Reduce No-Shows with SMS Appointment Reminders

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If you’re running an appointment based business you’re probably painfully aware of the cost of no-shows and missed appointments. Whether you’re taking bookings for an office based business (doctor, dentist, hairdresser etc) or for onsite appointments (building inspections, electricians, plumbers etc) it’s important to have a system in place to remind your customers about the upcoming appointment in advance.

Integrating reminders into the daily workflow of your appointment based business has a number of important benefits:

  • decreases appointment no-shows. We’re all human and sometimes we just forget to enter the appointment into our diary, but being reminded helps prevent no-shows or gives customers a chance to cancel or reschedule. It also allows you to fill your calendar if someone cancels with other waitlisted customers
  • maximises the convenience to the customer by allowing them to receive reminders on their mobile phone which they generally have with them at most times. They can also choose to respond if necessary from their phone at a time of their choosing
  • reduce the number of outbound and inbound calls and staff playing telephone tag

SMS messaging has emerged to be a preferred channel for customer communication including appointment reminders. I personally receive SMS reminders for the majority of my appointments (everything from car repairs/servicing to dental appointments). There are a number of advantages of SMS appointment reminders including:

  • SMS/TXT messaging is available on every mobile phone – there’s no need to download an app. It will work just as well on a Nokia from the 1990s as it will on the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy and doesn’t require an Internet/data connection
  • sending txt messages is immediate and asynchoronous – it doesn’t require you and your customer to be talking to each other at the same time. You can send an appointment reminder to a customer and they can read the message and reply if needed at a time that is convenient to them
  • 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes of being received and have a a 5X higher open rate than email
  • Cost effective – compared to a physical mail out or phone calls SMS appointment reminders are very cost effective

We’ve helped many small businesses implement an SMS based appointment reminder system into their daily workflows, including:

  • a removal business sends appointment reminders to both customers and truck drivers 2 days in advance confirming the upcoming appointment
  • a hairdresser automatically sends out appointment reminders 3 days before each appointment using a FileMaker Server scheduled script
  • a physiotherapist sends out birthday congratulations to all their customers automatically on their birthday with special offers using a FileMaker Server scheduled script

Appointment reminders can be sent by a staff member each day (for example to remind everyone about appointments tomorrow) or scheduled to be sent automatically by FileMaker Server. You can also take advantage of 2 way messaging to allow your customers to send a reply via SMS which is routed directly back into your FileMaker solution. One customer was able to replace a process that took 2 staff members over 90 minutes to contact all customers to confirm their appointments for the next day with an automated SMS reminder system that sends out hundreds of appointment reminders in under 5 minutes.

If you would like to discuss integrating SMS appointment reminders into your FileMaker solution please contact us for a free initial consultation to discuss your requirements. Our fmSMS solution is also available if you would like to have your existing in-house/external FileMaker developer perform an integration using our ready made solution.

 

Credit Card Tokens and Payment Processing Video

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Recently we wrote an article about the benefits of automating the processing of credit card payments using your FileMaker solution and why you shouldn’t be storing unencrypted credit card numbers in your FileMaker database. We wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to tokenise a credit card number and then charge that token when processing a transaction so we put together a short video demonstrating this. We’re using the eWay Payment Gateway in this example.

You can watch the video below or directly on YouTube via this link.

FileMaker and Xero Integration Webinar Recording

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fmSMS and Emoji Support ?

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At the recent FileMaker Developer Conference I was doing one of my fmSMS demonstrations to an attendee which involved me sending a message from fmSMS to their mobile phone (showing how you can use FileMaker to send SMS messages) and then having them send a reply back to demonstrate how you can use fmSMS to receive incoming messages directly into FileMaker. Normally the reply is a simple text reply of a few words, but this one was a bit different as you can see here:

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-10-42-30-pm

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Emoji reply had made it all the way back from their phone to fmSMS via the SMS Gateway and the PHP page that is used to convert the incoming reply into a FileMaker record without me having to do anything to handle the Unicode characters – it just worked! I decided to do a bit more research into this to see how different SMS Gateways handled Emoji characters as a way of testing their Unicode support (there are now hundreds of Emoji characters encoded in the Unicode standards).

It’s important here to understand the history of SMS – back when the GSM standard was being adopted the mobile phone industry decided on a standard set of characters called GSM 03.38. Support for this character set became mandatory for all GSM handsets and network elements (carriers etc). The GSM character set includes the English alphabet ( A-Z ), numbers (0 – 9) and some special characters, and the size of a single SMS was limited to 160 characters. The 160 character maximum actually comes from the fact that you can encode 160 7-bit characters into 140 bytes – 140 bytes being the limit for the size of a message.

