Managing Orders in Aptify e-Business

Aptify e-Business 5.5.1 and up includes two top level actions for Company Administrators related to the Orders functionality. A Company Administrator can do the following

• View Order History for a Company
• Pay Open Invoices on behalf of other company persons

Examples of these features are included below. For detailed information on the Aptify Orders functionality see Using Order Entry.

• Viewing the Order History in Aptify e-Business
• Paying Orders in Aptify e-Business
• Disputing or Commenting on an Order in Aptify e-Business

Aptify e-Business 5.5.3 introduces the ability to specify the order party type for each order, to support the addition of Company Only orders in Aptify 5.5.3. e-Business orders can be specified as Personal or Corporate orders. By default, the payment party type for e-Business orders aligns with the selected order party type. Using the other payment party type requires that the Company Administrator manual disable the link between order party and payment party types. See Paying Orders in Aptify e-Business.

Viewing the Order History in Aptify e-Business

By selecting the Order History option from the Manage My Group drop-down or by clicking the Order History button on the Company Admin Dashboard landing page e-Business displays a view of recent orders, (by default these will be sorted in descending order on the most recent data). The Company Administrator can sort the results by any of the columns displayed below, in addition to the ability to search for specific orders based on order details. Clicking the arrow to the left of each Order number displays a list of order lines for that order.

By default, the Order History control retrieves all orders for the Web User's Company. However, if a particular company has a large number of orders, it may take longer than expected to load the grid. If your system has a large number of orders per company, you may want to modify the control to add additional filtering to return a smaller sub-set of Orders (such as Order placed in the last year or two).

Aptify e-Business 5.5.3 introduces the ability to specify the ordering party as Personal or Corporate, to support the introduction of Company Only orders in Aptify 5.5.3. To indicate this information in the Order History, a column, Payment Party, is added to the Order History page. Personal orders are identified with the Individual payment party type, and corporate orders are identified with the Company payment party type. 

Paying Orders in Aptify e-Business

The Company Administrator also has the ability to pay open invoices on behalf of other company persons. By selecting Pay Off Orders from the Company Admin Dashboard landing page or via the drop-down menu, e-Business displays a list of current unpaid invoices.

The Company Admin has the ability to pay invoices individually or to pay several at the same time completely or partially. The Unpaid Order page includes a payment information section at the bottom of the page where the Company Administrator can provide the required payment details to complete the order(s). You can search for a specific order with any of the criteria displayed (city, Order #, date, etc…) or sort the columns in ascending or descending order to organize and display the data based on any of the order fields.

Aptify e-Business 5.5.3 adds the ability to specify the ordering party as Personal or Corporate, to support the introduction of Company Only orders in Aptify 5.5.3. By default, the payment party type aligns with the order party type (i.e., a Personal order uses the Individual payment party type and a Corporate order uses the Company payment party type).

For an order to to use the other payment party type, the Company Administrator must manually disable the link between order type and payment party type by editing the Aptif_UC_Navigation file, changing the value of EnablePaymentType property to false, and restarting the Microsoft IIS.

See the "User Control Development" section in the Working With an e-Business Site chapter of the attached Aptify e-Business 5.5 Developer Guide for more information about the new items added to e-Business and about making changes to the Aptify_UC_Navigation config file.

The figures below show the ordering party type and payment party type controls that are added in Aptify e-Business 5.5.3:

Payments that are made using the Contribute button do not respect the link between order party type and payment party type. Payments made using the Contribute button are classified as Individual payments, regardless of the order type.

Payments associated with Meeting Transfers also do not respect the link between order party type and payment party type. When a meeting transfer is done, and there is a price difference between the meetings, the payment is always classified as a Company payment.

Disputing or Commenting on an Order in Aptify e-Business

From the Unpaid Order control, a Company Administrator can comment on or dispute an order if needed. For example, if the company is being billed for activity by a former employee and the company administrator believes that the company is no longer responsible for paying the order, the administrator can add a note to the order that is then reviewed by a staff member.
The following steps illustrate what happens during this dispute resolution process.

1. On the Unpaid Orders page, the Company Administrator clicks the Add/Edit link in the Comments column for the order about which he/she has a question.
2. This opens the Review Comments dialog where the administrator enters the relevant details. 
   
   
   
3. When finished, the administrator clicks Save and the order is flagged in the Unpaid Orders grid.
   
   
   
4. In Aptify, this event triggers the Notification to Review Order Comments process flow, which does the following:
   • Creates a task for a staff member to follow-up on the order comments. The task's Assigned date defaults to the current date and the Due date is in one week. The task is assigned to the employee identified in the Aptify_UC_Navigation.config file by the AssignedToID property for the AdminOrderDetail control. You can also configure properties for the Task Description, Status, Priority, and Type.
   • Send an email notification to the staff member that there is an order to review.
     
     
     
5. The staff member reviews the order (which is also linked to the Task by default) and updates it as needed. The Company Administrator's comments can be found on the Messages > Company Admin Review Comments tab. The Order also includes an alert that comments exist on the order.
   
   
   
6. The staff member contacts the Company Administrator to discuss the resolution to the order dispute. The staff member can add additional comments to the Company Administrator Comments field (which would be visible to the administrator on the Unpaid Orders page from the Add/Edit comments box) or the staff member can clear the comments, which remove the alert from Aptify and clear the Flagged for Review notification on the Unpaid Orders page.