Many of you may have recently found out about the Ag needing the manufacturers name on your chemical usage reports. If you haven’t run in to this yet, you may soon. This is not the kind of thing that can be fixed in a program update (unfortunately), however, it is really simple to do by hand.

Please Note: If you file your chemical usage reports Online – you do not need to make any changes, this only applies for mailed reports.

First, open the Materials window: Purchasing > Materials.

Press the blue button next to Material ID, and select a chemical that you use, then press OK.

In the ‘Name’ field, your going to add the manufacturers name, so instead of it saying “Bora-Care”, your going to make it say “Nisus – Bora-Care”.

After you have typed in the manufacturers name, press the ‘Save’ button. This will save the changes and clear the form so you can continue to the next chemical.

Repeat these steps for each chemical that you use. Obviously if you never use Talstar CA, you don’t need to update it, however if you end up using it in the future, your going to want to update it before sending out your usage report.

Open: Recievables > Payment Posting. In this window, you will see that the ‘Post Date’ already has today’s date, and you are pretty much ready to get started. On line 1 enter the payment information from left to right. The MOP stands for Method Of Payment, and will default to Check. If you are writing off the amount, or received some other form of payment, click in the MOP box, then click the small Options Arrow, and make a selection from the list. Detail is where you can put the check number, Payment Amt is obviously where you put how much they paid. When you fill in the Invoice Number / Job Number field, the rest of the line should auto complete.

Although you could theoretically put in as many payments as you would like in one shot, we recommend that you only do around 10 or 15. If you have more payments to enter than that, only fill in 10 or 15 lines, then hit OK and continue with a blank page. The reason this can have some issues with larger volumes is because for each line, Bugbase has to open, read, process, then write to about 3 documents. Doing this for 10 or 15 lines (30 to 45 documents) is fine, any more though and you may run into some issues.

To add or edit your count list, open Administrator > Locations > Counties.

In the Counties window, click on the blue button next to County ID to see all of the counties in the system. If you see the county that you are trying to add, select it and hit Open. Otherwise, close this list so we can enter it in from scratch.

The first piece of information you need is the County ID (see below for list). The County ID is a number mandated by the state.  Second, enter the county name. The only other thing you have to do to get this county to print, is check the little Active box in the bottom right hand corner of the window.

List of counties / codes:

01 Alameda
02 Alpine
03 Amador
04 Butte
05 Calaveras
06 Colusa
07 Contra Costa
08 Del Norte
09 El Dorado
10 Fresno
11 Glenn
12 Humboldt
13 Imperial
14 Inyo
15 Kern
16 Kings
17 Lake
18 Lassen
19 Los Angeles
20 Madera
21 Marin
22 Mariposa
23 Mendocino
24 Merced
25 Modoc
26 Mono
27 Monterey
28 Napa
29 Nevada
30 Orange
31 Placer
32 Plumas
33 Riverside
34 Sacramento
35 San Benito
36 San Bernardino
37 San Diego
38 San Francisco
39 San Joaquin
40 San Luis Obispo
41 San Mateo
42 Santa Barbara
43 Santa Clara
44 Santa Cruz
45 Shasta
46 Sierra
47 Siskiyou
48 Solano
49 Sonoma
50 Stanislaus
51 Sutter
52 Tehama
53 Trinity
54 Tulare
55 Tuolumne
56 Ventura
57 Yolo
57 Yuba

The ‘Route ID’ is the first thing you should fill in. This can be anything: “1″, “JOE”, “PEST”, but I would recommend keeping it under 5 characters if possible.

Next, if applicable, select the person handling this route in the Assign To field. Once this is done, give the route a name. Again, the name can be anything like: Pest 1, or Joe (if it is in fact joes route) or even Office to keep track of office stuff. The Schedule Group option will define what category this route falls into (on the scheduler, you will notice your routes grouped into folders, this is how you choose which folder).

The other fields are optional, and leaving them blank wont hurt anything. Hit Save, and open the Scheduler. You should now see your new routes on the left and across the top.

Go to Administrator > WDO Admin > Sketch Labels.

This is one of the shortest tutorials on here. Basically, to create a new label, just click on a blank line and type. To remove an existing one, or change the order in which they appear, right click on the label. To edit a label, you click on it and type.

When you are done, hit save. If you have left your diagram page open, switch to a new tab to refresh the list, and show your changes.

If you do not have a scanner, or you are not comfortable with cropping, and cleaning up images, we can create your digital signatures for $25 per signature.

If you have the know how and the equipment, here is how you do it.

First, sign a piece of paper, and scan the image into any photo editing software. You will want to scan this at 300 PPI, and crop the signature as closely as possible. We recommend that you clean up and distortion/ coloration caused by your scanner, and make as much of the white-space pure white, otherwise you will end up discoloration around the signature:

Once you have got the signature cleaned up, you must save it as a Bitmap (.bmp) file. Some software will default to .jpg, but entering a jpeg as a signature file causes some printing issues.

