Piles of invoices? No Problem!

desk full of paperPiles of invoices look different than they did a few years ago when paper cuts were a much bigger risk. These days, invoices often arrive via email as PDF files. Spitfire Project Management System includes some features that date back a decade and were originally designed to handle TIFF files from network scanners.  We don’t think about this feature too often, but it can still offer significant workflow benefits today.

Sales recently shared the needs of a prospect who wants to process a pile of around a hundred invoices and supporting documents a day basically twice, making two passes through the pile.  We told the prospect about our solution, which apparently thrilled them enough that they asked if they could start using it “tomorrow.”

Continue reading

Data Deduplication and Single Instance Storage

deduplicationOkay, so this article is for the IT Crowd, or at least those who thought the British comedy was funny.   You see, sales told me that the fact that our system includes automatic and transparent Data Deduplication is so darn dry and boring that they couldn’t imagine including it in a fact sheet anywhere.

Apparently, the feature is so obscure  that even Google Chrome’s spell check doesn’t believe “deduplication” is a word. Maybe that’s why Wikipedia has entries for both Data Deduplication and Single Instance Storage.

Continue reading

Too Much Information

too much informationI have the distinct pleasure of spending a short time each week with a handful of kids, most often middle school age. I learn a lot from them: for example, thanks in part to text messaging, teens have even more acronyms than the software industry–which is astounding!

Hearing them banter about one of those acronyms “TMI” got me thinking.  TMI strictly means “Too Much Information”, but also carries the connotation of some fact or piece of information that the party didn’t want or need to know.

Continue reading

Just one version of the truth … please!

SpreadsheetsOne of the most ubiquitous documents in a Construction office is the common spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are used for everything: estimating, budgets, forecast, tracking of submittal – production statistics – performance metrics and other types of critical events and data, and even used to create Pay Applications and invoicing … and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is no surprise why the spreadsheet is popular. The functionality of modern spreadsheet applications empowers even the novice users to develop effective tools to apply to specific tasks.

Continue reading