Defining Frequency

You can define a frequency for the following items:

A Job record (doing so creates a schedule A job with a frequency (service plan). Saving a schedule will create a series of jobs, depending on the frequency settings. The term Schedule is customizable. For details, see the Defining Vocabulary section of the Implementation Manual.)
A Task record
A Billing Cycle (part of an Advanced Billing A billing method where you can manually define how to split the billing of particular invoices (how much will be billed to what person at what time?). See the Defining Billing Properties section of the Implementation Manual for more details. setup).

To define a frequency:

Click Frequency. The Appointment Frequency dialog box appears.

Click the tab corresponding to the frequency the job will occur. The options in the sections below will change according to which tab is selected.
Select the appropriate options for the job frequency in the top portion (step 1) of the dialog box. For instance, if you want the frequency to occur on the last Saturday of every month, you would need to select the second option button, Last from the first drop-down list, Saturday from the second drop-down list, and type 1 in the field, as displayed in the screenshot above.
Select the scheduled end option in the middle portion (step 2) of the dialog box. Your options are:
- No end date. The schedule will reoccur forever until you actively end it (by editing the frequency, for instance). For details about ending an existing recurring job, see the Defining an End Date for a Recurring Schedule section.
- End after X occurrences. Type the number of occurrences you want to occur in the text field. When you save the job/task/Advanced Billing configuration, it will only create or occur for the number of times you type here. For example, when defining a job frequency, if you type 10, only 10 jobs will be created.
- End on X. Select the date you want the schedule to end from the calendar box. The frequency will continue to create jobs/tasks/advanced billing setups until the date you define. For example, if you create a job on 1/2/06 with a weekly frequency that ends on 2/28/06, 9 jobs will be created.
Click OK.

For example, if you wanted to create a recurring job that occurred every week on Tuesday and Thursday forever, you would open the Weekly tab of the Appointment Frequency dialog box for the job, select the Tuesday and Thursday check boxes, and then select the No end date option before clicking OK.

Caution!

Caution:
In a database that uses Man-hour based scheduling, the job's duration is calculated based on the employees' availability on the frequency's start date, even if the first scheduled job does not fall on the frequency's start date. This calculation determines the duration for the entire schedule, even though the employee(s) availability may not be the same on every date of the schedule.
With this in mind, we recommend that you the frequency of a schedule start the same day as the as the first instance of the schedule.

Ending Frequency

You can end a frequency at any time. To do this:

Open the frequency dialog box.
Select the End on option button and select today's date from the calendar box.
Click OK.

Caution!

Caution:
We do not recommend setting an end date for a Billing Cycle - your best option is to use the No End Date option. If you want to stop using a billing cycle, please turn off the billing cycle by selecting the No option button in the Billing Setup dialog box.

See Also: Ending a Recurring Schedule