payments, the default ending date is today instead of 7 days ago.

V1.2.43

• Improvement - added Help button to startup screen when you can't connect to SQL Server, and revised the Help file.

V1.2.44

• Improvement - you can't finalize a work order with no jobs.
• Bug Fix - fixed Sales Recap report, Sales Recap by Make report, and Daily Summary Detail page to handle correctly any jobless invoices finalized in the past.

V1.2.45

• Bug Fix – fixed several errors that could happen when starting new tickets.
• Improvement - when you start a new ticket from within the Customers task, you'll stay in the Customers task instead of going to the new ticket in Work Orders. Each new ticket you start this way is added to the top of your MRU.
• Improvement - added a new [Return to Work Order] button to the Customer screen, but it only appears when you got there from Work Orders.
• Improvement - when starting a new ticket, you're warned if there's already an open ticket for the same vehicle.
• Bug Fix - fixed the tool tips on both Attachment forms (history and current).

V1.2.46

• Updated the Help file.
• Improvement - in Settings | Reminders, you can generate the Initial and Manual files without FTPiong them to CustomerLink.
• Bug Fix - in Settings | Reminders | Customer Link | Manual, the default interval is the last 6 months.
• Bug Fix - trim any blanks from the beginning and end of the FTP address, username, and password when FTPing to CustomerLink from Daily Tasks | Reminders.

V1.2.47

• Bug Fix – on the Vehicles screen, you no longer get an error 94 when you try to change a blank license to one that's already in use.

V1.2.48

• Improvement - added customer name and vehicle license to the messages that pop up after you start a ticket from inside the Customers task.
• Improvement - added Billed Hours and Efficiency columns to the Techs Summary in the Daily Summary.
• Bug Fix - the selectors on the Reports | Timeclock screens are always filled in.
• Improvement - improved the installers with better messages. Added the Canadian invoices.

V1.2.49

• Improvement - warn if Mileage Out is a single digit during Finalize.
• Improvement - the Unknown Customer can no longer be a warranty provider or have a charge account.
• Bug Fix - you don't get an error 5 right after adding a new customer.
• Bug Fix - QuickBooks settings for customers had problems when you had no charge customers.
• Improvement - in Customers with the QB interface turned on, you are warned right away when you turn on a customer's charge account switch, rather than when you leave the Customers task.

V1.2.50

• Bug Fix – a blank Slogan isn't allowed because it would inhibit the totals on printed tickets.
• Improvement - better explanation of interactions between Charge Allowed and Warranty Provider switches in the Help file.

V1.2.51

• Improvement - on Reports | Sales | Tax Collected, show both taxed and untaxed parts, labor, and sublet for each Tax Authority involved in selected tickets.
• Improvement - on Daily Summary, include cores and restocking charges in the Main Summary and Invoice Details.
• Improvement - on Reports | Sales | Detail Profit, cores and restocking charges are shown separately, and discounts, supplies, and taxes are shown at the bottom. The bottom line on the report now matches the bottom line on the invoice.
• Bug Fix - on Reports | Sales | Detail Profit, we fixed a bug on jobs totaling $0.00.
• Bug Fix - it's no longer possible to delete a job that has only non-trivial timeclock entries.
• Bug Fix - after updating the job info on a ticket, you no longer get a data access error if you try to delete the entire job.
• Improvement - added cores and restocking columns to Reports | Export | Parts Sales.
• Improvement - added these new features to the Help file.

V1.2.52

• Improvement - when Finalizing a ticket with a significant partial payment, a message explains why you can't choose Charge as the payment method.
• Bug Fix - on the Finalize and QuickBooks Settings forms, alerts are shown in the user's chosen color instead of blue.

V1.2.53

• Bug Fix – fixed the OrderID/Invoice# selectors to disallow blanks and revert to 1 on invalid entries on the Detail Profit, Tax Collected, Payments Log and Order Log Reports.
• Bug Fix - on Reports | Sales | Job Analysis, the first model year enforces the 4-digit rule like the last model year.

V1.2.54

• Improvement - upgraded development environment from Windows 2000 to Windows XP Pro.

V1.2.55

• Improvement - made it more user friendly when Motive Power found that the shared files or registry had been changed or damaged. Now we tell the user what went wrong and exit gracefully. Previously this kind of problem would result in a run time error. If this problem happens after a RunMe has run, we tell the user and go on.