Unicode characters use several GSM characters to describe each Unicode character which means that you won’t be able to send as many characters in your SMS when include Unicode characters. Depending on which special characters you’re sending, you may only be able to send between 35 and 70 characters. To send a message that is longer than the 160 characters/140 bytes limit the message needs to use Concatenation, which involves breaking up the message over multiple SMS messages.

Thankfully most SMS Gateways and mobile phone handsets support concatenation where multiple messages are joined together to form a single message on the handset, even though that single message is greater than 160 characters (or 140 bytes). As each message needs to broken up into individual 140 byte messages the SMS Gateways will charge you for each individual message, even though they appear as a single message to the recipient.

Here’s an example of such a message using the GSM character set which is 312 characters but appears as a single received message on the phone:

long-message

SMS Gateways that handle the encoding of Unicode characters make life easy for us developers – we don’t have to do anything when sending or receiving messages from FileMaker. One such SMS Gateway is Twilio which I used in my tests and was able to handle the Emoji characters with ease – they have a number of articles on their website that go into the details of their support for Unicode. I created an outgoing message in fmSMS with some Emoji characters (FileMaker Pro 7 and later being a fully Unicode aware application):

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-10-26-51-pm

and sent the message using a number of different SMS Gateways. Where the SMS Gateway supported Unicode the message appeared exactly as it was sent:

emoji-received

 

 

I tried with some SMS Gateways that don’t have native support for Unicode characters and on the handset here’s what the same message looked like:

no-emoji

I then sent some replies containing Emoji characters back to fmSMS which has a “chat view” that shows all the sent/received messages to an individual contact – here’s our Emoji conversation:

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-10-33-36-pm

As you can see the incoming message containing Emoji characters was received successfully using the Twilio SMS Gateway once again.

Unicode support isn’t only important for Emojis – if you need to send accented characters or messages in Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc then you will be thankful for Unicode support as well. Just remember that when sending messages containing Unicode characters the standard 160 character test doesn’t apply – I’m yet to find a way to have a Unicode character check that converts back to the GSM character set in FileMaker so I can accurately count the number of credits required for each message, regardless of whether it contains GMS or Unicode characters). If anyone knows of a way please let me know in the comments below. ?

Are you still processing credit card payments manually?

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american-express-89024_640

Do you process credit card transactions manually and wonder if there is a better way? The good news is that there is a better more automated way that can integrate with your custom FileMaker solution and save your staff time and your business money.

Chances are if you’re a small business that sells goods or services your customers are going to want to pay by credit card, and having options and making it easy for customers to pay your invoices is a good thing for your business. Once you start accepting credit card payments however you need to comply with the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) to help protect card data and prevent payment data theft. Small businesses are increasingly at risk for payment data theft – nearly half of cyberattacks worldwide in 2015 were against businesses with less than 250 workers according to cybersecurity firm Symantec.

The easiest way to protect against data breaches is to not store card data at all, however that isn’t always practical, especially if you’re selling an ongoing service that requires ongoing payments (e.g. a monthly subscription service). Whilst you definitely should not be storing unencrypted credit card data in your FileMaker solution that any employee can access, you can take advantage of encryption and tokenisation technologies that allow you to store an “alias” or token in your FileMaker solution and use that to processes future charges. Here’s how it works:

  1. customer provides credit card details to pay an Invoice
  2. you send an encrypted HTTPS request to a PCI DSS compliant credit card gateway who store the credit card details (as they are PCI DSS compliant) and send you back a token and a masked version of the credit card number (e.g. 512345…346)
  3. you store this token in your FileMaker transaction record. As this is a token and not a real credit card number it’s completely useless if stolen. You can also store the masked version of the card number in case you need to confirm with the customer which card number you are charging
  4. when you need to process a payment in the future you make another HTTPS request to the credit card gateway requesting a payment and referencing the token
  5. the credit card gateway returns a response indicating whether the transaction was processed successfully or if there was an error (e.g. declined, insufficient funds etc)

This can all be automated in a FileMaker solution allowing staff to process a payment or tokenise a card at the click of a button. We’ve worked with many PCI DSS compliant credit card gateways such as Stripe, eWay, BPOINT and Authorize.Net to help customers automate the process of processing credit card payments securely in their FileMaker solutions. If you’re currently storing credit card numbers in your FileMaker solution and would like to tokenise these we can also help you batch process these.

