A Short Glossary of Terms

Before we begin let's make sure that we are speaking the same language. Terms such as “product” or “job” whilst familiar refer to specific things when used in the context of this manual, so below is a short glossary to clarify their meaning as used inside these pages.

Term	Meaning
TSM	The Service Manager is the official name of the software. Our website is www.theservicemanager.com and contains essential information on TSM products and services.
Job	The central focus of the package is Job Management. A job is a single or a set of tasks a technician is to perform on a client's site. TSM is designed to record, schedule and manage the progression of a job from a customer's order to their payment for the work.
Site	The site is the location a job is to be performed at. Because the physical address of a site may be different from the billing or general office address and there may be several different sites for one billing customer, a Job Card allows the entry of a site Customer ID representing the individual site.
Customer	A customer in TSM closely corresponds to a postal address, but can be used to hold the same information a customer or supplier card does in an accounting package such as MYOB or QuickBooks. TSM Jobs always belong to a customer record. For this reason the customer record must exist before a job card record can be created.
Contact	Distinct from a customer, a contract record is a person's name coupled with phone number & other contact information located on the Contacts tab of Contact Maintenance. This feature is used specifically for recording the contact details of individuals within the same company.
Module	A module is a window inside the TSM interface. A module is different from a prompt or dialogue box in that it usually represents a single record in the database (the Job Card module) or a complex task (the Security module) as opposed to a single task such as selecting the printing method on the Print dialogue screen.
Product	A product record is managed in TSM using the Product Maintenance module. Most commonly it represents a physical item, a spare part or a product that is either used on a job or sold to the customer over the counter, or a combination of both. It can also be used to represent a service or a unit of subcontractor labour.
Accounting Post	The software used for linking TSM to an accounting package. TSM is not accounting software, but the data stored within it, can be fairly easily translated into financial transaction information.
Employee	In TSM an employee doubles as a user - where every employee can potentially log into the software using their Employee ID as the username and their password (if set). Employees are managed though the Employee Maintenance module.
Invoice	A Debtor Invoice of a Job created in TSM. This can be easily printed out to be mailed or faxed to the customer. It can also be posted to an accounting package to avoid manual data entry. Invoice details (if extant) can be viewed on the Invoicing tab of a Job Card.
Cash receipt	A payment entry for an Invoice in TSM. It does not have to be purely a cash payment as the name suggests, as the Payment Type setting allows the user to denote other payment methods - cheque, Visa, etc. This data can also be posted to the accounting package using the Accoutning Post.
Setup	The Setup module is located in Utilities → Setup. It contains several tabs and some of them have sub-tabs of their own. For example; “Job Cards Setup Page 1” means The Page 1 subtab of the Job Cards Tab in the Setup module.