Updates galore

ARMA has been much improved over the last 12 months with some great new features added:

  • Street order for driver lists and round complete can now be set by bin type. This means you can set a different order for the round if e.g. waste and recycling collections are made in a different order
  • Option to enter the time for each ‘missed clean’ when running end of day
  • Customers in Arrears form updated to allow direct entry of a payment or to go to the customer details page. This allows the user to go through the list telephoning each customer and updating the customer record as needed
  • New option on Main Menu to select a customer by ID

There’s always more in the pipeline!

New website build in progress

The old ARMA website is becoming difficult to update and maintain, so we’re moving to a wordpress site over the next couple of weeks.

We’ve copied all the old news items and the main pages, but there may be a few bits and bobs missing!

New ‘Payment Reminder’ module implemented

We have completed the design, coding and testing of the first add-on module for ARMA.The ‘Payment Reminder’ module creates a reminder slip for each customer whose credit is at, or below £0.00 after a days clean, or if desired, each time you visit a customer. The slips are printed at the same time as the driver lists for a day, either 2,3 or 4 to a page (depending on the design selected) and need to be guillotined before use.

If you currently write out reminders, either when on your rounds, or before you go out, this module could save you valuable time.
As the slips need to be customised for each ARMA customer, there is a small charge of £200 for the module, or, for monthly payers, an extra charge of £10 per month.
Contact us for further details and a demo.

ARMA updated

We’ve been working hard over the Christmas period adding a new version of the ARMA Activity Report, which shows income and cleans over a selected period.

The old report was slow to generate and provided a single set of figures. The new version is generated in just a couple of seconds and both income and cleans are displayed by month along with totals for the period.
The new Activity Report shows both income and cleans performed split by month. It is built using some new tables created in the background and takes just a couple of seconds to produce.
We’ve also updated a few other areas to make ARMA even easier to use…
  • Direct entry of next clean date in Customer Detail form
  • New ‘Add Round’ form to simplify round entry
  • Prompt added to reactivate inactive customer when a payment is entered

Overseas enquiry

We received our first overseas enquiry late in November. ARMA can be used pretty much anywhere, as it takes date, time and currency formats from your Windows defaults.

We were both pleased and surprised to get an email from New Zealand asking us for an extended registration key for ARMA.

ARMA is free for the first 2 months provided you register the software using the key we can provide by email.

Problem (resolved) found with Windows XP

We have found a problem when running ARMA on Windows XP, where payments are not correctly applied to a customer.
The software has now been fixed, but if you have previously installed ARMA and are running XP, we strongly recommend you download and install the patch version from here.
Detailed description:
When adding a payment for a customer, ARMA stores the customer number in a variable to pass to the payment routine. If running WIndows XP the code to build the variable name doesn’t work. This results in a customer number of 0 (zero) always being used by the payment routine.
Fix:
Calling routines, and the payment routine, modified to use a fixed variable name for the customer number.

User Guide now available for download

Download the ARMA User Guide from our downloads page and take a look at what ARMA could do for you…

  • Step by step guide to setting up ARMA
  • Managing daily tasks
    • Printing run sheets
    • adding payments
    • adding cleans at end of day
  • Printing reports
  • Modifying rounds
  • Registration process

New features are being added all the time. Check the support page for details.

Wrapping up loose ends

We’ve been busy dotting the odd I, crossing a T or two and generally preparing ARMA for the outside world.

The help file is complete and has been fully incorporated into the system and all the major bugs in the code have been fixed.
The latest release has been installed on our system at FreshbiNNs and is running live – once we have a few days of problem free processing under our belts it will be all systems go.