Website

Our workload over the last two weeks has been surprisingly healthy. As a resulted, the scheduled website release yesterday needed to be postponed a few days until we could dedicate the necessary resources. If you mark your calendars for May 21, 2007, you will have a front row seat of the official unveiling; although an early release is possible.

Within the last two weeks we discovered the need for a adaptable order template to use whenever dealing with significant volumes of customers. Modeling the basic format after our previously engineered invoice template, the resulting document will serve our purposes very elegantly. The one difficulty we encountered was attempting to implement a system for customers to calculate their own sales tax. Without realizing it, my attempt at innovation and simplification resulted in confusion. Instead of having the sales tax calculated separately and then added to the subtotal, I merged those two steps into one:

Grand Total: [subtotal] x 1.056 (sales tax) = _______

By multiplying by 1 and 5.6% at the same time, you keep your original number (the subtotal) and efficiently add an appropriate percentage to it (the sales tax) in one simple step. However, what I learned is that simple does not always equal easy. While the formula is in fact simple and quick, because of it's uncommon nature, people are required to stop and think before using it. There is not anything wrong with thinking, but the goal of an order form should be receiving the necessary information from your customers as quickly and accurately as possible. Thinking can either slow down that process or result in errors.