Category Archives: Transit

Automatic invoicing and projected client balances in ParaPlan paratransit management solution

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We are pleased to announce that we are releasing two, very handy new features scheduled for the next update.

  1. Automatic generation of invoices when saving to history.
  2. Current and projected Client balance displayed on Client screen.

ParaPlan, a turnkey paratransit management solution, has a highly robust, highly detailed invoicing system. Users can invoice directly to Clients, to Programs or to a 3rd party. Costs are calculated from the executed (or no show) trips and additional charges for items such as O2 transport or after-hours trips can be applied to the invoice.

Automatic invoicing

For some users, this highly granular control is more than they need and they want a simpler way to use all the other benefits of our invoicing system. For these users we offer the ability to automatically generate invoices when saving a work date to history. 

Screen Shot 2013 02 18 at 9 31 49 AM

When Generate Invoices when saving to history is checked, the system will generate invoices for Clients and Programs for trips that meet the following criteria:

  • Trips that were completed or no shows.
  • Trips that have a dollar amount in Client Billed or Program Billed.
  • Trips that have not already been invoiced for.

When those conditions have been meet, an invoice will be generated with the default billing information for that Client or Program. The Client/Program balance will be updated and a PDF will be available for printing (it will not be printed automatically).

This use case is specifically targeted at users that want to collect pre-payments from Clients and be able to see how much money a Client has left in their account.

Projected Client Balances

To make it easier to understand how much money a Client has left in their account, we have added a new expander panel to the client screen. When initially viewed, it will display the dollar amount a client is projected to have at the end of the day. When expanded, it will display the projected amount for the end of the week, the end of the month and the next 30 days. 

Screen Shot 2013 02 15 at 10 59 20 AM

This allows users to quickly determine if a Client is financially eligible to schedule a new ride. To calculate the balances, we look at:

  • Total balance of unpaid Invoices and collected Payments from our Billing system.
  • The cost of the trips the Client has taken that have not had an Invoice generated for.
    • The system assumes all trips saved to history have been invoiced.
  • The cost of scheduled one-time reservations.
  • The cost of scheduled recurring reservations.

The addition of these two new features really helps make ParaPlan a viable replacement for any existing payment collection and reconciliation system. Please call Kyle at 913-735-6651 to enable Billing on your ParaPlan system.

Hey, where did my keys go?

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Keys

The “Keys” icon has long been a staple of ParaPlan. The history behind the decision to use that specific icon is brief. When development of ParaPlan 4.0 began in 2006, we needed an icon. I had a set of several hundred and picked the one that most represented transportation. It was meant more to be a placeholder rather than a permanent selection, but as these things sometimes happen, it became the default.

Today, we replace those keys and the history of coming to that decision is a bit more verbose. First of all, I have been making an effort to spend more time and energy on design. With that in mind, I have been working on an icon for our pending iOS app. That process was quite intense and with a lot of help from my wife, we have something that we really like. Icons on iOS do not always scale to the desktop, so we made a few changes while keeping to the general theme. The P represented is obviously for ParaPlan, but it also represents a path that a vehicle has taken. More specifically, the “turn right, save gas” theory that UPS uses to be more environmentally friendly. In the same way, our software saves gas for our clients by grouping trips and optimizing their routes.

So here are the new icons that will be gracing your desktop today, and in the near future, your iPhone and iPads.

CenteredfatterP   WindowsIcon4

ParaPlan now leaves no show trips on Routes

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Today’s release of ParaPlan contains an exciting new feature. When a trip is marked as no show by a dispatcher, or no showed by a driver from their MDT, that trip will stay with the route on the Scheduling Canvas. It will be marked in orange as normal, but it will stay on the route as such:

Route view 2

 

The no showed trip will also show in Cancel bin (as it always has), also colored in orange. We realize this might be a bit confusing at first and may lead the dispatcher to think the trip was duplicated, but it is in fact just the one trip. We feel this adjustment in workflow will pay off once dispatcher get used to it.

Cancel bin

 

Why leave no shows on the route?

In the majority of no shows, the driver goes to the client’s house, waits for a period, then considers it a no show. Leaving that trip associated with the route is a more accurate representation of the driver’s workday. A manager taking a quick glance at a route may see a large gap between executed trips. This could potentially bring up a host of questions that could reflect poorly on the driver or the scheduler. Seeing the no show trips in orange is going to remove any of those doubts.

Many of our clients have to report trips that were no showed by the client. Leaving the trips with the route allows timestamps and odometer readings to be recorded much more easily on those trips. This change will help our clients submit their reporting numbers. It also helps explain mileage gaps when performing routine vehicle maintenance.

Why does it show up twice? Is it in the system twice?

It is still just one trip recorded in the database. We felt that it needed to be shown with the route AND in the Cancel bin to most accurately reflect the workday. This can be affirmed by changing the pick up time of the trip and see it change on the route and in the Cancel bin. We felt this was an important enough change that it needed to become the default behavior. Currently this is not overridable. 

