Surcharge Report Formula

We had an interesting request recently where a customer wanted to add a surcharge fee to a Zoning Permit. Of course this is easy to do for Building Permits which have that function built in and which support multiple fee details. For Zoning Permits you basically have to add the surcharge fee directly to the base fee in Maintenance so that when the fee calculates it already includes the surcharge too. In this case we were talking about the 3% Ohio commercial permit surcharge. The basic fee formula was something like "zoning.size * .20" so to add the surcharge to it we would need to write it like this: "(zoning.size * .20)+((zoning.size *.20) * .03)". That part is pretty easy. The tricky part came in the reporting because all we have is a total fee but we want to show how much of that fee is due to the surcharge. My algebra skills are rather rusty but eventually we figured out the necessary formula. If you have a field box at the bottom that calculates the total fees collected you can make a copy of this box and change the field expression to show how much of that fee is a surcharge. The new field expression would be "per_fee - (per_fee / 1.03)". The final number in that expression would change of course depending on the surcharge percentage. This same approach would be useful in Building reports too if you want to show the surcharge amounts based on the total fees rather than reporting on the fee details.

Building Maintenance Script

We've added a new script to the Downloads page of our website. This is a strange one but every once in a while we have a customer do something I didn't think was possible. In this case the customer modified the names of several Building Permit Types in the primary Building maintenance database (as far as I can figure this could only have been done using the Database Browser). Shortly thereafter they noticed that their fee details and inspection details did not show up correctly when they created new permits. The problem was there are multiple Building maintenance databases and the name of the Permit Type must be consistent across all of them for ZonePro to work correctly. The recently posted Mismatched Building Details Script scans through all of the Building maintenance databases and creates a list of any inconsistencies found. You can then fix these in the Database Browser to restore ZonePro to its proper working order. Hopefully this is a script that most of you will never need but as we have learned our customers are full of surprises.

Better Name Splitting in the Compare Module

The Compare Module is used to import a parcel data file and compare it with your existing ZonePro property database. The two main uses are for adding new parcels after lot splits and adding new owner names after owner transfers. Most of the external data files that we've encountered have the owner name in a single field in the last name first format. Previous versions of the Compare Module had an option for splitting the owner name into the first name and last name fields used by ZonePro, but the code was very simplistic. It split every record the exact same way and it only handled the last name first format. In the new version of Compare Module you will be able to use a script to determine how to split names. Scripts are basically mini-programs so they can be as complex as you like. This allows a tremendous amount of flexibility in how the names are split. We will provide a good starting script on our web site that can be copied and pasted into the Compare Module. You can then customize it as needed. By fine turning the script over time you should end up with a name splitting routine that really works well for your community.

Yet Another Photo Tip

Another Photo Module tip has been added to the Tips & Tricks page of our support web site. In this instance we had a customer who had deleted a lot of old photos from their server. They wanted an easy way to remove any records from the Photo database that were linked to files that were no longer there. Again, the script feature of the Database Browser came to the rescue. But I don't want to spoil the ending...go to our web site to see how it is done.