The first day of the new system

Bob the Hedge Hog relaxes with a cup of joe, after entering payments all day.

20120103

Ok, the first day with the new computer system did not go as smooth as I would have liked, but there were some extenuating circumstances. First lets remember it is the first day of the year and a lot of payments needed to be entered, and the auto pay has not been set up in the new system making all credit card payments be done by hand, and I have not seen this many checks in one day in a long time. Second I got to rent spaces on the first day of the year! That is a great way to start the year. Oh yeah, third, I don’t think I ever really finished training.

From 9:15 to 4:45 all I did was payments. This would be phone in credit cards, dropped off checks, dropped off cash, mailed in checks , auto pay credit cards and auto pay automatic draft. All of these which were treated like walk in payments. I now know how to process payments of all sorts and have gotten quite fast at it. After 5:00 I tried my hand at doing close out for the first time. Guess what, I did not balance. So here comes my second bonus of the day. I now know how to reverse a payment, move a customer out and how to reverse a move out of that customer. Another Geek moment happened today at this point. This new system (Site Link is the name, I have held off naming it in case I did not like it.) can do a complete reversal on a move out. This is really cool in the storage world. For 20 years if ever I moved a customer out by mistake (yes that happens) I would have to recreate the entire data base for that customer. This new site link program was find the right button and poof it is like it never happened. This came in really helpful today when I took a payment on a space then vacated it then realized , Hey maybe I shouldn’t charge them for the month after they moved out. One button they were back in the system, I could then reverse the payment and move them back out. Geeky stuff to you maybe, but to me I was Superman.

Moral of the story - After 9 hours of competitive payment entering ask your wife why you don’t balance 10 minutes later the answer was obvious and fixable.