V1.2.56

• Improvement - changed the program so that you can’t get into a confused state when updating details on the default vehicle. Motive Power doesn’t ask if it’s a different vehicle after you change the make, model, or year of the Default Vehicle. You can no longer change its tag from Default.
• Bug Fix – you no longer get a run time failure if you try to update the name of one vendor to be the same as another vendor. This is not allowed but in certain conditions you would crash instead of getting the message that you could not duplicate a vendor.
• Improvement – made the F1 message larger on the Login screen.
• Improvement – changed the Vehicle History screen and report, to show the newest service first so you don’t have to page or scroll down to see recent work on vehicles that have had a lot of services.
• Improvement – changed the buttons on the customer search screen so that you can’t pick Start Ticket until you have displayed customers. The [Show Vehicles] button is disabled when we’re showing the Customer/Phones list because we’re listing only Customers, not Vehicles.

V1.2.57

• Bug Fix – changed the phone number add on the Customer screen so you don’t get a run time error if you add a new phone but leave the number blank. Now you must fill it in to leave the grid.
• Bug Fix – changed the service interval fields on the Jobs page of Work Orders to accept only digits. Previously you could get a character in there which would prevent the reminder from working properly.
• Improvement - added tool tips to the Invoice History screen to tell you what order the data will be sorted in if you click on that column.
• Bug Fix – italicized the column heads on Daily | Cashbox to show that they’re sortable. Fixed the grids Settings | Personnel | Security and Reports | Logs | License to prevent misleading highlights.
• Improvement – added information to the Help file explaining how to align invoice for window envelope and detailing the sort order for Invoice History.

V1.2.58

• Improvement – Added details to show what the e-mail reminder looks like in Help.
• Bug fix – Changed work orders to be able to stop an error that would occur if you entered multiple decimal points in Job Hours or Job Price. Now it notifies the user and reverts to the old value.
• Bug fix – Changed time clock to notify you when you enter multiple decimal points; previously Motive Power ignored the entry.

V1.2.59

• Bug fix – Changed the Add Job form to handle problems created if the user entered certain keystrokes that were not numbers or letters when scrolling to a job or using the job filter.

---

TECH MODULE

Motive Power Tech changes for Motive Power 3

• There is no separate Tech module for Motive Power 3. End users get either tech or service writer features depending on their security settings in the personnel section of Motive Power 3.

Motive Power Tech 2

• Improvement -Added a check for extra spaces or lines feeds at the end of customers mailing address. Ask user if he meant it, and strip off the extras if not.
• Improvement - Changed Mailing Address and Parts Pricing basis from Frame to Elastic for better full screen presentation in Customers and WorkOrders.
• Improvement - In Work Orders, when user presses [Add Job], we check for vehicle make, model, and year. If any not filled in, we warn user and offer to go directly to Vehicles page instead of adding a job.
• Bug fix - Found by MJS in Motive Power 2 in the work order directory. You’d get a Run time error 381 when pressing [Cancel] if there’s nothing in the Most Recently Used list (like when the files are brand new).

Tech V2.0.3

• Bug fix - R&A found a problem with the Work Order Most Recently Used list, similar to Mgr V2.0.6. Using the Directory, you couldn’t always access WOs that weren’t already on the Most Recently Used list once the Most Recently Used list was full.

Tech V2.0.4

• Bug fix -From WorkOrders: when Vehicle Make started out blank, you’d get a Run Time Error 94 if you tried to drop down the list of makes.
• New Feature - Added call to MPHelper.exe if we can’t connect to Motive Power 2. MPHelper looks at your network for a shared MotivePower2 folder and a CAI2 instance of SQL Server.

Tech V2.0.5

• Improvement - Shortened the 120 second ConnectionTimeout because it makes MPowerTech2 seem broken when it can’t connect initially. Now tries regular connection twice before resorting to MPHelper.

Tech V2.0.6

• Improvement - in WorkOrders: when you press the […] button in the Parts grid, Motive Power 2 looks in both invoice history and the Catalog, and uses the later price if both exist.
• Improvement - Now gives error message if [Print] fails on a ticket. There are some fields that the report writer cannot split across pages. Includes suggestion to trim some long text fields.

Tech V2.0.7

• Improvement - Fixed wrapping toolbar in Vista by widening screen slightly if Vista is detected.

Motive Power Tech 1

Tech V0.0.3

• Improvement - Changed version of ADO to 2.7 because one test machine (Toshiba) was getting the timeout error when trying to launch MotivePower Tech.