If you would like to discuss implementing a secure credit card processing system for your FileMaker solution plesae get in touch for a free initial consultation. For more information on how you can protect card data the Payment Card Industry has a number of guides for small businesses, including:

Update: we’ve published a short video demonstrating how you can use FileMaker to tokenise a credit card and then process a transaction by referencing that token.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

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puzzle-1152793_1280

In Part 1 of our series on FileMaker and eCommerce Integration we outlined the challenges many small businesses face when they go live with an online store and the new workflow challenges that can create, leading to the prospect of having to do double data entry in multiple places. In Part 2 we showed how you eliminate any double data entry by making your online store visible to your FileMaker solution by using the ESS (External SQL Data Sources) feature of FileMaker Pro/Server, allowing users to see online orders on a normal FileMaker layout.

Not all FileMaker Pro solutions will be able to take advantage of the ESS feature however for a variety of reasons, including:

  • your online store doesn’t use a supported ESS data source
  • your online store hosting provider doesn’t allow remote SQL access
  • your company firewall won’t allow ESS access to the hosting provider
  • you wish to avoid the expense of purchasing ODBC drivers

There are a number of alternatives to having a “live” view of your online orders using ESS which can be broadly defined as either a push or pull approach, whereby data is either pushed from the online store to your FileMaker solution or pulled/downloaded from your online store by your FileMaker solution. Like all solutions there are pros and cons to each approach and the particulars of how your FileMaker solution is hosted will determine which options are available to you.

In the following examples we’re going to be using the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress as it offers both a push and pull API and is a popular eCommerce store, powering over 37% of all online stores at the time of writing.

Push Online Orders to FileMaker – the push approach is usually considered the most optimal solution as it is only invoked when there is new data to transfer, thus reducing the number of unnecessary requests to the online store to check for new orders. In WooCommerce you implement a push solution through the use of Webhooks – Webhooks are are very common form of server event notifications which trigger an action by sending a request to a URL that you specify. WooCommerce has a number of Webhooks that you can activate, for example each time a new order is created.

We’ve helped many customers over the years implement a Webhook solution that works as follows:

  • a new order is created on the customer’s online store
  • a Webhook is triggered which sends the details of the new order as JSON encoded data to a URL (a PHP page) on the customer’s FileMaker Server
  • the PHP file uses the FileMaker PHP API to convert the JSON encoded data into a new customer record, order record and order line items

The customer also receives an email for each new order, which prompts them to open their FileMaker database and review the order details and ship any required products then push the invoice to their accounting software (Xero, MYOB etc). The customer hasn’t had to do any double data entry or query the online store for new orders – everything is pushed through as it happens. It does require the customer to have FileMaker Server with Custom Web Publishing enabled and allow external access to the PHP file hosted on their server.

Pull Online Orders to FileMaker – if the push approach is not a viable option WooCommerce also offers a REST API that you can also use with FileMaker Pro. The WooCommerce REST API allows you to query your WooCommerce online store and retrieve details about customers, orders, products etc, as well as being able to push data from FileMaker to WooCommerce if necessary. A typical solution using the WooCommerce REST API works as follows:

  • customer receives an email notification from the WooCommerce store about a new order
  • customer then clicks a button in their FileMaker solution to query the online store for any new orders since a timestamp (typically the last time they checked for new orders)
  • FileMaker sends a REST API request for any new order details and receives a JSON encoded response from the WooCommerce REST API with details about each order
  • the response is parsed out to create new customer, order and order item records

Once again the customer has been able to eliminate any double data entry and simply has to click a button in FileMaker to get all the new order details.

As we have illustrated in this series there are typically a number of options available when it comes to integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM, whether that’s a direct live view using ESS or having new orders pushed or pulled into your FileMaker solution. With an integration into your accounting software such as Xero, MYOB AccountRight or MYOB Essentials you can completely eliminate any double data entry for the entire order and sit back and watch as the data flows from your online store to FileMaker and then to your accounting software.

If you would like to discuss integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM please get in touch for a free initial consultation.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

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shopping-cart-3-1546160-1280x960

In Part 1 of our series on FileMaker and eCommerce integration we outlined the challenges many small businesses face when they go live with an online store and the new workflow challenges that can create, leading to the prospect of having to do double data entry in multiple places.

