2nd Alpha demo released

Just wanted to stop in real quick and let everybody know that a second more formal demo has been released of the billing system. That demo can be found here: http://soapware-demovideos.s3.amazonaws.com/project7.htm

The billing system remains in Alpha as we work on polishing and preparing it for beta. As mentioned before though we wont put it into beta until we get the 2010 pre release and the 2010 release out of the door. As soon as that time comes we will be sure to let everybody know.

The Alpha continues....

As most of you know by now we have not and will not release standard billing as planned this fall. Randall talks towards the details in his blog post on Oct 2nd http://roates.blogspot.com/2009/10/tentative-soapware-product-release.html

In a nut shell, we are somewhat stuck behind what I call the release train. We have 2 SOAPware releases ahead of us that must be taken care of before the tracks can be cleared for us to start the process of getting released. Until that happens we are quite simply sitting in Alpha.

This isn't all bad of course, the longer the application sits in Alpha the more polished it will be when released. As we wait for the tracks to clear we will continue to work on billing ensuring that all features are implemented and that the overall quality of the product is sound.

If you have any questions about the product or the expected release, please feel free to leave comments here or twitter me at SOAPWynne.

Alpha demo released to the public

A few days ago we gave a demo to the company showing many of the new features that will be released with the upcoming Standard Billing. This demo is in a presentation format with a few questions from the audience mixed in. It's about an hour and a half long and should give everybody a better idea as to what is going to be released.

Let me apologize in advance for the annoying beeping sound that you will hear in it. This was a problem with the recording that we wish did not happen but given the amount of content and the desire to allow our customers to view and give feedback, we decided to go ahead and release it.

For now, feel free to comment on this blog or send me a e-mail/tweet if you have any questions. We will soon be reorganizing our forums and will have a new home to discuss billing related ideas.

Here is the link: http://soapware-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/SWBillingWalkThru.wmv

Billing goes Alpha!!!

As of this week SOAPware's Standard Billing product has moved into the Alpha phase. What this means is that we are at the end of scheduled new development/coding. We have achieved all of the goals we set out to achieve and are now moving forward with the next phase in the project.

So what does Alpha really mean? What we mean by Alpha is that we are moving into a stage where we start preparing the application to be used by users outside of the company. It's where we start pulling everything together and make a number of very important decisions about the product. It's where we ramp up our documentation and support to make sure the proper foundation is there for the release. And of course, the most important aspect is that we continue to test and resolve issues that are found.

One of the most frequent questions we get here at SOAPware is when will users be able to install and use/test our new billing system. The Alpha phase isn't a good time to do that for many reasons, but the following phase (Beta) is. Once we move into the Beta phase we will start a closed Beta program and progress form there.

Let's take a moment and look at our schedule. Back in March I blogged about the Billing Release Schedule and talked a bit about dates etc. For SOAPware Standard Billing we said in the Winter of 2009. I'm happy to say that we are still very much on track to releasing this Winter.

To be more specific, I would like to move from the Alpha phase to the Beta phase in early September. Once we are in beta things become a bit more unpredictable. User feedback will certainly drive the process from there and will help determine just how close we are to release. So, let's all hope for a smooth Beta so that we can get this out there for everybody to use!

New Features in Scheduling...

A month or so ago I blogged about the new outlining functionality that we will introduce in Scheduling once our Standard Billing package is released. I wanted to spend this month talking towards another new feature in Scheduling that I'm sure many of you will be excited about.

When we originally wrote Scheduling we tried to keep it as basic and affordable as possible. This simplicity has helped Scheduling become one of the more popular products we have sold here at SOAPware. That simplicity though has also proven to be inadequate for sites dealing with larger volumes of appointments. With the Standard Billing release, we plan to address some of those issues.

Starting with Standard Billing, Scheduling will now be able to notify all clients of changes occurring on the Schedule. This change allows all clients to update their view automatically without requiring the user to refresh the screen. What this means is that at any given time, the Schedule that you seen on the screen is an accurate representation of your appointments.

I plan to demo this soon in a video that will hopefully be released in a couple weeks. If you would like to be notified when that video is released, please follow this blog or follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/SOAPWynne

Outlining to be introduced into Scheduling...

With the upcoming standard billing release we will see some long awaited new features implemented into Scheduling. One of the new features allows you to define Outlines that will assist staff in scheduling the correct type of appointment for the defined day/time slot. For example, if you want all of your new patient appointments to be scheduled between 8am and 10am on a Monday, you can define that in Scheduling and assign it a color that will show up on the Scheduler.

Below is a screen shot of Scheduling showing a New Patient outline between 8am and noon. It also shows Surgeries between 1pm and 3pm and then Follow Ups between 3pm and 5pm.

Note that Outlining doesn't prevent staff from scheduling appointments before, during, or after any of those times, it's quiet simply a guideline to help staff correctly schedule an appointment into the desired available time slots.

This new feature will be released with the standard billing release of SOAPware.

Time flies when you are working hard..

It seems like just yesterday I made a post to our billing blog but of course, it's been much longer than that. It certainly isn't for the lack of want or content, but rather the lack of time. I did want to pause for a moment and let everybody know where we are at and how we are doing.

At the moment, we are 'close' to being on schedule. We have done a substantial amount of work but still fell short on 1 or 2 of our goals for the 3^rd milestone. We have added a new member to our team who has already had a positive impact so we do feel that we will catch up during the 4^th millstone.

Back to the 3^rd millstone though, one of the major screens that we worked on was the payment screen:

The act of taking a payment may at first seem straight forward, but as you get into the details you will find that things can get complex very quickly. The dialog we have designed is designed to be intuitive and allow for easy payment entry, but also allow for the different complex situations that can arise.

For example, you can add multiple patients to this dialog allowing for payments to be applied to as many patients as you like. This allows for a customer to easily pay for their entire family and allow for your front office staff to easily capture it. Hopefully we will get some demo videos up before to long that shows how you would go about filling out the payment dialog and showing some of the more involved aspects of this dialog.

Within the next week or two, I'll also try to show some of the reports we have been working on. We aren't taking the reports lightly and have been working on them for the past 2 months. At the moment, most of the reports created aren't very exciting but they are required for the billing system. As we get into the more exciting ones (which will be in the coming weeks) we will post those and talk towards their meaning/use.

That's it for the moment, as always if you have any questions or comment please feel free to contact me. Thanks!