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  • From: USA, WA, Seattle
  • Registered: 01/07/2024
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Installation at office and multiple trucks that are warehouses

We are an electrical contractor and want to use FrontAccounting to run job costs and maintain optimal inventory levels. We have 3 large trucks that carry inventory and go to remote sites. We have Sierra Wireless modem / routers with a WWAN connection on each truck and industrial PCs. We want to install FrontAccounting on each truck to serve that "warehouse" to avoid issues with connectivity at remote sites. An instance of FrontAccounting would be installed on-premise at our office servers. How would this need to be set up? What errors would occur if a truck was outside of a connection area and that database was "offline", could we backup the databases to each instance of FrontAccounting and make them read-only until that database was connected again?

  • From: USA, SC, Columbia
  • Registered: 01/26/2022
  • Posts: 20

Re: Installation at office and multiple trucks that are warehouses

This is an interesting conundrum. The solution may depend upon how often your large trucks go out to remote sites and you lose communications.  Additionally, are you trying to create invoices on the trucks while out in the field?

If the time that the trucks are not able to communicate is infrequent, I would suggest that you install and maintain FA in the home office and use the Sierra Wireless modems/routers to log into the the central office/server. In the event that you can't establish real time connections, simply write down the items that used for that particular job and enter them into the accounting system when connections can be established.  To keep the trucks info separate, you could use the "Dimensions" function to create separate locations / ie. trucks.

On the other hand if the lack of communications is very frequent you could run each truck as you suggested with its own FA system.  The problem comes down to a simple way of consolidating data. You could export / import the data from each truck into the central office server. [FA has the ability to do this so you will need to research this function.] It will require a lot more work than the scenario above.

Good Luck in finding a usable solution.

Frank

  • From: Singapore, India, Chennai
  • Registered: 05/02/2009
  • Posts: 6,093

Re: Installation at office and multiple trucks that are warehouses

Have a separate application for managing the truck transaction data and have a middleware to synch with FA tables when at the HQ. Issues such as change in data that was already synched will render the HQ server data as stale even though newer data are in synch.

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