2015-01 Klaw Release Notes

Overview

The Klaw release provided updates to a variety of areas throughout general TBS. One of the key updates was to the Email Billing options. The developers and IT were hard at work setting up a secure online repository that will now store all PDF invoices for clients. These will no longer be stored on the web servers and taking up valuable drive space. With this change, TBS can now include a secure link to a customer's PDF invoice directly in the ebill notification. Read more below about this new feature and options.

 

General TBS - Enhancements & Bug Fixes

23571 - Update EmailPDF options Development

The Email Bill Notice options on the Account Settings - Invoicing tab have been updated to support the new Email link feature within billing emails. All emails can now have a direct unique link that points straight to the customer's PDF invoice within the email bill. This will eliminate the need to attach large PDFs to emails that can sometimes be caught in spam filters or cause performance delays when sending emails with large attachments.

Since "with PDF" and "Without PDF" are no longer needed as options, the new options will include:

  • No Email
  • Email If Over Minimum
  • Email Always

Existing settings and default values will automatically be updated based on the logic below. Also, account managers will take care of updating all Email Templates to include the new Download Invoice link for customers.

Legacy Setting New Setting
No Email No Email
Email Without PDF, If Over Min Email If Over Minimum
Email With PDF, If Over Min Email If Over Minimum
Email Without PDF, Always Email Always
Email With PDF, Always Email Always

 

24383 - Download File Option on Document Viewer Development

A 'Download Document' button has been added to the Customer Documents viewer to assist users that have trouble with their browser when using the View Document button.

24377 - Add Cycle to Invoice Review tab in BCP Development

Cycle has been added to the Invoice Review grid.

The default filter has been changed slightly as well. Previously, the top level filter can be described as "Where Review Until is not in the past".

The "Where Review Until is not in the past" filter has been replaced within a new AND filter to make it easy to add a Cycle filter and keep the "Where Review Until is not in the past" filter.

 

24403 - Bug: Invoice Viewer Location Summary Tab locks up on large accounts Development

Previously, larger accounts were experiencing issues showing invoice detail. To remedy this, the Invoice Viewer has some improvements, most of them on the Location Summary screen to handle large data sets as well as some .

Changes to the Location Summary tab:

  • All table cells have been top-aligned to improve readability
  • Table headings are now in bold to improve readability
  • Background colors have been changed slightly to improve readability
  • Location and detail information is now sorted alphabetically vs. by location code
  • The Rate and Priority columns in the Taxes and Fees breakdown have been removed for clarification
  • The tab is faster due to database query improvements
  • If a customer has over 1000 products, the charge and tax/fee breakdowns no longer appear - this was too much data for the browser to process.

Additionally, the View Invoice tab now has two sub-tabs: View Invoice and Download Invoice. The View Invoice tab is the default and provides the existing behavior. The Download Invoice tab downloads the invoice PDF as an attachment.

 

24396 - Bug Fix: Invoice summary screen not showing all Tax Details Development

A bug has been resolved on the Invoice Viewer summary screen -- the screen was previously not showing all tax details.

 

24389 - Improve Error Recovery in Persistent Processes

Better error recovery has been implemented for some important system processes so that, should the unexpected happen, the processor will restart after a few minutes.

The affected system processors are:

  • Activity Queue Processor
  • Email Queue Processor
  • Metric Action Processor
  • Scheduler Processor

 

24409 - Bug Fix: DB Timeout on Credit Invoices

Previously, when crediting an invoice with a large number of taxes, the credit transaction could have been created without the tax credit records. The system now cannot create one without the other -- if the tax credits fail for some reason, the transaction will not be created.

Additionally, an index has been added to improve the performance of the tax record lookup.

 

24353 - Email Template Administration Tool

To improve the readability of the Email Template Administration browse screen, the Plain Text Content column has been removed.