Introduction
The Images feature provides the ability to have photographs recorded for each of your assets, customer equipment, invoice items, employees (or their ID, and company logo. There are many advantages to having photographs on hand. Some very good reasons would be for insurance claims, historical events, and photos of items you sell, to show your customers.
Assets
Take photographs of your service vans, automobiles, tools, and office equipment.
Customer Equipment
Take pictures of customer’s equipment for reference and sales related activities.
Invoice Items
Take photographs of the items you keep in inventory.
Employees
Take photographs of your employees. In some states, it is mandatory you have copies of your employee’s identification (driver’s license and social security card).
Company Information
Used to setup the official company logo to appear on invoices and other reports.
Form Access
Open the record and click on the Menu button.
- From an Asset record, click the Image button.
- From a Customer Equipment record, click Menu | Image.
- From an Invoice Item, click Menu | Image.
- From within an Employee record, click Menu | Image.
- From the Company Information window, click Menu | Image.
Saving Images to Hosted File Location
Connect to the RDS website (https://rds.aptora.com). Once you have entered your login credentials, click the File Explorer icon.
Copy over your employee images to you a folder within the hosted environment. It is recommended to create a folder for storage of your images used for the forms above. This way you are easily able to access them for attachment.
Field and Button Definitions
- Picture Utility – This is where your image is displayed.
- Type – Displays the image format (e.g. BMP, JPEG).
- Width/Height – Displays the width and height of the image in pixels.
- Name – Displays the image filename.
- Size – Displays the size of the digital image file itself (in kilobytes, Megabytes, etc.).
- – / + – Used to zoom in and out on the image when the “Thumbnail” radio button is selected.
- Picture – Displays the image at its original size without zooming in or out.
- Thumbnail – Used to activate the “– / +” control which enables zooming in and out on the image.
- OK – Saves the form and exits.
- Select – Brings up the Microsoft Windows® “Open” dialog box, used to locate an image on the local workstation or network. Please see the Help system in Microsoft Windows for more information on using this form.
- Clear – Removes the existing image from the form.
Tips
- Most bitmap formats (JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF, etc.) are supported in the Image feature.
- When you select an image from your computer’s hard drive, a copy of that image is placed in the same folder that contains your company file (database). This allows the user to move the images from the original location without creating problems for Total Office Manager. This also makes backups much easier as all images will be found in one location.
- Images don’t have to be “images”. At least one company we know of works on the rooftop units at a large mall. They use the Image feature in customer equipment to store a scanned map of where the particular piece of equipment is located on the roof, to make sure they’re working on the correct unit. Be creative with this feature!
