Why Are Some Customers Not on the Map?
The customer map can only draw a customer whose location has been set, so a customer nobody has placed yet is left off. The map never hides this: whenever any customer in the list or on the board has no location, a banner at the top of the map says how many, and gives you two ways to fix them. It appears on the map of both the Calls screen and the Scheduler.
Why are some customers not on the customer map?
Because they have no location stored in ABM Service. The customer map draws each customer at the position saved for it, and a customer whose position has never been set has nowhere to go. The banner across the top of the map then reads, for example, "3 of 40 customers in this window have no location and are not on the map." On the Scheduler while the To schedule column is open, it says "on this map" instead of "in this window".
The two numbers always add up: the customers with a marker, counted under the map as "on the map", plus the ones in the banner, are every customer the list or the board reaches. The calls of the missing customers are still counted in the line under the map, and they are still in the list or on the board; only their marker is missing.
The banner stays for as long as any customer is missing, and cannot be dismissed, so a map showing some of your customers is never mistaken for one showing all of them.
A customer can also be missing because its stored position cannot be read, for example only one half of it was filled in, or it holds something that is not a position. ABM Service treats that exactly like no location, and the customer appears in the banner.
How do I see which customers have no location?
Select Which? in the banner at the top of the customer map. A panel headed No location set opens over the map with the number of customers and one line for each:
- The customer's name. Select it to open the customer's screen; the arrow beside it opens the customer in a new tab.
- The customer's code, how many calls it has in the list or on the board, and how many of those have nobody yet, for example "2 calls · 1 nobody yet".
- Set location, to place the customer from here.
Close the panel with its Close button (×), by selecting Which? again, or by pressing Esc (Escape) while you are working in the map. Which? is for a quick look without leaving the screen; Set their locations is for fixing them.
How do I put a missing customer on the map without leaving the screen?
Select Which? in the banner on the customer map, then Set location beside the customer. The Set location dialog opens over the Calls list or the Scheduler, already moved to the customer's Eircode (the Irish postcode) or address when ABM Service can find it.
- Select Which? in the banner at the top of the map.
- Select Set location beside the customer. It reads Opening… while ABM Service looks the address up.
- Move the map in the dialog until the pin in the middle sits on the customer's building, or search for an address or Eircode.
- Select Save location.
The dialog closes, the map asks for its customers again, and the customer appears as a marker; the banner's number goes down by one. Cancel closes the dialog without saving. If your company's ABM Service has no Google Maps key set up, the Set location dialog has no map and asks for the Latitude and Longitude instead; paste each number in whole, for example copied from an online map, because a number typed one key at a time loses its decimal point. This is the same dialog the Customers list and the customer screen use, so a customer is placed the same way wherever you find it.
How do I fix all the missing customers at once?
Select Set their locations in the banner on the customer map. The Customers without a location page opens showing just the customers this map could not place, with a Set location button on each row, so you can work down the list one after another. Select Show all there to widen it to every customer with no location.
When the window has more than 200 such customers, the page opens on the whole list instead, because a shortlist that long is not one anybody works through from a banner.
When you have finished, go Back: the Calls list or the Scheduler comes back as you left it, with the map looking at the same place, and the map asks for its customers again, so the ones you placed now have markers.
Does the map look up a customer's address by itself?
No. The customer maps on the Calls screen and the Scheduler only ever draw locations that have been saved, and never look up addresses to guess where a customer is. A screen of customers would mean hundreds of address look-ups, each one charged by Google, every time the question changed, and a guessed pin could send an engineer to the wrong place. The banner's count is the honest answer instead.
Addresses are looked up only when a person is placing one customer: in the Set location dialog, and on the customer's own screen, where the map can suggest a position from the Eircode or address for you to check and save.
Why is a call not on the map at all?
A visit on the Scheduler board whose call has no customer on it cannot be drawn, because there is no customer to place, and it is not counted in the banner either, because there is no customer to name. It is still on the Scheduler board. The Calls list and the To schedule column do not show calls with no customer at all, so on the Calls screen every call in the list has a customer to place.
Everything else in the list or on the board is on the map one way or another: as a marker when its customer has a location, or in the banner's count and the Which? list when it does not.