Tech V0.0.4

• Improvement - In the Work Orders Directory, My Jobs view: punching in or out of a job makes that job the focus.
• Improvement - Updated some documentation to current, like the How To page in Work Orders
• Improvement - Added tool tips to the buttons on Work Orders Finder.
• Bug Fix - changed the Open list in Dir to include all the jobs for the current Tech.

Tech V0.0.5

• New Feature - Added a No Jobs button to the directory so you can see tickets that have been started but have not had any jobs added yet
• New Feature - Added the attachments feature to the Tech module. Everyone can display the attachments but the permissions Add attachments and Delete attachments apply here

Tech V0.0.6

• Improvement - Made better tool tip for the No Jobs button in the directory
• Improvement - Added the current Motive Power version number to the Settings screen because all users have permission to see this screen.
• Bug Fix - Changes so that a person with read only access to a work order someone else has open cannot add or delete attachments

Tech V0.0.7

• Improvement - Changed so that you can recover an attachment to an open work order that was accidentally deleted
• Improvement - Changed to access one work order at a time instead of reading the full recordset to improve performance
• Improvement - Added the number of attachments to the button on the Info page so you can easily see if there are any attachments for this ticket

Tech V0.0.8

• Bug Fix - Changed to fix a small problem with warranty providers on a work order. If you added a job, chose a warranty provider and checked parts and then pressed add job again right away, the warranty provider information was not saved

Tech V0.0.9

• Improvement - When you pick a job from the directory you go to the job directly instead of to the top of the work order in question
• Improvement - Changed how the program accessed records to improve performance.

Tech V0.0.10

• Improvement - Revised the Quickie tutorial to go along better with the new workflow

Tech V0.0.11

• Bug Fix - Some tech users would fail if they picked the Setting button on the Tech module depending on exactly how permissions were set in the Manager module

Tech V0.0.12

• New Feature - Starting a new ticket will automatically place the work needed section of the most recent work order into the work needed section of the current work order
• Improvement - Changed to advanced to the next cell automatically when entering a VIN in Customers | Search | Vehicles by VIN
• Bug Fix - Fixed a problem with editing the third party authorization area on the Info form of Work Orders
• Improvement - Changed handling to be smoother when you try to blank out a numeric in grids.

Tech V0.0.13

• New Feature - Added a way to get old part information into the Parts section if you have the exact part number. A small button is added to the part number field. After entering the part number either click on the box or enter Alt+Period to have Motive Power look for an exact match in finalized invoices. Messages pop if the pricing information is more than 6 months old or the part had a core charge last time it was sold

Tech V0.0.14

• Improvement - Changed graphic and messages on exact match feature so that it looks more like an underlined period (the keyboard shortcut is Alt+ Period)
• Improvement - Clarified messages on the Work Orders | Totals | Score to read 'costs or quantities not entered for some items'

Tech V0.0.15

• New Feature - Created a report of vehicle history that does not contain any information about who owned the vehicle previously. This report appears on the History screen for each vehicle
• Improvement - Changed the exact part number match to work only for workers with permission to Add and Edit parts

Tech V0.0.16

• Improvement - Upgraded exact part number look-up to warn you if the information is over 6 months old
• Improvement - Added a message "Be sure to add a core charge of this item removed is not rebuildable" to clarify the message when you use the exact part number feature and the part information indicates that there was a core charge last time.

Tech V0.0.17

• New Feature - Added a parts look-up called Catalog. When you request an exact match look-up on a parts line and the part is not found in a Finalized Invoice, the request will check the Catalog file for an exact match.

Tech V0.0.18

• New Feature - Provided an automatic crosscheck to other vehicles when adding or editing the VIN. When possible, the vehicle history will be migrated regardless of the previous or current license or owner. When it can't be done automatically, the user will have to resolve it, but the new feature can print you a sheet detailing both vehicles. This feature required changes so that the default vehicle no longer has a VIN to copy to each new vehicle you start.

Tech V0.0.19

• Improvement - Changed the parts finder and the sublet finder to keep the Settings and the filtered data after adding an item to the work order. This makes it easy when you want to pick more than one item from the filtered data. Pick Add to ticket, enter quantity and click Search and the search form for that job is just like you left it.

Tech V0.0.20

• New Feature - Added another column to the AllJobs view in the Tech Work Order Directory. This column indicates whether a particular job has been Finished. It can be used as a sort key by clicking the column heading.