As a small business ourselves we also experienced this pain when we went live with our own online stores. Our first online store was for our oldest product fmSMS which allows you to send/receive SMS messages from the FileMaker platform – this has always had it’s own dedicated website/domain so it made sense for the store to live on the same site:

http://www.fmsms.com/shop/

A few years ago we also started selling the first of our fmAccounting Link products for the Xero accounting platform and it made sense to sell this via a store on our main Databuzz website:

http://www.databuzz.com.au/shop

So we now currently have 2 online stores located at different domains, but we will eventually merge these together to simplify things. As both stores were built using the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress and hosted with the same web hosting provider, we knew that any integration solution for one of the stores would work for both stores.

For each order that came through the store we need to perform the following actions:

  • check for an existing customer in our company FileMaker CRM and if no match is found create a new Contact record
  • create a new Invoice and associated Invoice Items
  • create a Payment record against the Invoice
  • push a copy of the Invoice to our accounting software (Xero in our case)
  • add the purchaser to a mailing list in MailChimp for future email newsletters/updates

The process starts with an email from the online store letting us know a new order has arrived:

New Customer Order

We would then have to copy and paste all the details into our FileMaker CRM, push the Invoice to Xero using our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) integration, then add the customer to the appropriate mailing list in in our MailChimp account. When you’re only dealing with a couple of orders a month you can probably cope with doing things manually, but once you start to get several orders a day you are then impacted by the time it takes to do all of these takes which are also prone to data entry errors. Like us you probably start wondering if there is a better way and can this process be automated.

The good new is that it can and having helped tens of customers in the past overcome similar FileMaker/eCommerce integration challenges so we knew where to start – ESS. ESS is the External SQL Data Sources feature that was first introduced way back with FileMaker Pro v9 and allows you to establish a live two-way connection between FileMaker Pro and the top SQL data sources. ESS originally supported these SQL data sources:

  • Microsoft  SQL Server
  • MySQL
  • Oracle

FileMaker Pro v15 introduced 2 new data sources:

  • IBM DB2
  • PostgreSQL

Most of the popular eCommerce stores are using one of the following backend databases to drive the store:

  • MySQL (used by WordPress/WooCommerce)
  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL

These are also supported ESS data sources so you can use the ESS feature to  get your FileMaker CRM talking to your online store. ESS allows you to view your SQL data from within FileMaker – it appears just like normal FileMaker tables. You can create new layouts to view the data, create relationships from your FileMaker tables to your ESS tables, access the SQL data from FileMaker scripts and more (there are some limitations and it does require setting up ODBC drivers – see the Accessing External SQL Data Sources (ESS) Overview and Troubleshooting for more details.

Once you have installed the appropriate ODBC driver and setup the System DSN you can then add an ESS table occurrence to your FileMaker relationships graph, just like you would for your normal FileMaker tables:

ESS Table Occurrences

You will need to have a basic understanding of your external SQL data source structure so you know which tables to add to your FileMaker graph and how they relate – details about WooCommerce can be found here. Once you’ve added your ESS table occurrences you can create new layouts based on each of these and start to view your online store data live in your FileMaker CRM. Here’s some examples showing some of the WooCommerce/WordPress tables that store online order details:

ESS Orders

ESS Orders Meta

ESS Order Items

ESS Order Item Meta

The above screenshots are showing data from 4 of the main tables that are used by WooCommerce to store order details:

  1. posts: this creates a record for each online order. This table is also used to store Product details
  2. postmeta: this stores a number of records related to each order, such as the billing/shipping and currency/tax details
  3. woocommerce_order_items: this stores line item details for each order
  4. woocommerce_order_itemmeta: this stores meta data about each order line item

As you can see by looking at these ESS tables in FileMaker we can see all the data about each order but it is located in at least 4 different tables, making aggregating the details each order so we can easily view the complete order challenging. We could create a number of FileMaker calculation fields to extra details about each order based on the meta_key for Orders and Order Line Items, but that would end up adding a lot of table occurrences and relationships to the graph and create another layout of unnecessary complexity.

