Traffic Report (Key Steps)

Open Jobs. Any new work should be opened as a job ticket, as it happens. A job ticket can be opened anytime after it is conceived, and certainly before the work begins. It's important to open new jobs as soon as possible, since purchase orders and time can't be tracked without a job number.

Clone Jobs. Existing jobs can be cloned into new jobs. Cloning makes an exact duplicate of an old job, including its estimates but not due dates, status, or cost and billing amounts. Cloned jobs get the next automatic job number.

Edit Jobs. Almost everything about a job ticket can be edited as needed. Changes can be made to jobs at any point during its lifetime, as needed. The changes you make to jobs take affect when they are saved; so anyone who prints a job report will see your changes immediately.

Delete Jobs. A job can be deleted before any work has begun. But once a job has costs, hours, or billings it can’t be deleted. This prevents jobs from mysteriously disappearing with unbilled costs. Deleting a job is permanent and irreversible. However, the deleted job’s diary entries aren’t affected, allowing anyone to see who deleted the job.

The Add jobs tasks window allows you to add tasks to a new job ticket once it's been saved. Like job tickets, changes can be made to job tasks at any point during the job's life -- including after the job is closed. The changes you make to job tasks take affect when they are saved.

A job task can be deleted before any costs, time, purchase orders, or billings have been added to it. Once a job task has activity, it can't be deleted. Like jobs, this feature prevents billable tasks from being deleted and, therefore, not billed. Once a job task is deleted, it is gone forever. The same task can be added back to the job later if needed.

If you always bill jobs based on a fixed estimate, then you’ll use the estimate billing option often. If you generally bill jobs at completion, the estimate billing option is useful when you sometimes need to bill a job -- or any part of it -- up front (such as a big printing job, or the first job for a new client).

Use these buttons to print job reports, labels, or estimates. Job reports can be printed for all jobs or jobs for just one client, project, or AE/Team. The lists can also be printed for a range of status codes and dates. You can easily see all the jobs currently in-progress, or all the jobs opened for a specific client this year.

Jobs can be searched by job number, name, client, project, template type, client contact, or last added. Use the forward and backward arrows to browse previous and next job numbers in your database, or enter a job name or number in the search field.

You could browse one-by-one to stumble across the errant job, but who's got that much time? You don't, and that's why there's Power Search. You can search for jobs using what little you know, then quick scan through the results to find what you need. You can even memorize your favorite searches.

This menu will automatically list recently viewed jobs. So if you're looking for a job that you've worked on recently, it will more than likely appear here. Simply select it from this menu and it will automatically open.

Use these links to see the current job's creative brief, work order, estimate, change orders, traffic:deadlines, print specs, RFQs, homeBase, or Work In Progress.

The job's vital information is displayed here, including job number, name, client, project, client contact, date the job was opened, date it's due to be finished, and the date it was last billed. You can change the job's priority using the priority drop-down menu. If the job has been finished, click the finished checkbox. To close the job, click the closed checkbox.

The job's description, new job checklist, and any special instructions can be seen here by clicking the appropriate panes.

This Gantt Chart shows how your shop is doing in actual hours spent on the job vs the hours estimated on the original estimate. To the right, the number of days before this job is due. If the numbers are red, the job is behind schedule. The client rating indicates how happy the client was with the finished job.

Job tasks are listed here, along with the current phase the task is in, the person responsible to complete each task, the start date, due date, hours left to complete the task, and a visual chart showing percentage of completion. Once the black bar fills this column, the task is finished.

The production status appears here.To change production status, click on the traffic:deadlines link and then use the status tab to update Production and Finance status. The next deadline for this job will appear on the right.

Select a task from the list on the left and the task's description and special instructions (if any) will appear here.