It's that time of year! Here's a list of easy steps you can follow to perform a quick spring cleaning on your Fast-Weigh Web Portal, along with a few additional tips and tricks you might have missed.

Your Fast-Weigh account handles all of your company’s ticketing data, and for some companies, this can be a lot of data - tickets, trucks, orders, products, billings, and more. In above video, we'll walk you through a list of easy tips to help you keep your Fast-Weigh system clean and organized. We’re also going to show you a couple of often-overlooked features and tools that should make your administrative operations even more efficient.

6 Ways to Perform a "Spring Cleaning" on Your Fast-Weigh Account

Tip #1: Use the Status Update Tool to Keep Your Orders Tidy

If you find yourself struggling with long sync times when syncing your order list on the Fast-Weigh Desktop Ticketing app, this could be an indicator that you have an excessive number of orders assigned to that Location. In many instances, a large portion of those orders probably have not have been ticketed in quite a while, and some may never be ticketed again in the future.

Because Fast-Weigh's primary job is to protect your ticketing data, orders cannot be deleted outright once tickets have been run on them. Instead, we have a handy Order Status system to help you set orders aside when you aren’t using them.

To change the Status for a large number of orders with just a few clicks, go to your Fast-Weigh Web Portal and navigate to Orders >> Status Update. There, you can quickly mark orders as Inactive, or even Close them entirely. This will help you keep your sync times lightning-fast, as the Desktop Ticketing app will only bother syncing the orders that have a status set to Active.

If you need to reactivate an order later, it’s as easy as finding the order on the Web Portal, editing it, and setting the status back to Active.

We suggest you use the Status Update tool every six months or so, just to make sure your scale app isn’t trying to pull in extra orders it doesn’t need!

Learn more about Order Status Update.

Tip #2: Deactivate Any Trucks That Your Company No Longer Needs for Ticketing

Just like with orders, trucks can be deactivated as well. This doesn’t delete the truck – it’s still around for you to reactivate if needed. If you have a truck or hauler that no longer needs to be used for ticketing, you can quickly mark the truck(s) as Inactive by editing your trucks in bulk. On your Web Portal, go to Trucks, then click on Truck Bulk Edit. Here, you can check off a number of trucks and apply various parameters, including their Status. Check off the trucks you want to deactivate, set their Status to Inactive, and click Save.

You can also edit Status for just one truck at a time, either from the Trucks list on the Web Portal, or when editing a truck on the Fast-Weigh Desktop Ticketing application.

Tip #3: Review Your Truck Assignments

In Fast-Weigh, you can assign a truck to a specific Order and Product. Then, when the truck arrives at the scale and the operator selects the truck for ticketing, the Desktop Ticketing app will automatically load in the Order and Product it was assigned to.

Individual Truck Assignments can be edited or removed on the Desktop Ticketing app by visiting the Edit Truck screen. However, when you have a large number of Truck Assignments, you can easily view them all at once on the Fast-Weigh Web Portal. Navigate to Trucks, then Assignment, and review your full Truck Assignment list. You can search and filter Assignments, as well as export them to Excel. You can also clear Truck Assignments or add new ones.

Tip #4: Set up Your Customer Pricing Levels

On the Fast-Weigh Web Portal, navigate to Resources >> Products >> Products & Pricing, and click on a Product to see its various pricing levels. Establishing pricing levels is optional, but as many companies charge different prices or apply discounts depending on who the customer is, we highly recommend you use these price levels to keep this process as streamlined as possible. After setting up your price levels in the Product list, you can then go to Resources >> Customers, edit a customer, and assign a certain price level to them. This means that when you create a new order for that Customer and assign Products to the order, the system will automatically use the price level that matches the one you assigned to the Customer. Because Fast-Weigh always allows custom order pricing, you can still edit the Order Products and change the Unit Price specifically for that order, if needed.