Tech V1.0.0

• Improvement - Updated the Help system for all changes made to date.

Tech V1.0.1

• Bug fix - The [Add Job] button on an open ticket worked when the ticket was owned by a tech or manager at a different station.
• Improvement - On the Vehicle History screens, we moved the customer's name out from behind the buttons.
• Bug fix - On the Jobs page of a Work Order, if you changed the in-house comments and then closed Motive Power immediately, your edit was lost.

Tech V1.0.2

• Bug fix - You couldn't add the first job to a new ticket.

Tech V1.0.3.

• Bug fix – Limit the quantity on a parts line to 9999 so that you can enter a negative 9999 to back out part sold in error. The previous limit was 32,000 but would not accept a negative 32,000.

Tech V1.0.4

• Improvement – We changed the warning about bad mileage entry from a 100,000 mile interval to a 10,000 mile interval after a survey of end users.
• Improvement – Change the discount function to not allow discounts that cause the pre-supplies charge total to of the invoice to go below zero. You can make negative invoices by entering a negative amount in the parts, labor or sublet section of a job. The discount function is not intended to be used for credit memos or returns.

Tech V1.0.5

• Bug Fix – corrected error that caused the message “Trouble calculating Supplies Charge” to appear when work order had more than one sublet item on a job.

Tech V1.0.6

• Bug fix – corrected tool tips on the Parts Search and Sublet Search forms.

Tech V1.0.7

• Bug fix – limited text boxes to 2048 characters for job description and In-house comments on Jobs page of Work Order.
• Bug fix - you cannot change the name of the Unknown Customer, or delete its name or keyword.

Tech V1.0.8

• Improvement - in Work Orders, make all the fields on the Jobs page look disabled when there's no job selected.

Tech V1.0.9

• Improvement - added Help buttons to the dialog boxes that warn about login problems.

Tech V1.0.10

• Improvement - Added a [Comments] button to the Vehicle History screen. Shortened other button captions, moved customer name to the left. Added ToolTips to all buttons.
• Revised Help file.

Tech V1.0.11

• Improvement - added Help button to startup screen when you can't connect to SQL Server, and revised the Help file.

Tech V1.0.12

• Bug Fix – on the Vehicles screen, you no longer get an error 94 when you try to change a blank license to one that's already in use.

Tech V1.0.13

• Improvement - in Work Orders, on Customer screen:
  • if you turn on the WP switch, the Charge Allowed switch comes on automatically (without any message). You can’t turn Charge Allowed off as long as WP is on
  • the Unknown Customer can't have a charge account or be a warranty provider.

Tech V1.0.14

• Bug Fix - you can no longer delete a job with only significant timeclock entries.
• Bug Fix - you don't get a data access error if you try to delete a job right after changing it.

Tech V1.0.15

• Improvement - upgraded development environment from Windows 2000 to Windows XP Pro.

Tech V1.0.16

• Bug Fix – changed the phone number add in the Customer screen so you don’t get a run time error if you add a new phone but leave the number blank. Now you must fill it in to leave the grid.

Tech V1.0.17

• Bug Fix – changed the service interval fields on the Jobs page of Work Orders to accept only digits. Previously you could get a character in there which would prevent the reminder from working properly.

Tech V1.0.18

• Improvement – made it more user friendly when Motive Power found that the shared files or registry had been changed or damaged. Now we tell the user what went wrong and exit gracefully. Previously this kind of problem would result in a run time error.

Tech V1.0.19

• Improvement - Changed the Vehicle History screen and report, to show the newest service first so you don’t have to page or scroll down to see recent work on vehicles that have had a lot of services.
• Improvement - added tool tips to the Invoice History screen to tell you what order the data will be sorted in if you click on that column.
• Improvement – made the F1 message larger on the Login screen.
• Improvement – added information to the Help file detailing the sort order for Invoice History.

Tech V1.0.20

• Bug fix – Changed work orders to be able to stop an error that would occur if you entered multiple decimal points in Job Hours or Job Price. Now it notifies the user and reverts to the old value.
• Bug fix – Changed time clock to notify you when you enter multiple decimal points; previously Motive Power ignored the entry.

Tech V1.0.21

• Bug fix – Changed the Add Job form to handle problems created if the user entered certain keystrokes that were not numbers or letters when scrolling to a job or using the job filter.