Loading...
 

Calculations Use Cases

This page is the space to add and explain Use Cases for mathematical calculations in Tiki and is related to the Calculations project. If applicable it would be good to add ideas or requirements how or where the processed data shall be further used, if not 'only' displayed. The use cases shall make future requirements and current limitations more visible.


Tracker Calculation

These use cases should specifically point out use cases where the existing mathematical calculation field stretches to it's limits and further development like for example calculation across items or across trackers would be needed.

Traders Job management App
(small or mid-sized trades business)

(existing real use case, coming to the limits of inability of calculation across tracker items)

A trader (craftsman/artisan) has customers in various places or cities and wants to

a. get an overview about the locations on an password secured online map (Cartograf) with quick access to customer and job details via the points of interest (POI) and

b. track data about time (productive and unproductive), driven distance, costs, notes (meeting notes, orders), etc.

The trader works alone or with a small team and has no time or talent for having bits of papers everywhere and handling a heavy load of office work in his limited spare time. The trader is mostly on the road or at the customers working. Getting the time to write invoices to get money for living and to pre-finance the next jobs or contract is an ongoing issue, so

c. the tracked data shall not only be used to visualize status reports and to get quick access to contact details or memos, but

the data shall be pre-processed, respectively calculated mathematically directly in the job-management app to be able to print out and save reports for the daily work per customer, invoices or prefilled invoice templates for the customers, travel expense reports for him and his employees or team mates, etc..

Ideally invoices could be printed and sent out even from the car in a brake time by using a mobile device like tablet or smart phone.
=> right now the app provides the data to write an invoice in a few minutes, although some manual calculation and search and find is necessary. Export to Excel/Calc gets less and less necessary, but for example the times or distances or certain daily relevant data must be collected and manually processed as reports are job based (= up to several per day, when more than one customer/job is involved at one day).

In case the data from daily reports - best filtered for certain periods - could be only summed up for the same field_name across several items (like {sum row "distance" for "customerXYZ" and/or "daterange123"}, {sum row "costs" for "job57" in "July2017"}, etc., I am sure at least certain types of invoices could be created by pressing one or few buttons in the smartphone ... given that all data is tracked reliably at every arrival and departure.

I can imagine a calculation tracker with a number of field of type "mathematical calculation of row of that (remote) tracker" with options for conditions like filter 'dater range' or 'customer name' or 'job ID' etc.. plus the existing field "mathematical calculation inside this item" to sum up and multiply invoice number and tax.

Imho there is no need to calculate across the items in the same tracker as the data is collected or created BUT a second tracker for the cross item calculation would enhance flexibility.

Example

Following Tracker numbers are not the tracker IDs, as the tool likely has a bunch of more trackers, respectively is build upon a CartoGraf installation.

tracker1
Provides the contact details of customers, partners, employees
This can be a simple address book tracker.
This is not the classic CartoGraf POI tracker, but a customer map or other would be still an idea or option ...

tracker 2
Provides the job/contract details and gets contact data, addresses etc. from tracker 1 by object-link, object-list and dynamic-objectlist.
This is a CartoGraf tracker where a number of fields are added. Every job is represented by a point of interest on the CartoGraf Map (kind of CartoJob).
This tracker must be different from tracker 1, as
a. the same customer can assign several jobs at different places and the idea is to see the job locations and their distances related to each other visually on a map.
b. customer data like name, address, contact data shall be filled in by the worker by using simple dropdown menus (object-link, object-list, etc.), whilst customer data is provided by the office.

tracker 3
Provides the job-based daily work-and-cost-reports (can be as well two or more trackers (work and travel, material, external contracted work, ...)

report ID job ID customer date raw data collected in several fields calculated driving cost by cent/mile calculated driving time calculated work time
123 77 John Doe 2-July-2017 ... 75,00€ 2hrs 3hrs
124 78 Mary Smith 2-July-2017 ... 37,00€ 1.2hrs 5hrs
125 72 Mark Penn 2-July-2017 ... 20,00€ 0.75hrs 2hrs
126 77 John Doe 3-July-2017 ... 75,00€ 2hrs 5.5hrs
127 82 Grace Jones 3-July-2017 ... 25,00€ 0.8hrs 3hrs
128 72 Mark Penn 3-July-2017 ... 60,00€ 1.65hrs 8hrs
...


tracker 4
Each item of tracker 4 calculates (mainly sums) rows of tracker 3 based on related filter fields of the same tracker 4. Imagine it similar as the wiki page field and the related wiki page name field, which is a simple text field.
We can use existing field types to use as filter for a new cross-item mathematical calculation field.
2 date fields for a date range. and object-link or dynamic object list fields for drop down filters for ex for customer names.

Driving time in tracker 3 is collected for statistic and costing - for invoice only sum work time (per job/contract/customer and date range) from tracker3, multiply with tax (VAT) and sum to the final invoices gross value.
Price for the journey (mileage cost) can alternatively be flat prices per day or per job/contract.

please mind:

All calculations and references shall be predefined in the tracker setup (field definitions).
The user only inputs the jobId and the date range. The rest is based on object-link, object-list, dynamic-object-list, mathematical calculation / advanced rating syntax and a new to be coded mathematical field (I have no idea if the existing field could be used for in-item and cross-item-cross-tracker calculation at the same time).

