Panopea Consulting - iMIS Blog

"Hidden" Feature of Service Central

How many of you using, supporting or selling Service Central are aware of its List Paying functionality?

I have run into this at more than one client who is already using the Service Central module in iMIS and could use List Paying but don't know they already have it. So I don't think enough of the iMIS world are aware of this very cool feature. I just ran into this again yesterday at a new client of mine.

List Paying is absolutely wonderful if you receive a single dues payment from an entity that is paying for many individual memberships. Without List Paying, you must go to each individual's record, apply the dues payment, move on to the next. Repeat until you are ready to scream. And god forbid, you should miss one person's payment and then have to go back to figure out who you missed. It can take a long time to apply the payments.

Much of that pain is alleviated by Service Central's List Paying functionality. All you have to do to make it work is to populate the Bill To ID field on the Financial window of every individual member with the ID of the entity that sends you the big check.  If you're doing a mass update to set this up, you need to populate Name.BT_ID and Name_Fin.BT_ID.

When you receive that big check, go to Service Central > Enter/Edit Payments and enter the ID of the entity. Not only will you see the amount owed by the entity, you will also see all of the dues payments for all of the individuals that you need to apply payments for. Right there in a single window! Apply the payments here, click Save. Every individual's record will be properly updated to show the dues payment including updating Name.PAID_THRU, updating the Subscriptions records and creating the Activity records.

p.s., It's even documented in the manual!

The Importance of BI

This is from Brian Moran who writes a lot in SQL Server Magazine:

This summer, leading IT research firm IDC released a report that
evaluates the business intelligence (BI) tools and vendor market for
the period 2003 through 2005. The study has been on the Microsoft site
for a while and if you are a BI person, you might have already read it.
But if you don't think of yourself in those terms, chances are you
haven't read the full report or even scanned the executive summary.
[snip...]
But trust me, reading the report is worth an investment of time if you're a
database professional, even if you're not a "BI person." More and more,
BI and related technologies are starting to seep into everyday usage
within database environments. IDC suggests that trends in the BI market
happen in 15-year cycles. IDC also asserts that "the next wave in BI
has now begun;" in a few years, we'll look back to see that 2005 was
the beginning of a 15-year cycle that focused on "expanding the reach
of BI to more users both inside and outside the organization and a move
to automate more decision processes by combining QRA (query reporting
and analysis) and advanced analytics functionality."
   Probably not tomorrow or next week, but sometime sooner than you
realize, you'll find it hard to be a senior database professional
without having at least a modest grasp of BI technologies.
[snip...]
   The report provides some interesting market-share data that will
interest BI veterans and provides a nice introduction to BI terms and
jargon that will help newbies better understand the competitive
landscape.

The link for the Microsoft article is here.

(If the link stops working at some point, send me an email and I'll send you the article.)