What's New in GarageKeeper 2000

Year 2000 Support

There are 2 basic ways to address the year 2000 situation. Year 2000 compliant means the program actually keeps 4 digit years. Year 2000 capable means that the software uses some kind of crossover date. For example if the last two digits were bigger than 20 it would take that to mean 1920. Many of the problems that will occur in the year 2000 will be in the hand off from systems that are year 2000 capable. Companies will choose different ways to fool software about the year 2000 problem. Data exchanged between year 2000 capable programs that are using different methods of fooling the software will cause most of the problems.
Computer Assistance decided to make GarageKeeper 2000 a fully compliant product. We did this because it will be more reliable and because there are GarageKeeper users that work on antiques and street rods which are more than 50 years old.
All of the files in GarageKeeper have been changed to be year 2000 compliant. This means that all dates are stored in GarageKeeper 2000 files as 4 digit years. In most date fields GarageKeeper 2000 defaults to asking you to enter a two-digit year in order to save you keystrokes. The default changed from 19__ to 20__ in the year 2000.

Editing

The next biggest change in GarageKeeper 2000 is to provide better editing capability. Those of you who used GarageKeeper 3.0 know the difference in keystrokes and ease of use that occurred in GarageKeeper 3.1. The changes in GarageKeeper 2000 provide a similar improvement.
In all fields you can use the Home, End, Insert, Delete, and the arrow keys to move around and make changes. We have tried to make this editing WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) as much as possible. Unlike earlier versions of GarageKeeper, it is not necessary to move to the end of a line or field to preserve the contents past the spot you are editing. The home and end keys get you to the first and last character in use in a field. Ctrl+Home will get you to the beginning of a field and wipe the field so that you can re-enter the data. If you decide you don't want to make changes or want to see what was there before Ctrl+end will restore the data as it was when you first came into the field.
In work order, customer and inventory screens where you do a lot of entry we have enabled the Tab and Shift+Tab combinations to move between fields. This makes it easier to go back and forth between GarageKeeper 2000 and Windows applications.

Changes in Work Orders (F1)

You use the Tab key and the up and down arrow keys to get around in the heading instead of the left and right arrow keys. You can use Tab instead of Enter to get from line to line in the parts and labor windows. You use Shift+Tab to get to the warranty provider instead of the left arrow key. You use Control+PgUp to get to the first line of parts or labor and Control+PgDn to get to the last line of parts or labor.
These changes were necessary because the Home, End, and the arrow keys are now available for editing in all fields.
You can also start work orders and search for order in progress by different customer codes. This is detailed under the changes in the customer file.
When using a service job, GarageKeeper 2000 uses the Date of Manufacture (DOM) instead of the vehicle year to pick the right job.

Changes in Inventory (F2)

There is now a page of notes for each inventory item. It works the same way as the customer notes screen.

Changes in Purchase Orders (F3)

Vendor screens in purchase orders now show the vendor phone number.

Changes in Customer File (F5)

The customer file has lots of changes. The first change is that you now have two customer names and customer codes associated with each vehicle. For commercial customers this enables you to associate a company name and code and a personal name and code with a vehicle. For regular customers you can have two different family names for each vehicle.
The most requested change was the ability to have more and longer phone numbers. Each customer now has four phone numbers of up to 20 digits each. These numbers can be individually titled. For example they could be called home, work, cell, and fax. You can title them for each customer or you can set up the titles in your default customer. If you use default titles you can change them for individual customers as needed.
In order to preserve space the city, state, and zip fields are on one line as are the year, model and make fields. The date of manufacture is now a full mm/dd/yyyy format.
The screen layout has been changed to put all the customer and vehicle information on the left and the policy and sales information on the right.
After using the four phone numbers, the beta testers requested a way to search for customer by phone number. Because it was late in the development, we added a limited way to do this. The command Tel has been added to the list at the bottom of the F5 screen. When a customer is displayed you can enter T and GK2000 will ask you to enter a phone number. GarageKeeper will display the customer with that phone number if an exact match is found. The browsing sequence in use at the time is preserved. Because this works only on exact matches you have to enter the full phone number as it was originally entered. With four phone numbers now available you can choose to use one of them for some type of abbreviated code if you like.

Changes in Service Jobs (F6)

Because of the change in the date of manufacture field, service jobs have been changed to work from a certain date to a certain date. This eliminates problems with manufacturers who start model years early. It also provides a way to automate jobs on vehicles that had mechanical design changes in the middle of a production year.
You can have a default service job. This works like the default customer in that you can set up a job to be added to each new estimate or work order when you start it. This is helpful for any particular language that you could not fit. For example New York shops use this to add a mileage out field, California shops can use it to put the oral approval language on each ticket. Quick lube shops could put the basic service on automatically. This feature can be as general or as vehicle-specific as you want, because GarageKeeper looks at the make, model, and manufacture date of the default job(s) when deciding which one to use.
Service jobs are easier to edit because you can now page up and down from job to job without having to go back to the directory and reposition yourself.

Changes in Megadisk History (F6)

Several changes have been made in the megadisk handling. We eliminated the invoice history floppy disk. Today, you can finally get fast, accurate, relatively inexpensive backup devices. We kept the invoice history floppy because it was not reasonable, until recently, to back up your megadisk files every day. With this change you need to back up the \GKN directory every day. You will not have any other backup for your paid invoices file, so let me repeat - YOU NEED TO BACK UP THE \GKN DIRECTORY EVERY DAY.
You need a high quality backup device. Inexpensive tape drives do not qualify for this purpose. We recommend that you get a DAT tape or a Jaz (or other cartridge hard disk) drive. These devices are fast enough to insure that you actually do the backup and good enough that the backup is reliable in case it needs to be used.
The invoice history floppy disks used to provide the function of finding invoices by date and invoice number. This ability is now included in the megadisk file itself.

Changes in Megadisk Maintenance (F7)

The megadisk was limited to 32MB or 100MB or 256MB depending on the earlier version of GarageKeeper you used. The GarageKeeper 2000 megadisk can be set as large as 500MB, if needed. If you have old invoices on invoice history floppies, that no longer fit on your earlier megadisk file, you can load them into the GarageKeeper 2000 megadisk.
The megadisk no longer checks your drive space when you set it larger. We had to make that change because so many of the 2GB and larger hard drives do not answer the internal program calls correctly. This problem is caused by a combination of the way translating controllers work and the variety of filing systems in use today. (FAT 16, FAT32, NTFS, NETWARE, NETWAREFS)

Other Improvements

• Data export to interface with QuickBooks Pro 99
• The install makes a complete Windows program group for Win 95/98/NT/2000 machines
• The CD contains versions of the starting screen without the roll-up door and a standard laser macro to fit window envelopes for Accounts Receivable statements