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Our programmers recently added a new financial report called "Payments
Summary" to the business software we sell. One of the menu options on the
report is misleading and I'm looking for advice on what to call it. The
option is currently labeled "Start Date," but the program doesn't actually
interpret that as "start adding up payments beginning on this date." The
report goes by weeks interpreted as beginning on a Monday. Two examples:
A) I run a report with a Start Date of Thursday, Feb 5 and tell the program
to group payments by weeks. I get a list of payments made in different
formats (Checks, Visa, MC, direct debit, etc.) for the week of 2/2â2/8,
2/9â2/15, 2/16â2/22, etc. See, the "start date" I chose, 2/5 falls in the
week of 2/2 through 2/8.
B) I run the report with the same Start Date of Thursday, Feb 5, but this
time I tell the program to group payments by days. I now get the list of
payments in the same format, but for Monday 2/2, Tuesday 2/3, 2/4, 2/5,
2/6, and Weekend (2/7â2/8).
It took ME a couple of minutes to understand how this works when the
programmer explained it to me; it's going to really puzzle our users and I
want to get down on tech support calls by changing what we call the "Start
Date" option. "Week w/ Date"? "Date Falls In Week"?
--
Joe Weinmunson
âWhat you read when you donât have to determines what you will be when you
canât help it.â
--Oscar Wilde
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