SPC: Sales, Profits and Commissions
Version 1.0.9, 1 Apr 2005

• Fixed a bug where if the Partner record were updated via the Update button, the program would convert the primary record to a Partner record as well. The result would be two partner records and no primary.

Version 1.0.8, 31 Mar 2005

• Redisigned the Plan logic so that the plan were associated with the Agent Profile table rather than the Agent table. This allows for agents to change plans with different profiles. Prior to this, changing an agent's plan would change it without regard to history. Now a past profile records the former plan assignment.
• Revised the Partner Sales logic so that the partner sale acquires the plan and plan profile of the primary partner.
• Worked on the user interface to make the relation between update/new fields and the current data more obvious (little blue lines in front of the places where the user is supposed to enter data).
• Moved the record navigation arrows to the right side of the screen header for better access.

Version 1.0.7,20 Mar, 2005

• Repaired bug where after updating the agent ID or agent name, a show all (All button) was required.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the vendor name from being updated.
• Fixed a bug in which any existing Partner ID failed to update in the sales table during update of agent ID.
• Corrected a serious problem where existing data in any associated partner record failed to update when the primary sales record was updated even though the Partner field remained unmodified.
• Repaired a minor bug where the post user (agent who first created the record) for a quota record was improperly updated.

Version 1.0.6, 7 Mar 2005

• Enhanced the data entry panels on all detail layouts so that the user can tell where to enter data. Also modified the view panel (at the left of the data entry panels) of those layouts so that data fields appear non-modifiable.
• Corrected a problem where the the sales record being viewed at database shutdown was not the same one that showed on database relaunch.

Version 1.0.5, 4 Mar 2005

• Redesigned all detail layouts to fit on a 1024 x 768 screen in landscape mode. This eliminates the need to scroll from top to bottom to get to various buttons.
• Widened and redesigned the list view layouts to accommodate more fields later on, and to be more consistent with the newly designed detail layouts.
• Added a general help topic on Layouts.
• Put the item field on the Sales list layout, along with a corresonding column sort.
• Made the entire line of data on the list layouts click-sensitive so that it acts like the small square button and proceeds to the detail edit layout for that data.

Version 1.0.4, 1 Mar 2005

• Increased the size of the vendor field in the regional report.
• Fields and logic were added to the employment plan feature so that bonus thresholds could be set by the user, and so that bonus values may be either flat dollar values or percentages of agent quarterly quota amounts. Dollar bonus amounts will still appear on the Agent Quota report.
• A form was put on the Lark & Owl website (www.larkandowl.net) to allow user feedback from those who download the demo version.
• A bug was fixed where fields were locked on the sales list layout preventing input during a find operation.
• A optional salary field was added to the Agent Profile record for manual inspection and information. The field shows up as a summarized monthly value on the Commission report.
• A flag was put on the Plan layout to control whether commission are calculated from sales profit (sale price – sale cost) or from total sale price. If the flag is null for the plan, sales commissions will not be calculated.
• A Sales Item report was created. This report is identical to the Regional Sales report, except that it sorts by item and reports a count of each item in a valid sale. A valid sale is one where the sale type is either Purchase or Lease. Other sales type will not be counted, such as Partner transactions for the secondary partner. Note that the Partner transactions must be included in the report in order to evalute total sales profit for the sold item.

Version 1.0.3, 15 Feb 2005

• Disable the internal dialog that mistakenly appears whenever a user attempts to delete an employment plan record.
• The plan name field on the agent layout was lengthened to accommodate text plan names.
• The process for using the adjust transaction to create a forwarded amount was documented in the field level help for Sales Type on the sales layout.
• A bug was fixed where the quota value of newly entered stock was not calculated correctly if there were no sales records in the database.
• The percentage of commission withheld and forwarded to be paid in the next month for agents in the company has been opened to the user on the Shop layout, so that it can be varied from zero to 100. This allows flexibilty in how a sales shop can be configured and operated.
• A general help topic was invented for Getting Started with a new, almost blank database.
• A bug was fixed which allowed the partner percent of sale to be entered without an available partner on update to a sales record. This caused the sales agent who owned the record to be his own partner.

