New for Version 3.7

We have made many changes since the release of 3.3. A lot of small changes and additions that will show in the new documentation. Here are some that you may find useful.

Superseding a component with another component

There are times when a component should be superseded by another because the scheduled maintenance would be unnecessary. For instance, a pavement slurry would usually be applied every 5 years. But every twenty years an overlay is applied. In the years that an overly is done the application of a slurry is not performed. The primitive fix for this was to create multiple components for the slurry with life adjustments and replacement counts that would stager the slurry between the overlays. There are multiple problems with this such as complexity, creating unnecessary components, and a slight skewing to the math. To supersede a component is now a simple selection of the component that should be overridden from the component that will replace it.

A.) Select a component in the database to supersede.

B.) Choose to view the schedule

C.) The expected replacement of components with this selection

Show Assessments by percentage

There are times when an association will assess contributions that are dependent on the size of the unit. To quickly present this distribution of assessments you can enter the size an share of individual or groups of units. In the Account Information View:

There is a new section in the report generator to support this information:

Update cost for minor revision

Often an association will want to see what the reserve study looks like in a following year without doing a complete phase one reassessment of cost. This means the current cost of most of the components in the study are simply bumped by some percentage to compansate for expected inflation. We now have a tool to make this quick and simple.

The tool will database the update so you can keep track of your operations and prevent you from applying an update more than once.

We will have a management data base next and by release time we will begin to support maintenance plans and and the Florida method of funding.

Resample Photos for PDFs

Modern cameras take pictures with a great deal of resolution. When printing to a printer this doesn't have any effect on the results. But when printing to PDF files the resolution of the photos is preserved. If you have several photos in your project this can bloat the size of your PDF to many several megabytes. Some mail systems won't allow attachments of greater than 10 megs. Before now the solution was to resample the photos yourself before creating the PDF and is time consuming.

We have implemented adjustable internal resampling so you can use your photos right from the camera and produce much smaller PDFs.

This is set as a global option so done once to have photos resampled for all future generation of PDFs.

Create One Report with Multiple Projects

There are instances when an association is broken up into sectors, each having there own funding needs. But it is desirable to produce one report under the umbrella of the main association. For instance,

The 'Other Report' is a second project with its own report. It looks like this:

We have one user with eight different studies gathered together. There is no limit of count or depth when having a report include the report from other projects. An example of the PDF from the above is available here:

Multi Project PDF

Thanks, Dan.