Now, we’ve got our signature cleaned up, cropped and saved as a Bitmap. In Bugbase, open the employees window: Administrator > Personnel > Employees. Use the blue button next to Employee ID, and select the employee for whom we entering the signature. In the right hand section of the window, you will notice the Signature Information section. Click the ‘Browse’ button and find and select your signature. It will be where ever you saved it, so if you can’t find it, save it again and take note of what folder you saved it in.

Once you have entered the signature, you should take a moment use the ‘View File Placement’ tool to see where it will end up. This tool is used to move the signature up and down (compared to the signature line). If it looks a little to high or low, close the preview and use the ‘Adjustment’ drop down to fine tune the appearance of the signature.

When you get the signature where you want it, close the preview window and save the changes made to the employee window.

That’s it! By selecting the inspector in the job window, the inspection reports will be signed. To have your completions signed, select the applicator in the Print window, on the bottom right hand corner.

The short explanation: Save your document as a pdf and attach it to your email.

The long explanation:

First, open the job. Once you have the job window open, hit the Print button in the main toolbar. Select the item you wish to send, and move the Print Option to PDF, like so:

After you have set the print option to PDF, press Process. You will be asked to select where you want to save the document. We recommend saving your pdfs in My Computer > Local Disc (C:) > Bugbase PDFs. If you have not created a folder for pdfs, you can do so by right clicking (while in this same window) and selecting New > Folder:

Name that folder Bugbase PDFs.  Open that folder, then click ‘Save’ or ‘Open’ in the bottom right hand corner of the ‘Save’ window.

Now, you have created the PDF that we are going to attach to your email. From this point forward, the steps will vary based on your email program.

Open (or sign into) your email program, and create a new email. In the email window, you should see a button to Attach a file. When you are browsing to your file, if you followed these steps, you should be able to find your document in My Computer > Local Disc (C:) > Bugbase PDFs. Otherwise, browse to where ever you may have saved the item.

Once you’ve got the pdf attached, all you need to do is fill in the rest: ‘To’, ‘Subject’,  ‘Message’… and hit send.

In Bugbase, you should have all of your inspectors, applicators, and technicians information as up to date as possible. For office staff and other personnel, you may want to have their information as well. Although not all personnel information is necessary, its a good idea to keep things centralized.

First, open the Employees Window: Administrator > Personel > Employees.

The Employee ID is required. It’s not a bad idea to keep the IDs sequential, to see all of your employees, or to edit an existing employee, click on the blue button next to Employee ID. The highlighted fields shown below are the minimum amount of information required for your licensed personnel.

Most of the fields are self explanatory, if you are going to get hung up on anything, it would be the ‘License Types’ section. After you enter and Employee ID, you will see the ‘ Branch 1 – 3′ and ‘Applicator’ options appear in the ‘License Types’ area on the right. To let Bugbase know what license(s) your employee has, click the ‘Active’ box next to each applicable license type. This controls the areas of Bugbase in which your employee will be available as an option.

Please note: You have the option to add an employees digital signature in this window. If you choose to do this yourself, you must save the signature file as a .bmp file. Trying to add a .jpg (or anything except a .bmp for that matter) will cause Bugbase to have errors.  We can create a digital signature for $25 and set it up for you.

To turn this feature on, go to Administrator > General Settings > Envelope Logo.

When you click on the menu item, it will have a little check mark next to it. Now, print or preview an envelope (open a job and hit Print > Envelope For… > Process.

You should now see your logo in the return address area of your envelope. If you don’t see it, you may not have us put your companies logo in Bugbase.

1: Check to see how much RAM your computer has:

Right click on My Computer and go to Properties. If you are running windows XP you should see something like this:

If you have less than 500MB, consider keeping other applications closed when working with Bugbase. Realize that they currently only sell computers with atleast twice that amount of ram. Local retailers such as Best Buy not only sell ram, but can install it in your computer for you.

2: Although a lack of ram can seriously decrease your computers speed, there is a simple fix inside of Bugbase that you can try before shelling out cash for computer hardware.

In Bugbase, go to Schedule > Scheduling Prefs: in the window that comes up, find the two fields marked ‘IP Address’ and ‘Port’.  These fields should be blank, so if there is any information in these fields, delete it and press ok.

Close and reopen Bugbase. If you are still experiencing performance issues, see step 1.

3: Spyware

There are a lot of companies out there that offer Anti-Spyware software. A lot of those companies also create spyware that has the function of slowing down your computer and telling you that you have a million viruses (you don’t have a million viruses). As a general rule of thumb: don’t purchase the so called ‘Full Version’ of an anti-virus program if you don’t remember installing the trial version. If you do install a new anti-virus program, please call us at 714.680.9999 so we can tell your new anti-virus to ignore Bugbase. Anti-virus software tends to beat up programs from smaller software developers like ourselves.