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The Lien Writer® Newsletter
Thursday, November 15th, 2018

ENTERING AND CONTROLLING CURRENT JOBS AND HISTORY DATA

Lien Writer® is famed for how easy it is to use- enter the data, print your required legal document and mail it. But we are often surprised, despite all the features available in the program, that doing the Notices to Owner and General Contractor (preliminary notices, notices of furnishing, etc.) are the only documents most users print. And, that most owners do not maintain the relationship between the Current Jobs and History databases.

The concept is simple. The Current Jobs section of Lien Writer® is where everyone starts entering data to print out a State’s required notice to the owner and general contractor to establish a right to file a mechanic’s or bond claim lien on the real property our clients performed their services upon in the event they are not paid for their services. Without serving this notice on the owner and general contractor a company has no right to seek compensation from the owner in the event their customer does not pay them for their services. Oh, you can still attempt to collect your bill from the customer, if he or she has anything to collect, but all the services you performed on the owner’s property are uncollectable from the owner when you have not established a right to lien the property, and that is how it is done in over 40 states via the Preliminary Notice process.

So, you send the notice, the owner receives it via Certified Mail, and then the owners make sure your customer pays you so they are able to receive a Waiver and Release of Rights of your claim against them. As we said, simple. Often 90% of the total work you need to do via Lien Writer®, costing you nothing more than the time it took to enter the data, print it, and the postage to mail the Certified Mail documents. But there is more to consider.

Often, we have clients, small outfits who have used our Lien Writer® for many years, call us up with a problem- the thousands and thousands of records they have entered into the Current Jobs database, and they find as the record count goes up it becomes harder and harder to manage and find records. On a recent service call one client, a company with one person using Lien Writer®, called complaining she was spending a lot of time searching through her Current Jobs database of more than 8000 jobs when trying to locate a particular job. The first thing we asked was “you have 8,000 active jobs?” to which she answered “no, of course not, I have about 40 active jobs right now, but I have been using Lien Writer® for over 10 years”! Okay, we said, “haven’t you been moving your completed jobs to your History section?”, to which she replied “Oh, I see the History section, but there is never anything in it”. To which we said, “when you finish a job, aren’t you moving the Current Jobs to History?”. “Ah”, she said, “No. Can I do that?”

Yes, of course you can. You should be doing this once a week or month. And, it is easy to do, too. We have number of features to get jobs from Current Jobs to History:

1) DELETE the Current Jobs record – this will automatically move the job to the History file. WARNING – Deleting a job in History removes the job from the program. We might be able to recover those jobs, but you will have to call or write us to be told how to do this;
2) Press the F3 key. This will move the job to History. In History, you can also use the F3 key to move a job back to Current Jobs;
3) When you have done your final Unconditional Waiver and Release for a job, the program will ask if you want to delete it. Pressing “Yes” moves it from Current Jobs to History;

Now, these three options are good for moving one record at a time. But, what if you, too, have failed to move your Current Jobs to History for the last 8 years? Moving one record at a time from Current Jobs to History is going to be a lot of time and work! Well, we have other options to mass move records from Current Jobs to the History file, and this will make it easy to keep your work files up to date.

The Lien Writer® Main Menu option Edit has a section Mass Move Current Jobs to History that is designed to help you keep your database clean. Options include:

1) Marked Jobs – This option allows you to mass move to History every Current Jobs record checked Marked:

The only problem is that you have to mark every record you want to move;
2) Paid Jobs – Selecting this option moves every record marked Paid to the History database. Again, we have to assume you have been marking these records as Paid every time you close a job;
3) Jobs by Next Call Date – This option allows you to send all records to History as of a specified Next Call Date. As mass mover this allows you to set a date when you did your last work;
4) Jobs by Entry Date – This option is the simplest to use but you have to have declared a mass move period that does not move your active Current Jobs. Typically, the program presumes to move records from 2 years through 1 year before the current date:

But it is often safest the first time to move everything from the beginning of your use of the program through 2 years ago:

Then you can use the other options to finish up clean your Current Jobs database.

Keeping your Lien Writer® databases clean is very important to help with your management of your jobs. Doing it on a regular basis makes the clean-up easy.

Keeping Up To Date With Lien Writer®
The current version on the street is our 10.1.1.1 version.

It is easy to update Lien Writer®:

1) If you are using a Lien Writer® version 9.3.2.7 or before, first run Lien Writer®, then go to Help / About Lien Writer and write down your version number and expiration date for verification;
2) Open your Internet or Google Explorer;
3) Go to our website at http://www.fwmsoftware.com/fwm-software-downloads/;
4) Click on Lien_Program_Installer v10.1.1.1;
5) The site will ask where you want the program to download. Put it in a directory location you want, or just download to the Desktop. Normally, it should take less than 5 minutes;
6) Once the program is downloaded, go to the directory site, or the Desktop, and double click on the Lien_Program_Installer v10.1.1.1. The program will begin installing and updating your data files;
7) If the former program was of the 10.x.x.x series, it will simply update. If your version is of the 9.3.2.7 series or less, it will install but you will need to get a update code. Call (530) 622-1344, or write us at techsupp@fwmsoftware.com to receive your new code;
8) A WARNING ON USING LIEN WRITER® VERSIONS PRIOR TO 10.x.x.x. THESE PROGRAMS ARE OUTMODED AND IN SOME CASES HAVE ILLEGAL AND OUTDATED FORMS. PLEASE UPDATE IMMEDIATELY;
9) Once you updated, just use the program as you have always used it