Remember a few days ago I said that my simple flying club tach entry web site had garnered about a bazillion feature requests before it could be rolled out?
Well, the worst of those features was a request that the user be able to pick his name from a list, instead of having to type it in himself. To me, that was a really bad idea – a pick list that’s 50 entries long is almost unusable. Well, it turns out that whatever bright spark set up our Quickbooks billing setup made the person’s full name the key, instead of keying on the person’s membership number. No wonder it takes Al so long to enter everybody’s tach slips every month – he’s got to type the person’s full name exactly the same time every single time, or it won’t register. Plus he says that a significant number of the users get their membership number wrong.
So I’m going to have to have them enter their membership number and their last name, same as they do on the paper forms, and then look up the full name, and if the last name they put in doesn’t match at least a substring of the full name, flag an error.
So not only do I have to build this stupid extra interface, but I’ve also got an ongoing task to maintain a list of every person in the club’s full name as it exists in Quickbooks and their club membership number. Or find someone reliable to maintain it for us. Like that will ever happen.
Bugger.