There are some help articles below for various common issues that have occurred in the past and how you can solve them.

A. How to get the best out of our Techncial Support...Please Read!

B. How to fix a lost peer-to-peer Network connection.
“Invalid Program or Start-up Directory”

C. Correcting an Invoice that doesn’t show VAT when it should!

D. Re-indexing your system. Why should you do it and how does it work?

A. How to get the best out of our Techncial Support...
There won’t be many users who haven’t had to request technical support at some point, and we hope that you’ve found it a rewarding experience. To get the best out of the service, though, try following our top five hints…

1. Knowledge is power! Before calling for support, try to be sure exactly what you’re reporting. For example, if you’re having a problem printing, can you describe what’s happening? Does it happen every time? Is there an error message? What does it say? Does the same thing happen if you print to another printer or from another PC? If you ask yourself these sorts of questions before you call, you’ll have a lot of useful information for us when we start asking you questions! It may also help you troubleshoot the problem yourself, for example it might be as simple as turning the printer on or adding more paper!

2. Email us if possible. If you email us, you can take the time to describe your problem accurately, and you can include screen shots and other information that’s difficult to convey over the phone. You might be worried that we’ll answer the phone and ignore emails, but that’s not the case. All issues will be dealt with within the specified response time and according to urgency, so emailing us with an urgent issue is as likely to get a prompt response as phoning us.
eMail Support: Click here to contact our Support Helpline

3. Leave a message. If you call us and we don’t answer, leave a message. If it’s outside support hours (i.e. before 2pm or after 5pm), we probably won’t answer the phone, so you won’t get hold of us by ringing repeatedly. If you leave a message, we’ll pick it up as soon as we’re available, and will react as appropriate. As always, the more information you can give us in your message, the better we’ll be able to help you when we call back.

4. Make sure your call is appropriate. We can only provide support for our software, so ringing us for help with general problems regarding your operating system or network is unlikely to yield a satisfactory result! You’ll get your problem resolved quicker by ensuring that your first call is to the right person!

5. Please be patient! You might feel that your problem is the end of the world, and we may agree, but we can only do so much at once. If we believe a problem is urgent, we will make every effort to find a resolution to it quickly. Chasing us repeatedly makes the process slower because we’ve got to stop looking for a solution while we’re updating you on our progress!

We hope these 5 points will help you get the most out of the service we provide…
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B. How to fix a lost peer-to-peer Network connection.
Support for our EMIR and BOSS products across our growing and considerable client base often reveals common problems for users with their PC’s and Networking.

Message: “Invalid Program or Start-up Directory” when trying to run EMIR/BOSS.
Problem: The network drive that your software is on is no longer connected to your machine.
Solution: Reconnect the network drive to get your program running again.

Try the following solutions:
Option 1. Check in My computer on the Desktop. Your network drive may appear with a cross against it. Simply double-click on it to refresh the connection. If the cross disappears you should then be OK to run EMIR/BOSS again.

Option 2. The network drive is not in the list. Right click on your EMIR/BOSS icon and choose properties. The ‘Target’ command line in the Shortcut Tab in the displayed window will start with a drive letter e.g. F: This is the drive letter we need to restore.
Choose My Network Places [or Network Neighbourhood] from your desktop – double-click it to open it. Double click on “Computers Near Me” to show all the computers in your workgroup.

When the computers are listed, choose your master EMIR/BOSS machine from the list by double-clicking on it. You will then see the hard-drive of the master machine listed. Right click on this hard-drive icon and choose Map Network Drive. Make sure you choose the drive letter required. E.g. F:
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C. Correcting an Invoice that doesn’t show VAT when it should!
Cause:
This is quite a common problem, particularly for new users of our systems. It is simply a case that the VAT marker wasn’t set to ‘ticked’ against the customer when the job was raised, and as the VAT status of a job is set when the job is raised, and in particular when the customer is chosen, the Invoice doesn’t show VAT even if the customer record has been updated so that the VAT marker is ticked subsequently.

Solution:
The solution, fortunately enough, is quite simple and can be done without the need for technical support! Simply check the customer account first and make sure that the VAT marker is ticked – this can be found against the Invoice address part of the customer’s record in Data Maintenance. Secondly, edit the job and change the customer to someone else and then change it back to the correct customer again. This change will update the VAT status of the job. Make sure that you choose the correct contact and Delivery Address though as these are also updated by changing the customer! Now, simply reprint the invoice and the VAT will now be calculated and shown on the Invoice. Your system will automatically update the invoice details on the Sales Ledger by overwriting the old details with the new VAT enhanced details.

Limitations:
This solution works on Windows versions of our software and on some DOS versions. If this doesn’t work for you then please contact technical support on the usual number! Also, the Sales Ledger update cannot work if you have paid the invoice or it is no longer in the Sales Day Book!
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D. Re-indexing your system. Why should you do it and how does it work?
Many of you may know the benefits of re-indexing your system as part of the maintenance of your system. Indeed, sometimes it is necessary to run the re-indexing utility to fix ‘corruption’ errors that can occur if your system has been cut off in mid flow by a network error, power failure, or other abnormal stoppage! Your system has two primary types of file for storing and accessing your data. The first is the database table that has a filename that ends in DBF. The DBF file actually holds all of your data in ‘records’. For example, the main job file is called CUSTORDS.DBF and this holds one record per job. In order for your system to retrieve this data efficiently, we use index files, which normally have the extension .NTX to hold different sort sequences that holds a look-up table of the ‘key field’ and a record number. E.g. A simple index would be on the ‘key field’ of the Job Number, so the look up table could be simply:
Job Number | Record No
10030            50
10031            51

So when you enquire by job number, your system looks up the record number in the index and goes straight to it, otherwise it would have to trawl through each record until it found the matching job number and this would obviously take longer and longer the more jobs you have! As this index sequence is updated every time you add a job to the system, by any machine on the network, if there is an error during the adding of a job, then this index would have a good chance of being corrupted by either having no entry for the Job added or an incomplete one. Your system has some 250+ databases and some 450+ indices. So it is worth re-indexing them occasionally to ensure they are optimised.

Finding Your Indexing Utility
To re-index your system you need to find the indexing utility in the main program directory and look for a .EXE file that has the letters ‘IDX’ in it e.g. EMIRIDX.EXE. Simply click this file to re-index, but call us first if you are unsure – and you must make sure that no-one is using the system at the time, and also be aware that it could take some time depending on the size of your data. So, maybe running it at the end of the day when everyone has finished using your system is the best time. If you get a ‘Corruption’ message then this is normally the way to fix it.

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