In the interests of transparency and communicating better, we are working on several avenues of communication. This is one. I will be trying to get an update posted every monday to give you a rough idea of where things stand each week As busy as we often are, it remains to be seen as to how diligently we follow up. Ask me again in a few months.
Support
As always, support is our single largest resource demand. The volume for the last couple of weeks has been about average, but the weather has certainly impacted our turn around time with staff being out, and delayed openings working around the weather. Unfortunately, this trend looks to continue with another week of forecasts including snow and ice that our fair city simply is not equipped to deal with. On a side note, for those that have never experienced an Atlanta Ice Storm, it is hard to explain. The snow is not the problem, it is the 1/2 inch of ice that accumulates before the snow starts to stick that turns every surface in the city into a pretty looking ice rink.
Looking at the current weather forecasts, we are expecting Tuesday morning to be iffy, and Wednesday afternoon, we will send people home early if the weather turns as ugly as forecast. We will update this blog as we monitor the situation.
Pacer
I know that for many of you, Pacer is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. We are not sitting idle on the subject, but have for the most part elected not to speak too much about the subject. Over the past couple of months there has been an enormous amount of work and time being put into making Pacer and TrustWin work better together. In the next couple of weeks we expect to release the next minor iteration of Pacer Automation. This iteration is the first that will enable downloading the missing images into a case upon setup. I know that this is a huge item in many offices, so we will let you know as we begin rolling it out.
Disbursement
Last week, disbursement hit a major milestone. After years of relying on a foundation that we have been slowly removing from various parts of the system, Disbursement finally moved away from that foundation. It is identical in calculation to the previous version, so that is not an issue. There are currently two offices using it to confirm that the calculations are indeed identical in the real world. Obviously we tested internally, but real office situations can find things that we simply cannot. With the end/beginning of the month being so close though, we are holding the wide release of this version until after most of the offices have run checks for this cutoff. Look for publication as a beta on TrustWin Update Client sometime after March 8.
Fee on Receipts
At this point, the core work on Fee on Receipts is done, and all of the Chapter 13 offices that can convert, have. There have been some speed bumps along the way. There remains some disagreement between districts regarding the processing and handling of debtor refunds. We expect that process to continue to go through some revision and iteration while offices sort out process and management hurdles associated with the refunds.
Other News
Disbursement is not the only program that is seeing some legacy work finally going away. Misc Trans / Unscheduled Payments is also undergoing the same refit to eliminate some of the very old and fragile foundation bits right now, with Payoff and Status Report being the last few significant bits that need this update. Why all this effort on things that work? In short, Windows 10.
Microsoft is working hard on Windows 10, and based upon the builds that are available today, we see some that need our attention in order to be ready when it launches. Most of these things are not 'major', but they do require some foundation fixes that we have deferred about as long as we can.
In other upcoming projects, we are now starting to plan for changes to how the mortgage payments are printed and tracked in order to support new requirements that are still being refined. As always, we are trying to get ahead of the curve, and we know this is coming down the pipeline. We are committed to being ready for this change as soon as we have all of the information in our grubby little hands.
Until next week,
Andy Satori
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