Handling Optional Surcharges

I had a customer ask if there is a way to optionally mark a building permit fee for inclusion in a surcharge calculation. The situation was this: if the proposed permit item exceeded a certain size it required a surcharge fee otherwise it did not. In their case the actual permit fee did not change but you could account for that easily enough as well. To check for the surcharge we used the Modifier field to indicate "Yes" or "No." We then added the following script to their fee formula to handle the surcharge option:

If detail2.modifier = "Yes"
Replace detail2.surcharge with .T.
Else
Replace detail2.surcharge with .F.
Endif

Tracking Multiple Surcharges Trick

In Ohio and perhaps other states as well communities are now tracking multiple surcharge fees. In Ohio there a 3% commercial and 1% residential fee. A trick to make these easier to track is to rename the "Surcharge" fee item that is created for you automatically in Maintenance when you assign a surcharge fee to a building permit. You must leave the front end as is but you can add on to the back to create fee names such as "Surcharge 1%" and "Surcharge 3%". Doing this makes it easy to differentiate between the two fee types when you later run reports from the Fee Detail Report Screen.

Renaming Application Groups

The other week a customer wanted to rename one of the titles in the Application Bar at the bottom of the Property Screen. He wanted to change the "General" option to "Site Plan." Turns out you can do that with the User Script option. The script was:

propscreen.app_option.option4.caption="SitePlan"

This script was added to the "Screen" option for the Property database. I think this trick may be of particular use to customers who have custom applications and want to rename the "Custom" label to something more meaningful.

New Backup Service for ZonePro

We are now offering customers a backup service for your ZonePro databases and documents. I've just put the finishing touches on a new module called ZP Backup that will run from the Main Screen of ZonePro. It will zip up your database files (and your Reports folder too if needed) and upload them to a special account we set up for you on our internet server. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes and involves no decision making on the part of the customer. It's very quick and easy. You can restore a backup file just as easily. This new service should have some support benefits as well since ZP Systems will now be able to review your backup files if needed. I'm excited about this option. Over the years we have had several customers who have had disastrous experiences where they have lost data because of a lack of backup files or problems with backup files. Now there is no excuse for not having a good backup plan.