PeachPro sets you free
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PeachPro sets you free
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| RCK Enhanced Customer Lookups |
Have you ever struggled to find a customer record? Now find the customer you want - Faster! Create 9 different ways to lookup customers that's easiest for you - by the whole phone number or just part of it, such as when you want to find customers within a certain area code or local prefix.
Lookup by the whole Customer Name, Telephone 2, Salesperson, City and State, Contact Name, and more! Plus, search multiple fields at the same time, such as Telephone 1 and 2, or Customer Name and Contact Name. RCK - Enhanced Customer Lookups allow you to look up customers your way.
To use RCK - Enhanced Customer Lookups, you must also own enhancement REL - Expanded Customer Lookups. After installing both enhancements, create custom lookups by following these three steps:
After following these three steps, your new enhanced lookups will work at any customer prompt in Accounts Receivable or Sales Invoicing.
To select the fields you want to use to look up your inventory items, select Maintain A/R Options from the Maintenance programs for Accounts Receivable, then select Set Lookup Options:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ |+==================================================================+| ||ARMAINT1 Maintain A/R Options COMPANY ID: SP || ||07/10/96 Software Professionals Inc. GENERATION #: 62 || |+==================================================================+| | +=========== Program Options ===========+ | | | O - Set Module Options | | | | P - Set Printer Assignments | | | | F - Set Laser Forms Adjustment | | | | L - Set Lookup Options | | | +=======================================+ | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
After selecting Set Lookup Options, the following menu options will display:
+========= Lookup Options ==========+ | K - Set Lookup Key Format | | R - Rebuild Keys | | D - Set Lookup Display Format |<--Only if REL is turned on. +===================================+
Select K - Set Lookup Key Format from the menu and a prompt will appear for Key Code. Press F2 -Lookup and you will see a list of available Key Codes.
To look up customers by fields other than Customer ID, Key Codes must be set up to point to the field you want to use to look up customers. Some Key Codes have already been created and are available with the purchase of additional enhancements. If you have any of the pre-defined lookup enhancements, you may select one of these key codes to view how it has been set up, but it cannot be modified. The pre-defined lookups are RIL - Lookup By Whole Customer Name, RLT - Lookup By Telephone Number, RLC - Lookup By Contact, RLS - Lookup By Salesperson, and RLZ - Lookup By Zip Code.
To create a custom lookup, you must select a numeric Key Code (1 thru 9) and specify the field to be used to look up customers. After selecting a Key Code, you will see the following screen:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |+========================================================================+| ||ARMAINT1 Maintain A/R Options COMPANY ID: SP || ||07/10/96 Software Professionals, Inc. GENERATION #: 00 || |+========================================================================+| |Key Code........: 1 | |Sort Group......: 1 Maximum Width: 40 | |Force Upper Case: N Current Width: 0 | | Available....: 40 | | Field Start Width | | | | | | | | Accept (Y/N) N | | F1-Help F2-Lookup F5-Ins Line F6-Del Line F10-Done | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
When setting up a custom key code, you would normally leave Sort Group at the same value as the Key Code. (For information on combining fields to be searched at one time, see Advanced Topics: Multiple Key Codes For One Sort Group discussed later in this document.)
Set Force Upper Case to Y, to force all fields starting with the same letters to be sorted together, regardless of whether they are upper or lower case. This is helpful when using a field such as Customer Name that has a combination of lower and upper case letters.
In the Field column, enter the code for the field you want to use to look up your customers. You can press F2 - Lookup to see a list of available fields. After selecting the field to look up by, the Start and Width columns will be set to default values. Normally, these fields would not be changed. (For information on using Partial Fields for searching, see Advanced Topics: Using Partial Fields For Key Codes.)
Press F10 - Done and you have now completed Step 1 for creating a custom lookup enhancement. If you want to have additional fields to look up customers by, select another Key Code and choose the field to look up by. After you have set up all your desired Key Codes, you are ready for Step 2, Rebuild Keys.
Before the Key Codes can be assigned to a lookup display, special auxiliary files must be created. To create this file, select Rebuild Keys from the Set Lookup Options menu in the Maintain A/R Options program for Accounts Receivable:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ |+==================================================================+| ||ARMAINT1 Maintain A/R Options COMPANY ID: SP || ||07/10/96 Software Professionals Inc. GENERATION #: 62 || |+==================================================================+| | | | +========= Lookup Options ==========+ | | | K - Set Lookup Key Formats | | | | R - Rebuild Keys | | | | D - Set Lookup Display Formats | | | +===================================+ | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Rebuild Keys must be run after creating or changing Set Lookup Key Formats and when you first install any pre-defined enhanced lookups. The amount of time required for this process varies depending on the size of your customer files and your hardware/software configuration.
After creating Key Codes that define how customers are looked up, and running Rebuild Keys to create auxiliary files, you need to select the fields to be displayed in each lookup box. Lookup Display Formats can be changed several times and does not require you to Rebuild Keys after each modification. After you initially set up your lookup display formats, you can quickly and easily modify them to get the lookups you desire.
To select which fields are to be displayed in each lookup box, select D - Set Lookup Display Formats from the Set Lookup Options Menu in the Maintain A/R Options program for Accounts Receivable.
Set Lookup Display Formats will prompt you for a Lookup Code. Press F2 - Lookup for a list of available Lookup Codes. If you have other enhancements, then some Lookup Codes have already been set up to display certain fields in the lookup box. All the Lookup Codes may be modified except for Lookup Code P, which is the default lookup provided by Peachtree and displays Customer ID.
