We are very proud to announce the availability of our HVAC Operations Manual. This is the same type of manual that you might receive from an HVAC Franchise – at a fraction of the cost.

Click here for more information: http://www.mrhvac.com/shopping/hvac-operations-manual/

The Purpose

An operations manual contains specific policies and procedures on how a particular business is managed on a day-to-day basis. Policies and procedures serve as the binding material to keep a business running and in particular as the business experiences growth, keep the business literally “glued together.”

You can think of this manual as your company’s “rule book” or “law book”. A company and its employees need a rule book just as a football team and its players need their rule book.

Policies and procedures provide three essential duties in a growing small business environment and these duties collapse into a convenient acronym to remember, ART.

1. Accountability: Whose job duty is it to complete critical tasks and when will those tasks be completed?
2. Reference: Serve as reference for the “how to’s” of business operations.
3. Training: Provides training and orientation for new employees, saves owner/manager time explaining repeatedly ‘how to.’

Employees should be held accountable for well-defined duties that are priority to business operations. As the owner or general manager, your responsibility is to define those duties and when tasks are expected to be completed.

You should expect employees to be accountable for doing that which is expected and the best way to ensure there is no confusion is to have those duties defined in writing.

That is not to say small businesses do not attract great employees. They do and in today’s work environment have become more loyal than those employees in large corporations. But, employees still need direction and leadership. Your role as owner /manager is to ensure leadership is in place.

Policy and procedures serve as a critical reference tool for both new employees and veterans. It also prevents veterans from making rules up to accommodate the way they like tasks done. It keeps control in the hands of owner/manager rather than senior employees.

At a Glance

• 2650 Pages of MS Word 2007 Documents
• 159 Forms and Templates. 204 files in 107 Folders. 78 MB
• Fully Indexed. Just the Table of Contents Takes 85 Pages
• Approximately One Million Words
• Professionally Templated and Completely Editable
• Includes Everything Mentioned on These Slides and Much More
• Includes Flat Rate Pricing Books (several labor rates included)
• Over 500 pages of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS)
• $2500 One Time Fee. No Licensing Fees and No Royalties
• FREE Priority Order Processing
• FREE Ground Shipping via UPS
• One Year of FREE Updates and Additional Files
• Written Specifically for the HVAC Industry

12 Sections Included

Section 1: Legal Affairs
Section 2: Office, Building, and IT Management
Section 3: Bookkeeping and Accounting
Section 4: Human Resource Management (HR)
Section 5: Compensation and Payroll
Section 6: Scheduling and Field Management
Section 7: Inventory Management
Section 8: Marketing and Sales
Section 9: Health, Safety, and Security
Section 10: Credit and Collections
Section 11: Service Agreements

Professionally Formatted and 100% User Editable

The entire system is printed on heavy bright white paper. Each manual is presented in a binder so it is easy to edit pages and replace them as needed. Best of all, these professionally formatted documents are included on a CD in MS Word format and they follow all standard MS Word formatting conventions. The owner can open, modify, edit, and print any of these forms and documents as needed.

Bar Code History

The most visible use of bar codes is in the supermarket industry, where it has been in use since 1970. They needed a faster and more accurate method of data entry. This was due, in part, to the fact that cashiers were highly skilled people; paid for their data entry speed and accuracy. Automating this process meant that the “average” person could achieve higher rates of speed and accuracy. The main idea was to save on labor costs.

The HVAC industry is now showing great interest in bar code technology for the same reasons. Service technicians and installation technicians can use bar codes to greatly reduce paperwork. Specialized software, like Total Office Manager from Aptora, can enhance this efficiency.

What is a Bar Code

A bar code is nothing more than a font or type style; like Arial, Times New Roman, Courier, etc. Bar code fonts are installed on your computer like any other font. If you have a bar code font installed on your computer, you should see it listed in your Fonts list (like from MS Word^®). However, bar codes are not free and most computers don’t have bar code fonts unless they have been specifically installed. When you install software programs like Flat Rate Plus^® and Total Office Manager^®, they add certain bar code fonts to your computer.

In fact, you could open MS Word, highlight text and change the standard font to a bar code font. This is what we did in writing this article. Take a look at the two identical sentences below. One uses a 12pt Arial font (top) and the other a 12pt bar code font called Code 39.

See The Fox Jump (this is an Arial font)

See The Fox Jump (this is the same phrase using a Code 39 bar code font)

Code 39 Bar Code

Some Technical Details

As you can see, a Bar Code symbol consists of a series of parallel, adjacent bars and spaces. Predetermined width patterns are used to code the actual data into the symbol. In the case of Code 39, each character consists of 9 segments, five bars and four spaces. Bars and spaces have two sizes. The width of the bars and the number and position of the spaces determines the character.

This is the letter a:

Bar codes include a stop and start character. The Code 39 bar codes uses an asterisk (“*”) to tell the scanner when the bar code starts and when it stops. There must also be sufficient blank space around the bar code. This is called the quiet zone.

To read information contained in a Bar Code symbol, a scanning device, such as a light pen (or more commonly a wand), is moved across the symbol from one side to the other. As the scanning device is moved across the symbol, the Bar Code width pattern of bars and spaces is analyzed by the Bar Code decoder and the original data is recovered.

Read the full story here with this free PDF download on inventory control using bar codes:
HVAC-Inventory-Management-Using-Bar-Codes.pdf