Tip #5: Run the Product Pricing Variation Report

You can find the Product Pricing Variation report by going to Reports, choosing the Orders category, and selecting this report from the drop-down menu. This report allows you to review all of your Order Product pricing, so you can determine if any Order Products (located within an Order) have pricing that is different from the default prices found in the Products list (located under Resources >> Products >> Products & Pricing).

This allows you to:

1) See which orders have customized pricing of any kind

2) Review how that pricing will change if your company is updating prices across the board. Review this report before running the Open Order Price Update tool.

Tip #6: Find Tickets That Haven't Been Billed

Some companies bill their customers every month. Others bill every week, every day, etc. Regardless of how often you bill, you should frequently head to the Billing screen and run a Billing Query to find out of you have any tickets that still need to be invoiced. You can even find particularly old tickets that haven’t been billed by going to the New Billing tab and clearing out any dates in the date range. This gives you a wide-open search query. When you hit the Query button, the table below will show absolutely any tickets in your system that have not been billed.

4 More Fast-Weigh Tips & Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

Tip #7: Click-Drag Table Columns on the Fast-Weigh Web Portal to Instantly Group Items

This is one of Fast-Weigh's most handy features, yet it's often overlooked! To demonstrate the drag-and-drop column organizer, navigate to Tickets >>Ticket Query and run a query to find a list of tickets. At the top of the table, you should see a tool tip: Drag a column header and drop it here to group by that column.

Let's say you're looking to find out all of the times a certain truck was ticketed throughout the day. To do this, simply drag the column header called Truck ID and then drop it to ths above tool tip. Instantly, the data in the table will be grouped by the truck. Now, what if you want to group by another piece of data? For example, if you'd like to know the name of the scale operator who ticketed the trucks. Just find the Operator column, grab it, and drag it to the top alongside the Truck ID. Now, you can see all of the times that certain trucks were ticketed, along with exactly who ticketed them. And you can continue to add columns and group as many types of data as you want.

This feature is also available in other tables, such as the Orders list and the Dispatching dashboard.

Tip #8: Use Filter Funnels and Search Boxes

On the many pages with tables within the Web Portal, you will see a Search Bar and a Filter Funnel icon on table column headers. Click on those funnels, and you can enter a certain word, number, or phrase to narrow down the data in the table. You can alsouse filters on multiple columns at once. Fast-Weigh will also save your filters automatically, so if you edit an order and then save and close to go back to the order list, your filters will still apply to the list. To clear out filters quickly, just click on Clear Filters, and they’re gone. You can also perform a more general search by using the search box at the top.

Learn more about using filters.

Tip #9: Multitask by Opening Screens in a New Tab

One of the pros to being able to access your Fast-Weigh Web Portal from any web browser is the fact that you can open just about any screen in a new tab. For example, visit any page on the Web Portal. Then right-click a link in the top menu, and choose "Open in a New Tab."

 Tip #10: Save Your Configuration & Update Reports on the Fast-Weigh Desktop Ticketing Application

If you open the Desktop Ticketing app and go to Settings, you’ll see that we have a vast number of options for you to customize your scale ticketing experience. However, just remember that after you’ve gone to the trouble of configuring your settings just the way you want them, you can actually save that configuration to the Fast-Weigh cloud. Do this by going to Settings, then click on About. Here, you’ll find a button that says SAVE CONFIGURATION. Choose Save to Portal. This means that if your scale house PC crashes or is compromised in some way, our team can simply install Fast-Weigh on a new PC and download your settings from the cloud with a few clicks.

So, if you’ve never saved your configuration before, go ahead and do that now. And any time you change something in your app settings, it’s always a good idea to save the configuration again.

Occasionally, you should also update your ticket formats and reports on the ticketing app. Under Settings, you should see a tab called Reports. Every few months, we suggest that you click on that tab and hit the button at the top: Update from Portal. This simply tells the scale app to check the cloud for any big changes we’ve made to your built-in reports and ticket formats. These updates will download quickly, and you should get a success message when it’s done. You can then close that window and go right back to work!

That's it! We hope you find these tips helpful when using Fast-Weigh. As always, if you have any questions, we're happy to help. Just visit our Support Team at any time.