This has been an ongoing problem with a client I perform tech support for. He has been using Billings for about 9 months and the problem began with version 2 and has gotten successively worse over time. Each month when he generates his billing invoices several of the clients do not show up with their names or addresses on their invoice. I reported this last year and after sending in his Billings database and AB database files received a direct email response on how to "rebuild" the client list in AB by deleting all the clients from the Billings group (not the group itself), opening Billings which rebuilds the client list in AB (except with the company checkbox selected), reopening AB and deselecting the "company" checkbox for each client, and finally reopening Billings to generate the invoices which now showed each client's name and address on the invoice. This had to be done each month prior to invoice generation until several months ago it failed to work on a couple of the clients. Last month it did not work on any of the clients. The rebuild just didn't work at all. I was hoping that an upgrade to Leopard would solve this problem, but alas, my labor to update all of his workstations to Leopard has left this problem unresolved. I just ran a dry run of his invoices and none of them shows a client name or address on the invoice, either before rebuilding the AB "Billings" group or after. Needless to say he is feeling rather frustrated (as am I) about this ongoing issue. Has anyone else experienced this behavior and, if so, what is the fix for it.

Marketcircle, are you listening?

Gary

Support brought this up to us and we are trying to figure out what could cause this on a continual basis.

I think there is some process on the the Mac in question that is changing the Address Book ID's. In older versions of the OS, .Mac used to do this (Apple has since fixed this).

We have a "Client" record (with very basic details) in Billings that points to the Address Book record (with all the details) using a specific UUID (Address Book's Unique Identifier). These UUID's are not supposed to change - ever, but something is changing them.

If a process (any apps that talks to the AddressBook framework) deletes and adds the same record (say John Smith) - the UUID will change - invalidating our pointer to that record.

When we can not find the UUID in the AddressBook framework - then we prompt for a re-link (we show that exclamation mark).

So - considering this happening frequently for you - and we(I) haven't heard of this issue from others - I think you need to look at what other apps are using the Address Book framework and may be changing the records around.

Hopefully this will isolate the source of the problem.

Here is a report that you can run before and after you run one of those suspected app - that could be changing your address book ID's.

Compare the Address Book ID column.

Download this report and put it on the desktop or in ~/Library/Application Support/Billings/Templates/

Then in Billings go to File -> Reports - open the "Client" disclosure and choose the "Client with UUID's" report.

Client ID's Report

Thanks AJ for the response. I have downloaded the "Client ID" report and will run it periodically to test this. I am not aware of any other programs that would be affecting the Address Book UUID's. We are using a single "dotMac" to sync the AB to multiple computers, but you stated that has now been fixed. The current OS we are running is 10.5.2. About one year ago we used Mark/Space's SyncTogether and also "Spanning Sync" but encountered too many other problems to continue their use. They have not been used for more than 6 months. The interesting thing to me is that if you select the "Show card" option from Billings to see the "linked" AB card it goes to the correct AB contact card of every client listed. It would seem from this that some type of link still exists.

My additional question to you is this: With the current broken UUID links to AB, how do I reestablish the UUID link so the client names and addresses show up on future invoices and still maintain the invoice history? I have gone through the exercise of deleting all the names from the AB group "Billings", then relaunching Billings to have it rebuild its group. This past time even that did not work, which it has in the past. Your suggestions would be appreciated.

I am not sure of the details of everything you have tried, but one way to link the clients to the AB persons is by selecting the each client and choosing the "Link To..." command from the edit menu or by right-clicking on the client. This would be tedious to do every time, but may work better than deleting all of the clients from the Billings group in AB.

Looking at the Client UUID report you sent, it is evident that the AB persons that Billings is looking for no longer exist (which is why the name column is often blank). That means that the UUID must have been changed by some other application. Make sure that there is no old sync software still installed that may be causing this, and maybe try turning off any syncing software you still use (including .Mac) and see if the problem stops. Then by turning them back on one by one you may be able to find what is causing the problem.

Let us know if you are able to get it working or not.

I just wanted to follow up on this topic in case anyone else is having the same issue. The problem ended up being much different then we originally thought. It has actually has nothing to do with the links to Address Book. Instead, a bug in Billings prevents client info to show up for any records in Address Book that are set to reorder the first and last name to be different than the default ordering.

If you have trouble with a client name and address not showing up on invoices, try this first and see if it fixes the problem. Go to Address Book and select the client in question and choose "Reorder Last Name Before First" or "Reorder First Name Before Last" from the "Card" menu. You may have to restart Billings for the change to take effect.

quote:

Originally posted by Fraser Kuyvenhoven:
I just wanted to follow up on this topic in case anyone else is having the same issue. The problem ended up being much different then we originally thought. It has actually has nothing to do with the links to Address Book. Instead, a bug in Billings prevents client info to show up for any records in Address Book that are set to reorder the first and last name to be different than the default ordering.

If you have trouble with a client name and address not showing up on invoices, try this first and see if it fixes the problem. Go to Address Book and select the client in question and choose "Reorder Last Name Before First" or "Reorder First Name Before Last" from the "Card" menu. You may have to restart Billings for the change to take effect.

I just noticed this week that first the client's address disappeared, then the client's name too, but the reordering of first/last name does the trick. Thank you.

I have been experiencing the same issue on my macbook pro 10.5.3 and my iMac 24" 10.5.1

I first reported this issue with smendonca@marketcircle.com but still no resolution. I have tried everything also

Ben

Hi Ben.

Just to make sure this is the same issue, do you know if you have been using the name reordering feature in Address Book? If not, this may be a different issue that needs to be looked in to.

If this is the same problem as Gary was having, you may want to try the following steps which Gary reported for him to get things working again. It seems that you may need to also rebuild the Billings group for the changes to take affect. Try this: With Billings closed, remove all the clients from the Billings group in Address Book. Then start up Billings, which should rebuild the Billings group. If there are still no names/addresses on the invoices, try choosing "Reorder Last Name Before First" in Address Book while Billings is still running.

Let me know if that works for you or not.

I think it is the name re-ordering thing.
I noticed that even after changing the order you still have to remove the contact completely and re invoice/bill the customer. A pain if you have lots of data already entered.

You should not have to remove the client from Billings to get new invoices to work. If you are referring to invoices you already made that are missing the billing information, then yes, those would need to be recreated.