If you selected User Defined Lookup 1, the following screen would display:
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |+======================================================================+| ||ARMAINT1 Maintain A/R Options COMPANY ID: SP || ||07/10/96 Software Professionals, Inc. GENERATION #: 12 || |+======================================================================+| | Lookup Code.....: 1 | | Menu Hot Key....: 1 Maximum Width: 75 | | Menu Description: User Defined Lookup 1 Current Width: 0 | | Menu Sequence...: 10 Available....: 75 | | Sort Group......: 1 | | | | Field Start Width Decimal Places Title | | | | | | Accept (Y/N) Y F8 - Undo | +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Change the Menu Hot Key and Menu Description to the character and title you want to appear on the menu when you press F2 to look up customers. The description should describe what fields customer will be looked up by, or it could relay to the user what fields will be shown. This option can be modified later if desired.
Menu Sequence is used to prioritize your lookup options. When you press F2 - Lookup for a customer, and more than one lookup display is available, you will get a menu listing the different lookups available. If you want this lookup display to be the first choice on the menu, set the menu sequence to 1. If you want this to be second, set it to 2. If you do not want a lookup option to appear on the menu, set the menu sequence to 0.
For Sort Group, you should enter the same number as the Lookup Code. The Sort Group number stores the definitions for the fields to be used to search for customers. Later, when creating lookup box displays, you must specify how the lookup finds customers by selecting one of the Sort Group numbers entered above. You can create more than one lookup box display that uses the same Sort Group number, giving you the ability to have two Lookups by Contact, but one box could display balances and another could display address and phone numbers. If you want to create a lookup box that searches multiple fields at one time, see Advanced Topics: Multiple Keys in One Sort Group.
In the Field column, enter the codes for the fields you want to see in the lookup box. The order that the fields are entered is the order that they will be displayed in the lookup box. You can press F2 - Lookup to select from 48 available fields to display. The first field should be the same as the Key Code field you selected for the Sort Group entered above.
Normally, the Start, Width and Decimal Place columns will be left at the default value. However, you are limited to 75 characters for total width of the display box, so you may choose to modify how much of a field is displayed, or change the width of numeric fields if your numbers are less than the maximum allowed by Peachtree. For numeric fields, the Width value includes the total number of spaces for this field, including the number of places to the left of the decimal, the decimal point and the number of places to the right of the decimal. If the Width or Decimal Places is changed, and a value in the field is larger than can be displayed, asterisks will appear in the F2 - Lookup box.
The upper right corner of the screen will show you the Maximum Width, Current Width of selected fields and spaces still available. If you select fields that exceed the maximum width, you will not be allowed to save your format until the Current Width is changed.
For more details on each option for setting up Lookup Display Formats, see the documentation for REL - Expanded Customer Lookups.
If the contents of the Key Code field is the same for several customers, you may want to enter a second field to perform a secondary sort. For example, if you had a lookup by Customer Name, you could enter a second field for Phone number, then if several customers had the same name, they would then be sorted by phone number. If a second field is not set up, and more than one customer has the same contents for a field, they will appear in the order they are found in the customer file.
If you want to look up customers by the third or fourth character of a field, or look only at the last 2 or 3 characters in a field, you can set up partial fields for Key Codes to look up customers by that specific part of the field. By changing the start location from 001, this will cause the first characters of the field to be ignored when searching for a customer. Decreasing the width will limit the number of characters used to find a customer. By modifying the start and width appropriately, you can use part of a field as a key segment. You can use this to make room for additional sort levels or to look up customers based on fields in your Accounts Receivable which you designate for special purposes. For example, if you wanted to look up your customers by their phone number's local prefix i.e.: 503-684-1555), you could set the start location to 005, and the width to 3. This will cause the focus of the lookup to be only the 3 numbers after the area code, with preceding and following numbers disregarded.
Occasionally, you may need to find a customer in Accounts Receivable, but you do not know which one of several similar customers it is. You could do 2 or 3 different lookups to find the customer, but this would be time consuming. Now you can combine lookups to find customers by searching multiple fields at one time. This is done by creating a Key Code Format for each field to be searched, such as Telephone 1 and Telephone 2, and entering the same Sort Group number for each of the Key Code Formats. Finally, when creating Lookup Display Formats, enter the Sort Group number used for the multiple Key Code Formats.
When more than one Key Code is assigned to the same Sort Group, you create multiple pointers to the same record in A/R, one pointer for each Key Code. These pointers are then sorted so that fields with the same or similar entries are grouped together, such as all phone numbers that start with the same area code and prefix. Since two or more pointers exist for each record, a customer will show up multiple times in one lookup box. One line in the lookup box will be the pointer to the first field, such as Telephone 1, and the second line will be a pointer to the other field, such as Telephone 2. When using the lookup box containing multiple pointers, it will find the telephone number entered, whether it is in Telephone 1 or Telephone 2.
Go into Maintain Lookup Display Format. Make sure that the menu sequence of the lookup is not zero. If it is zero, change it. There is no need to Rebuild Keys.
This is probably due to adding customers on the fly from the Sales Invoicing module without a PeachPro enhanced program. Rebuild Keys will update the lookups so that all customers are displayed, but you should also make sure that Enhanced Sales Invoicing has been installed. To do this, go into Sales Invoicing Enter Invoices and check that there is a number in the upper left hand corner of the screen after the word SIPROC1. If there is not a number (i.e. E38) then reinstall the module from the PeachPro disks, then run Rebuild Keys.
The order of the customers in a lookup is determined by the field in the key with the corresponding sort group. Make sure that the first field in the Set Lookup Key Format is the same as the first field in the Set Lookup Display Format.
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