CAPITAL Office Business Software

These are some ideas that we would find useful for working with Assembly Manager:

When the Assembly is built, component stock is deducted and the Finished stock is added to the stock table. Records reflecting the transaction are recorded in the Audit_1 table. Would it be feasible to also create a "Customer" Invoice Transaction and a matching "Supplier" Invoice Transaction (using the existing tables that handle these transactions for real customers and suppliers)? I know that you can already have "Internal" Customer and Supplier accounts.

This would give a better picture of stock usage for forecasting.

Also, when an Assembly Transaction is copied from a Standard Template, the Work Notes do not appear to copy. We used these Work Notes on the Template to describe some basic steps for each assembly. Is this by design, or is it something that has changed recently? I noticed the problem in April 2005.

Is there an Installation Workshop setting that defines the number of digits to use for a Stock ID? Currently we have 10 Digits in our Stock table, but only 7 digits in every other table that also uses this field. Is this a glitch hanging over from a previous upgrade? It causes us some headaches, because any external database tools (Excel, Crystal etc) cannot use their auto-linking features on the Stock table. Advanced users can write a custom Sql join like so:
<code>
stock s inner join staux000 x on right(s.number,7) = x.auxkey
</code>
However, this makes a select few responsible for more mundane tasks that could be pushed out to others who could do the job using their "high-level" tools. Is there an easy way to fix the table without breaking Capital?

1. There is no need to create additional customer and supplier transactions as movement information is recorded in the system stock audit trail, and it is possible to run movement reports to ascertain usage. Many users have requested an on-screen view of usage history and this is something we are looking into for a future release.

2. This is not a problem, it is by design. Remember that you can create assemblies without work orders. A work order must be issued first. In the past it was not possible to transfer work order notes to a newly created assembly task because the work order does not exist at the time the assembly is created. In the latest version of CAPITAL, if a template contains work order notes, you are now asked if you also wish to create a work order. If you do this, work order notes are then copied into the new assembly. By the sound of things you do not yet have a version available to you that incorporates this behaviour. (Tech Support, the Development Team and some Resellers operate versions of CAPITAL later than the official release.)

3. This is not a 'corruption' in the database. Some fields or sections of fields may be reserved for internal use or for future use. That usage may not be obvious to you. Right now it is difficult for us to justify making extensive modifications to our software simply to workaround functional limitations in some third-party tools, particularly with so many good ideas internally and from our users, waiting to be implemented. This is not to say we're not aware of the issue, but altering the structure of this table in this area involves a significant and risky change, so it is not something we are planning to do in the immediate future.