There is a better way however that avoids all that unnecessary clutter on the graph – we can use SQL Views to create a more structured view of the SQL data we require. ESS fortunately also supports SQL Views which allow us to create a predefined SQL query that we then add to the relationship graph. We created 2 SQL views for Orders and Order Line Items to gather all the related meta data about each order and order item. When we add these to the graph and view them from a FileMaker layout here’s what we see for Orders:

ESS Orders View

and this for Order Items:

ESS Order Items View

Much better! For each Order we now get 1 record showing all the Order/Customer details, and for each Order Line Item we now get 1 record showing all the details about the Order Line Item, including the Product Price and SKU (the SKU is the same one used in Xero so it’s important that we can pass that through to Xero). We can then create a relationship between these 2 ESS table occurrences to relate an Order to its Order Items by the order_id value:

ESS Relationship

and be able to view a complete WooCommerce online order in FileMaker:

WC ESS Order

We now have a FileMaker layout showing all the details for a single WooCommerce/online order, including Customer Details, Line Item Details and related Product Details. From here’s a simple case of FileMaker scripting to move the data from the ESS tables to the native FileMaker tables (first checking for any existing Customers with the same name) and from there into Xero. We add a button to the Online Order layout to push the online order into out FileMaker CRM which handles all of these tasks, saving us around 15 minutes per online order (we have customers that are getting tens of orders every day so they time savings really start to add up).

If you’re not familiar with ESS it’s important to be aware of the following:

  • you will need to install ODBC drivers
  • if you’re hosting your file with FileMaker Server you can install the ODBC driver once on the FileMaker Server machine for all FileMaker Pro clients to use, which makes deployment a breeze
  • depending on your ESS data source and whether you are on Mac or Windows you may need to purchase the ODBC driver. There’s a full list of compatible ODBC drivers in the FileMaker Knowledge Base
  • you will need to get some documentation that explains how your SQL data source tables are structured so you know which tables to add to the relationship graph
  • when working with ESS tables it’s best to use a “read only” account that won’t let you edit any of the SQL data in case you accidentally edit/delete any of the online order records
  • your company firewall will need to allow access to the ODBC data source port
  • if you’re accessing a MySQL data source you will typically have to setup Remote Access to the MySQL database via your web hosting company (e.g. via cPanel).

In Part 3 of this series we’ll look into the options when you can’t use ESS and how you can still go about integrating your online shop with your FileMaker CRM. In the meantime if you would like to discuss integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM please contact us.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

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puzzle
Many of our small business customers have both a physical presence and an online presence when it comes to selling their goods and services. They  might have:

  • a physical retail store where customers can come and purchase goods in person
  • a mail order store where they take orders by mail, phone and fax and send the goods to the purchaser once they have paid
  • an online store which takes orders, processes the credit card transactions and notifies the business to fulfil the orders
  • a popup store/market store that runs every month or for short periods of time

When the business is starting up, or when they are adding a new method of selling goods and services, the tendency is for each of these stores to operate as their own silo. This ultimately leads to a lot of data duplication/double entry in multiple systems as the business deals with orders coming in from multiple store presences. Quite often we see the following workflow:

  • physical and mail order/phone orders are processed in the central office FileMaker CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution
  • online/eCommerce orders are processed via the online store attached to the customer’s website. The business is notified of new orders via email and these are then entered into the central office CRM system by customer service staff who then notify the accounts department to create an accounting entry in Xero or MYOB etc.

We wouldn’t generally recommend to customer’s that they use FileMaker to run their online eCommerce store, so there’s no problem with having the physical presence and the online presence separate (and it’s highly advisable from a security standpoint). However this leads to the problem of scattered information and ad hoc processes – wouldn’t it be better if all the information was in one place and you could see all the physical orders and online orders from the central FileMaker CRM? Could you save time and increase productivity by not having to manually re-enter all the online orders in both the main FileMaker CRM as well as your accounting software?

We’ve been helping customers for many years now integrate their online stores with their FileMaker CRM solution so they can view everything in the one place and automate the transfer of online orders into their office CRM, and then push that into their accounting software without having to re-type anything.

Here’s a list of online orders from a popular shopping cart as it appears in the web browser admin view:

WooCommerce FM List 2

 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could also view these same orders live in FileMaker:

WooCommerce FM List

and instead of re-entering each order manually, including the line item details:

WooCommerce Order WP

you could see all the online order details live in FileMaker:

WooCommerce FM Details

and with the click of a button you can push the order details from the online eCommerce system into your FileMaker CRM and apply some business rules at the same time, such as:

  • check for an existing customer in the FileMaker CRM and if no match is found create a new Contact record
  • create a new Invoice and associated Invoice Items
  • create a Payment record against the Invoice
  • push a copy of the Invoice to your accounting software such as Xero or MYOB
  • add the purchaser to a mailing list in MailChimp or Campaign Monitor etc
  • send a thank you email to the customer with a discount coupon

Here at Databuzz we recently faced the same challenges that we’ve been helping our customers with for many years – we opened our first online store last year and have been working on integrating this with our internal FileMaker CRM every since. In Part 2 and 3 of this series we’ll cover some approaches to eCommerce and FileMaker integration based on our experiences as a small business that uses FileMaker and Xero to run their business.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

The Hidden New Features of FileMaker v15

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When a new version of the FileMaker platform is released I immediately locate the “New Features” list to familiarise myself with the changes in the new version. When v0 was released recently I was a bit surprised when reading the list of new features – only 1 new function, 1 new script step, the new concealed edit box, some important changes to the Script Workspace, a swag of SSL certificate enhancements and a bunch of usability improvements.

