ServiceDesk 4.8.199 Update 12/27/20

If you are doing automated appointment reminders, you likely know we offer several strategies by which you may control which customer telephone numbers may be used for RoboCalling (if any), and which may be used for SMS texting (if any). For details please see here.

One of those methods involves placing the expression "RoboTo" in the little Notes box next to a telephone number (to indicate that the accompany number may be used for that purpose) or "TxtTo" to indicate that a number may be used for SMS.

Until now, we've left it up to the user to manually type in such expressions. Todd at Nebraska Home Appliance was kind enough to point out this was a rather silly oversight on our part, so we've now addressed the matter.

Thus, if you now right-click on any of those little Telephone-Note boxes as present in a Callsheet, ServiceDesk will display a little dropdown like this:

Just click on the text you wish to insert, and, voila, it will instantly insert for you.

If you're not a Canadian servicer, you may sensibly skip this section.

If you are a Canadian servicer, you know that handling of sales tax in Canada can (depending on your province) potentially be rather different, as compared to in the U.S. Historically, we have built accommodation for each different Canadian tax situation as it has arisen. Regretfully, we had not prior created documentation describing how each such accommodation works, and the setup that is required for each. Thus, several times, as we've encountered new clients needing to accommodate their particular situations, we've struggled to remind even ourselves of what are the options we've created, and of what must be done for their setup.

Recently, a client in British Columbia (where PST and GST must be kept separate) alerted us to the fact that in that province PST does not apply to labor. We needed to re-create an accommodation for that (turns out we'd actually done it once in the past, but had revised for a client with a different need, without realizing we were simultaneously breaking it for the first client). We re-created that accommodation with this release.

At the same time, we figured it was high time we created documentation that describes the whole "cope-with-various-Canada-tax-situations" scenario, so we did so. You may access that documentation here. It may also be accessed by clicking on the tax-information button as seen here in the Settings form:

This was simply an omission in the initial build of this new interface. We failed to put, in each appointment reference, a visual indication of its JobCount value. That's added in this release. We use the same signification as is used in the DispatchMap -- namely, if the JobCount value is more than 1, the appointment reference is appended with a quantity of asterisks enclosed in brackets. The quantity of asterisks indicates the JobCount, as seen here: