In the previous lesson we opened the vendor screen. Let’s take a closer look at the structure of our entry screens.
Each entry screen opens to a list of items.
The fields at the top of the list tab allow you to filter the list. In this way you can narrow the list to just the vendors you’re interested in. In this example I’ve entered a partial postal code, and the list has been filtered to only display vendors with ‘V8’ as part of their postal code:
If you are uncertain as to the meaning or purpose of a field you can hover your mouse over the label and a tooltip will appear:
This tooltip is telling you that if you enter a ‘Y’ in this field this list will only display vendors that have outstanding balances.
Tooltips are available on virtually every field in abio.
Ad Hoc Reporting
You can generate a report from the list tab. Move the columns around, change their widths, filter the contents of the list, and then click on the ‘Print’ button:
Clicking on the ‘Print’ button will let you select a printer to send the report to. You can also click the down arrow next to the Print button and choose to either export the report to Excel, or email a PDF version of the report.
You can also toggle the report between block capitals and mixed case for readability:
Details Tab
The details for an item are on the Details tab.
Navigating the List of Records
If you’ve filtered the list to just certain records you wish to review, you can navigate through the List from the Details record. Four keys allow you to do this:
- Page Up – This will display the record one up on the List tab from the currently selected record
- Page Down – This will display the record one down on the List tab from the currently selected record
- <ctrl>Home – This will display the first record on the List tab
- <ctrl>End – This will display the last record on the List tab
Action Field
As an enterprise system, Abio is different than software you have loaded on your own desktop. When you work on a spreadsheet on your own computer, it’s yours to change or delete any way you see fit. Abio is designed to be used by large teams, where different members of the team have different areas of responsibility, and some members of the team are more trusted than others. To that end, Abio users are assigned roles that allow them access to different screens, reports, and utilities. In addition, some users may be allowed to view records but not change them. Some may be allowed to change but not delete records. Your Abio administrator can adjust these roles as necessary.
To manage different roles, Abio controls access to screens via the ‘action’ field. Clicking on the action field shows you a list of available actions. Actions that are not available to your role will be greyed out:
If you select the Change action, fields that can be changed will display with a white background:
Like the filter fields, you can hover over the label on a field to view the tooltip:
When you’ve made your changes, click <Apply>. A message will display confirming your change is saved. Here we’ve updated the web site for this vendor:
Repeating Actions
Abio was designed for managing very large construction projects with thousands of invoices and timesheets. To allow users to enter data as quickly as possible, Abio makes the assumption that the user is likely adding multiple records at a time. To this end, whenever you finish adding a record, Abio immediately sets the screen up for another add. This means you will see a message that you’ve successfully added the previous record, and the screen will be initialized to blanks for the next record.
If you want to review the record you just added, you can use the navigation keys we referred to earlier. The new record is added as the last entry on the List tab:
But you don’t have to reposition on the List tab to review the ‘NEWVEN’ record. You can use the ‘PageUp’ key to display the Details of the record one above the last record, then the ‘PageDown’ key to display the most recently added record.
Additional Tabs
As well as List and Detail tabs, entry screens can have additional tabs when there is more recorded than can be displayed on a single detail tab. For instance, Payroll Cheque entry has 7 tabs:
Hotlinks
Some fields on entry screens are blue and underlined. These fields are hyperlinks that you can click on to take you either to the source record, or to a report. If you look at the Client entry screen, you can see that region is a hotlink:
Clicking on the region label will bring up the Region entry screen for the Eastern Region:
Other hotlinks lead to reports that itemize the components that make up a summary number. On the Client entry screen, the purchase label is a hotlink:
Clicking on the ‘purchase’ label brings up a list of purchases for this client:
This report itemizes the A/R invoices that compose the purchase amount of $15,119.34.
Printing Entry Screens
You can either use the Print action, or <ctrl> P as a keyboard shortcut to print this record:
You can also export to excel, or email a PDF of this record:
Printing, exporting and emailing screen prints from the entry screens work in a similar fashion to printing, exporting and emailing reports.