Result of creating an item is (shall be) a tracker item, that can be displayed as a pdf printable invoice based on a pre-defined output template.

invoice ID job ID customer date 1 date 2 Sum travel / journey costs ref Tracker4 sum work time ref tracker4 calulate work invoice net value sum net price this item multiply tax (VAT) this item sum invoice price
10 77 John Doe 1-June-2017 30-June2017 200,00 € 25hrs 750,00 € 950,00 € 180,50 € 1.130,50 €
11 77 John Doe 1-July-2017 31-July-2017 320,00 € 35hrs 1.050,00 € 1.370,00 € 260,30 € 1.630,30 €
12 78 Mary Smith 1-July-2017 31-July-2017 120,00 € 30hrs 900,00 € 1.020,00 € 193,80 € 1.213,80 €
13 72 Mark Penn 1-July-2017 31-July-2017 122,00 € 40hrs 1.200,00 € 1.322,00 € 251,18 € 1.573,18 €
14 82 Grace Jones 1-July-2017 31-July-2017 170,00 € 10hrs 300,00 € 470,00 € 89,30 € 559,30 €
15 85 John Doe 01.08.17 31.08.17 230,00 € 20hrs 600,00 € 830,00 € 157,70 € 987,70 €
...


Imho the results of tracker 4 then can be displayed on a wiki page (using a second output-tpl page) and printed as invoice by using the new mPDF feature.

At some point options to add custom data to the invoice, like extra hours or extra material, must be optional (maybe a next step of development of calculation).

If I am not wrong, one single field type similar to the existing mathematical calculation, although some more complicated due to the necessary filter references, could provide the opportunity to get all relevant invoice data directly from the web-application by
a. reliably using tracker 3 on a daily basis
b. creating the invoices by creating items in tracker 4
c. view the item and print

Conference Registration
(non-profit organisation NPO)


A non profit organization organizes an annually international conference.
For their participants management and paper management they set up a Tiki using trackers and wiki pages.

  • Interested lecturers register to the website (if not yet) and submit papers to the call for papers, getting accepted (or not), etc.. Easy.
  • Lecturers will get half price or free entry depending on the type of lecture
  • Interested participants register and get prebooking assets. Next tranche gets early bird deductions.
  • The conference has different parts with certain assets and prices
    • for ex. pre-conference institutes recognized as further education training with scientific points
    • plenary sessions and workshops (conference as a whole) has points as well
    • events like conference dinner or river cruise might cost extra fees


Participants can book parts of the conference the whole package and have to decide which workshops they attend.
The attendants pay different prices depending on their role and the time of booking.

On the other hand there are a number of costs like

  • conference venue
  • interpreters
  • technical equipment
  • event agency (optionally)
  • travel expenses for staff and lecturers
  • accommodation for staff and lecturers
  • etc.


Whether the included shop and payment features meet all requirements or not, regular reports of costs and revenues (compared to expected costs and revenues) have to be provided to the conference organizers.

Thus calculations inside and across tracker items and trackers would be required or at least massively helpful.

Spreadsheet Calculation


Alias

Calculation Use Cases

Keywords

The following is a list of keywords that should serve as hubs for navigation within the Tiki development and should correspond to documentation keywords.

Each feature in Tiki has a wiki page which regroups all the bugs, requests for enhancements, etc. It is somewhat a form of wiki-based project management. You can also express your interest in a feature by adding it to your profile. You can also try out the Dynamic filter.

Accessibility (WAI & 508)
Accounting
Administration
Ajax
Articles & Submissions
Backlinks
Banner
Batch
BigBlueButton audio/video/chat/screensharing
Blog
Bookmark
Browser Compatibility
Calendar
Category
Chat
Comment
Communication Center
Consistency
Contacts Address book
Contact us
Content template
Contribution
Cookie
Copyright
Credits
Custom Home (and Group Home Page)
Database MySQL - MyISAM
Database MySQL - InnoDB
Date and Time
Debugger Console
Diagram
Directory (of hyperlinks)
Documentation link from Tiki to doc.tiki.org (Help System)
Docs
DogFood
Draw -superseded by Diagram
Dynamic Content
Preferences
Dynamic Variable
External Authentication
FAQ
Featured links
Feeds (RSS)
File Gallery
Forum
Friendship Network (Community)
Gantt
Group
Groupmail
Help
History
Hotword
HTML Page
i18n (Multilingual, l10n, Babelfish)
Image Gallery
Import-Export
Install
Integrator
Interoperability
Inter-User Messages
InterTiki
jQuery
Kaltura video management
Kanban
Karma
Live Support
Logs (system & action)
Lost edit protection
Mail-in
Map
Menu
Meta Tag
Missing features
Visual Mapping
Mobile
Mods
Modules
MultiTiki
MyTiki
Newsletter
Notepad
OS independence (Non-Linux, Windows/IIS, Mac, BSD)
Organic Groups (Self-managed Teams)
Packages
Payment
PDF
Performance Speed / Load / Compression / Cache
Permission
Poll
Profiles
Quiz
Rating
Realname
Report
Revision Approval
Scheduler
Score
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search
Security
Semantic links
Share
Shopping Cart
Shoutbox
Site Identity
Slideshow
Smarty Template
Social Networking
Spam protection (Anti-bot CATPCHA)
Spellcheck
Spreadsheet
Staging and Approval
Stats
Survey
Syntax Highlighter (Codemirror)
Tablesorter
Tags
Task
Tell a Friend
Terms and Conditions
Theme
TikiTests
Federated Timesheets
Token Access
Toolbar (Quicktags)
Tours
Trackers
TRIM
User Administration
User Files
User Menu
Watch
Webmail and Groupmail
WebServices
Wiki History, page rename, etc
Wiki plugins extends basic syntax
Wiki syntax text area, parser, etc
Wiki structure (book and table of content)
Workspace and perspectives
WYSIWTSN
WYSIWYCA
WYSIWYG
XMLRPC
XMPP




Useful Tools