TECSYS Integration

Automatic Integration with TECSYS

TECSYS and TrackAbout have built a generic integration that is in use with all of our mutual customers. The picture above shows the information that flows from one system to the other.

How the Tecsys/TrackAbout Interfaces work

At a high level:

• TrackAbout hosts webservices that are called by Elite
• Queue timers in Elite kick off calls to these webservices
• These queue timers can be run on whatever schedule you want to set in Elite
  • It is typical for the timers to run twice a day or so.
• You can also use "Execute Now" in Elite to kick off the queue timers manually at any time

Specifics of integration

The specifications for the integration is listed below. This is useful if you want to see exactly which fields are sent between TrackAbout and Tecsys. Note that you can change the version (v=#.#.#) in the URL to see the specification for different versions of the interfaces.

• Data from Tecsys to TrackAbout:
  • https://www.trackabout.com/ws/EliteSeries.asmx?Meta&v=2.0.0

• Asset Balances
  • https://www.trackabout.com/ws/EliteSeries/AssetBalances.asmx?Meta&v=2.1.0

• Rental Invoices
  • https://www.trackabout.com/ws/EliteSeries/RentalInvoices.asmx?Meta&v=1.1.0

Data Imported from your Older Rental System (Before Tecsys)

This data is needed to be exported from your older rental system and imported into TrackAbout

• Customer Balances
• Customer Rental Rates
• Leases
• Customer Owned Counts (This is only needed if customer owned are tracked with the same item number as non-customer owned and there is a special count of customer owned cylinders for customers.)
• Delivers and Returns (Needed so that we can calculate daily rental when comparing TrackAbout to your current system)
• Rental Invoices (From a recent rental run. Used for comparison to TrackAbout data)

Manually Entered Data

This data is small and is keyed manually into TrackAbout from your existing system

• Standard Rental Rates
• Bracketed Rental Rates (This can be auto-loaded by TrackAbout if there are many brackets)
• Locations (Warehouses)
• Payment Terms

This data is created for you in TrackAbout

• RentalTaxStatuses
• Webservice Users

Some Specific Issues

Bill-to and Ship-to numbers

Today we're setup in TrackAbout like this:

Bill-to: 007780 (We call this the "Parent")

Ship-to: 0077801 (We call this the "Department")

TrackAbout requires that all bill-to and ship-to numbers be unique.

TECSYS is fundamentally setup like this:

Bill-to: 007780

Ship-to: 1

TECSYS requires that all bill-to customers be unique and that the ship-to numbers within a bill-to are unique. So many bill-to's can all have the same ship-to number. For instance many bill-to's can have a ship-to of "1".

To ensure that we don't have any problems in our integration, we will setup our TrackAbout numbers to have a Ship-to number that includes the TECSYS Bill-to number then a plus sign (+) then the TECSYS Ship-to number. This guarantees that all ship-to numbers are unique in TrackAbout. So the format is like this:

TECSYS

Bill-to: A

Ship-to: B

Trackbout:

Bill-to: A

Ship-to: A+B

So if you wanted to keep the longer ship-to numbers in Elite for ease of training/conversion for your users then we'd set them up like this (This is what we've done at our other TECSYS/TrackAbout customers)

TECSYS

Bill-to: 007780

Ship-to: 0077801

TrackAbout

Bill-to: 007780

Ship-to: 007780+0077801

Or if you wanted to switch to using short ship-to numbers in Elite you could do it like this:

TECSYS

Bill-to: 007780

Ship-to: 1

TrackAbout

Bill-to: 007780

Ship-to: 007780+1

So one of the steps in your conversion to TECSYS is for us to convert your Bill-To (Department) numbers in TrackAbout to the new format.