Version 1.0.2, 30 Jan 2005

• A serious duplicate record problem was resolved and eliminated, caused by ignoring the next new values of record keys on data import across two unsynchronized copies of the database. Even though all the records in the target tables were being deleted before import, the field definitions of key values were not being dynamically reset afterward, so that the next new record in that table would get a new key not guaranteed to be unique.
• A problem was fixed where help windows did not correctly resize when the layout view percentages were changed.
• A change was made to the way that quota value is calculated for stock entries. The new formula is: stock quota value = cost / (1 — the standard margin).
• A bug was fixed in the Vendor Quota report where if a stock item were the only transaction in the month for a vendor, the total expected (fiscal) yearly quota would not be calculated correctly and produced a "?" in the field on the report.
• A bug was fixed which caused the name of the sale partner, if it existed, to be removed from the primary agent's record during the update function.
• A change was made so that the partner in a sale would receive the same commission rate for his portion of the raw profits as the primary agent. The Partner Commission rate in the Plan table was eliminated from the table and the corresonding formulas.
• A bug was fixed where the exported sales table had the same name as the database itself (sales.fp7), causing the Windows runtime version of the database to behave strangely. A "-exp" was added to the filename of the exported sales table (sales-exp.fp7) before the file extention so that the Windows specific problem would not occur.
• Buttons were created above the dark blue divider line at the top of every major layout, so that the user would not have to journey to the Shop table to change the layout view percentage. There are three side-by-side buttons that look like little montitor screens and correspond to views of 75%, 100% and 150% of normal size.
• A plan was established to build distribution CDs for specific clients, and supply a generic demo CD with realistic but fake data.
• A Clear All maintenance script available only to the developer was placed on the Tools layout. The Tools layout was slightly redesigned to have 5 instead of 4 panels for the various catagories of functions available there.
• A bug was fixed where there was no user warning shown for an attempt to modify any of the profile dates at the bottom of the sales transaction layout.
• A check and corresponding message was invented to warn the user on the Sales layout if he attempts to log a sale against a vendor whose profile is dated in the future. Allowing this might cause the monthly and yearly accumulators on the Vendor Quota report to become meaningless, especially if a previously active profile had different quota values in the month array. Some sales could then exist based on both the old and the new profiles causing an imbalance in accumulated quota values over the fiscal year.
• The requirements for filled fields on the new Plan entry page were eliminated, allowing employment plans to be created with zero or non-existent commission rates. This was necessary to accommodate non-sales agents getting monitary credit for performing certain sales functions, such as Extras or partnerships.
• The item fields on both the Stock and the Sales entry layouts were forced to uppercase, after the developer's observation of existent sales data and of the entry practices of users.
• Completion messages were created for import/export functions.

Version 1.0.1, 24 Jan 2005

• A bug was fixed where the Report layout help and the Tools general help were missing from the package.
• A feature was added to the Shop page as a user preference which will allow the user to choose a 75%, 100%, or 150% window scaling factor, so that all layouts and reports could be accommodated more easily on monitors with different resolutions.
• A change was made to cause the contents of all user data fields to be selected on entry.
• A change was made to revise the user security structure so that there are at this time only three accounts on file: DBDevel, DBAdmin and Demo. The password minimum lengths were set to 8 for DBDevel, 6 characters for DBAdmin, and 4 for Demo.
• A 30-day Demo version of the SPC database was created. Username is "Demo", password "demo". Please note that in FileMaker Pro databases, usernames are not case sensitive, but passwords are. The Demo version may be permanently upgraded to a licensed version by purchasing and entering a valid DBAdmin password. Contact the Lark & Owl Press for more information (864.592.2204).
• A bug was fixed where the last column of the Regional Report did not show the correct total.
• A change was made so that the date clearing scripts (small green buttons) blanked the both the year and the month. The values, in any case, are still persistent across closing and reopening of the database.
• A change was made to offer the user a more obvious way of dismissing a report window: a Continue button in the lefthand status column. When pushed, the window will disappear revealing the Report layout. Ctrl (Cmd)-2 on the keyboard or Reports under the GoTo menu will still revert to the Report layout.
• A bug was fixed where the "Go To Detail" icon-button at the top of the layout did nothing.
• A bug was fixed where the top-of-page icons on the Quota list layout were misaligned.
• User general access to the primary data layouts was removed and a developer accessible Tables feature was added to the Tools layout for that purpose.
• A bug was fixed in the report generation logic that made the year in the specified report range default to the company's fiscal year, rather than current calendar year. Fiscal year is involved in both the Agent Sales Quota Report and the Vendor Quota Report, however fiscal year is used to specify the report range only in the Vendor Quota Report.

Version 1.0.0 18 Jan 2005

1.         Initial version.