These are all great new features – support for iBeacons and Touch ID on FileMaker Go, multiple undo in the Script Workspace/Specify Calculation dialog, being able to delete all records in a table immediately, and support for additional external ODBC data sources are all great additions and will allow developers to create some amazing solutions for our customers. I certainly look forward to using these in the future when a project requires these features – but it didn’t “feel” like there was a lot of new features we could start using immediately on all projects regardless of whether they were deployed using FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Go or FileMaker WebDirect.

Another thing happened shortly after FileMaker v15 was released – I started getting notifications from the FileMaker Community letting me know that product issues that I had previously reported with FileMaker Pro/Go v14 had been fixed in v15 (here’s an example). I’ve been pretty good at reporting product issues as they arise via the official FileMaker Inc site over the years – often all you’ll hear back is that the issue has been confirmed and sent to Development for review, but at least I know that FileMaker Inc. are aware of the issue and it will hopefully be fixed in a future update.

After receiving over half a dozen of these notifications I started to wonder how many bugs were fixed in v15 and if there was a list of these. A quick look at the FileMaker Pro v15 Release Notes showed no list of bugs that were fixed in this release. FileMaker Inc. haven’t released a list of bug fixes for many years unfortunately – I remember back in the 2000’s getting a nice list of bug fixes with each new version of FileMaker Pro that was released. Knowing which bugs have been fixed is important to both developers and customers – we can remove workarounds that we put in place or we can release new features knowing they are now going to work in situations where they didn’t work before.

I then thought I would search the list of Product Issues for ones that had the same update as my notifications, e.g. “This issue has been addressed in FileMaker Pro 15”, “This issue has been addressed in FileMaker Go 15”, etc. A quick search of the FileMaker Product Issues for these patterns found over 150 matching results – a substantial number by any measure and an indication of the effort the FileMaker engineers have put into this new release. Whilst the list of new features isn’t as “meaty” as previous releases it’s great to see soo many bugs being fixed in one release – it would be great if there was an easier way to review these without having to do searches in the FileMaker Community.

Some developers will argue that FileMaker Inc. should have patched previous versions (e.g. v13, v14) as well and not force users to upgrade to get these “bug fixes”, and I have some sympathy with that argument. However you only have to look at the pattern for previous releases to know that FileMaker Inc. are generally going to roll bug fixes into a future version and have been encouraging customers to move to annual licensing so they immediately get any new releases every 12 months, along the lines of a subscription model.

The software industry has been moving towards the “software as a subscription” model for the past few years – looking at my own currently installed suite of software I now have a number of applications that I use on a subscription basis, including:

  • Microsoft Office
  • Adobe applications
  • Xero (online accounting)
  • various WordPress plugins/extensions

and no doubt that list will increase every year. Given the industry trend it’s not surprising to see FileMaker move towards an annual release/licensing model. Personally I would love to see “updates” released to the currently shipping version that fix these bugs (some of them are critical for certain deployments) more frequently, rather than having to wait 12 months for a new annual release. And an easier way to read the list of bug fixes.

I encourage everyone to go and read the list of issues that were addressed in the FileMaker v15 platform – it’s very likely you’ll see fixes to issues that you had encountered but didn’t realise were now fixed.

fmAccounting Link (MYOB Essentials Edition) Preview Video

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We’ve just uploaded our first preview video for fmAccounting Link (MYOB Essentials Edition). This video demonstrates the following:

  • authenticating against the MYOB Essentials API
  • downloading a list of available MYOB Essentials Businesses
  • downloading Inventory Items, Tax Types and Chart of Accounts from MYOB Essentials
  • uploading a Contact from FileMaker Pro to MYOB Essentials
  • uploading an Invoice from FileMaker Pro to MYOB Essentials
  • uploading a Payment from FileMaker Pro to MYOB Essentials

You can watch the video below or directly on YouTube via this link.

We should be releasing fmAccounting Link (MYOB Essentials Edition) in the next couple of weeks – please Contact Us if you have any questions in the meantime.