How will it look on the driver’s MDT?

This behavior will remain the same. If the driver marks it as no show, the trip will be marked in orange on the dispatcher’s Scheduling Canvas and it will be removed from the MDT. If the no show was initiated from the dispatcher, the trip will be removed from the driver’s MDT and the driver will be notified.

How are roundtrips handled?

When the outgoing trip of a roundtrip (or callback/will-call trip) is marked as no show, the return leg is untouched and remains scheduled. This is always how ParaPlan has handled this situation. This is because even though the client may not have ridden on the vehicle as scheduled, they may still have made it to their appointment through other means and will still need a ride home as previously scheduled. To remove all associated legs of a trip, a dispatcher should cancel the trip and check the “Cancel associated trips” checkbox on the Cancel Reason window.

Will the Actuals screen change?

Yes it will. Just like the route view, the trip will remain on the digital manifest and be colored in orange. This will allow users to populate timestamps and odometer recordings (pick up only, obviously) for trips that were marked as no show. Note that we also changed the color of the route border as it clashed horribly with the no show orange.

Actuals view 2

Will this change any reports?

Yes. Many reports that listed or aggregated executed trips now have the option of including no shows. Depending on the use case, clients may wish to include no shows, or continue to leave them out. The default option is to NOT include no shows, which is consistent with previous reporting behavior.

What about any custom queries?

We will have to look at this on a case-by-case basis to see how a custom query needs to be modified to remain accurate to the query’s intent. Contact Brett and he will look at them individually.

This is very exciting! When will it be released?

We are pushing this out to our beta users today. Based on feedback, we will release this to all clients on Wednesday or Thursday. Please contact us if your agency would like to be a beta user and have quicker access to new features.

Smoothing out the rough edges

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Once a software solution is mature enough to have the core functionality complete, developers can begin to focus on the use cases that are uncommon, but very annoying. We had the chance to tackle on of those cases today.

ParaPlan will allow a user to enter just a month and day when typing dates. We assume that they meant this year and we automatically fill it in. This works out really well for the first 50 weeks of the year and saves our users many keystrokes and spares many typos. The last two weeks of the year become much more challenging as clients start requesting rides for the following year. So if Betty calls today and is requesting a ride for January 14, the user will enter 1/14 in the trip date and once they tab out, it will autocomplete to — 01/14/2012. Not the ideal end result.

To fix this situation, we added a check to see if today was in December and the user was entering a date in January and both of the dates were this year. If so, we change the inputted date to the following year and provide a message at the top of the window that we did so and provide an opportunity for the user to click the message and undo the change.

Note that we automatically executed the action that 95% of the use cases would end up choosing if we had displayed the options to the user in a message prompt. We find that message prompts (especially Yes/No prompts) confuse and irritate users. Often they will just ignore the text and choose the button that they think will get them back to using the software. So we almost always automatically execute the action that is most likely, then give the user the option to undo the automatic action taken. Much cleaner and less intrusive than a Yes/No message box demanding the users attention.

Here is a screenshot of a user entering a date that is meant for next year, but will be autocompleted to this year:

Before

 

Here is the resulting screenshot of the year automatically changed and the ability for the user to rollback the change:

After

How to exclude trips from reports in ParaPlan

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In ParaPlan, trips are performed by a specific program. These programs are typically a funding source of some sort. For example Kroger will pay our clients to drive senior citizens or handicapped people to the store then back home. Medicaid is another common funder.

Often when running reports, users like to see everything except a certain program. We use a minus symbol as a reserved operator to perform that task. So if we wanted a report that showed all the trips in April 2012 except those done under the “grocery” program, our report window would look like this:

How ParaPlan handles changed LogistiCare trips

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ParaPlan by EnGraph Software can import trips provided by the brokerage company LogistiCare. They provide a CSV file containing trips that our clients are contracted to perform, and we import them into ParaPlan. It’s a really neat system and it allows companies to provide non-emergency medical transportation to regions that might not otherwise have these services available.

Invariably, trips change before the execution date. Sometimes, they are updated with a different destination, other times, they are completely cancelled. To allow for these situations to be properly handled, LogistiCare included a TripStatus field. This field will be either NEW, MODIFIED or CANCELED.

ParaPlan will handle each case differently:

NEW
A new trip is inserted into ParaPlan.

MODIFIED
ParaPlan looks up the existing trip using the LogistiCareID. If it finds it, it updates the trip and unschedules it if it is already assigned to a Route. If it cannot find the existing trip, it generates a new one and makes it available for scheduling.

CANCELED
ParaPlan looks up the existing trip using the LogistiCareID. If it finds it, it cancels the trip and removes any Route assignment. If it cannot find the existing trip, it creates a new trip with the provided information, then cancels it.