Welcome to your first lesson of basic training, the AMI Set up Guide.

We are going to cover what you will need to do prior to creating your first work order.

This lesson is about 20 minutes, so if you want to so you can pop some popcorn, grab your favorite beverage, a pen and paper, and if necessary, go take a pee break, go ahead and pause here

Now that you’re ready, let get started.

The first thing you want to do is set up your computer.

Yes AMI is cloud base and your data is stored on the cloud, but the FAA really like to have backups in place.

So either on your computer, laptop, server, or even a large thumb drive, you want to a folder named AMI.

Now add a customers, inventory, vendors, and work orders folders.

Since AMI uses a lot if spreadsheets that you can download, it would always be a good idea to keep somewhere you can easily access these files later.

Use the work order folder to store your documents from all your work orders and quotes.

Now you can name the files by work order number, customer, tail number, or any way you want.  Use a system that works for you.

Okay, so before you set up your company information, you will want to add your Users to AMI.

You will want to do this first because you will need these users later in the company set up process, especially if you have a buyer or DOM other than yourself.

Let’s click on setting and select user management.

The first thing your will want to do prior to adding user is establish the primary roles in your shop.  We give you five basic roles; you may have a chief inspector or an Accountable manager or something.

To add a new role clicks the actions menu and select new role.

I always recommend adding an administrative task so your user can log time that isn’t on a work order.

You can call it attendance or maybe shop time, whatever floats your boat.

If you are not adding new roles and you want to add an administrative task to the existing ones, just click the edit pencil and add it.

Now that your roles are set, let’s add your users. Click the actions menu and select add new user.

A couple of tips, since you are the owner of the software, you control the passwords.

Maybe keep a spreadsheet with your user’s passwords stored somewhere in case they forget the password you gave them or you will need to rest the password every time they forget or get a new device.

And if you are the micro-managing type, you can select whether or not that user will need to add a note when clocking out.

So next let’s set your company’s basic information.

Go to Settings and select Set Up Info and defaults

I am not going to spend a lot time on the company address tab, well because this is pretty self-explanatory.

The company data tab is where you are going to set your system seed data, allow access you your customer portal, set your certification number, and add your logo.

The seed data will represent the numbering of your different document types.

These are defaulted to 1, but you can set them to whatever what.

The only thing you need to know about seeding is that once you set a seed value, you can never go lower than the last number used.

For example, if you set your work order seed to 2000 if couldn’t go back and set it to 1000

The one seed we do not set a default value for is the invoice.

If you leave this blank, you invoice number will stay synced with the work order.

There are no best practices for setting your seed values.

I use a year format numbering scheme.

This may not work for you; just use what makes sense for your shop.

Now set your work week. This could match you pay period or anything you want.

The AEA Membership ID will open features in the system that are exclusive for AEA members like the EEDirect

EEDirect is a parts listing service they offer to help buy and sell avionics equipment from other AEA members.

Now let’s set your rates and fees. This feeds all the financial information of the AMI system.

Technician labor rate is pretty obvious.

Parts markup is default mark up for inventory item that do not have designated sale price. I will go more into this in the inventory class.

Next, set your shop’s consumable fee.

You can set this to a fixed amount or to a percentage.

It can be a percentage of total work order revenue, or of labor, or of parts, whatever floats your boat.

I have seen folks use a $100.00 flat rate; others use 10 percent of parts other 3 and a half percent of the total revenue.

Finally taxes, enter the tax rate name , the rate, and QuickBooks Tax Item name, and then set whether it’s applied to parts or total revenue.

If the tax is standard for work orders, click the default tax checkbox. This makes sure it is available for work orders and sales orders.

Notification Data is pretty basic. Choosing your buyer recipients determines who receives low stock emails and when they are sent.

If you have your customer portal access turn on, enter anyone’s email address who will receive information provided through the portal like aircraft times or possible concerns.

The tool crib setup is already preloaded with a bunch of tool types and statuses. Adjust this as you see fit.

The document header and footers are used for any verbiage you want to include on a particular document.

Since they work the same way, and the current header is for logbooks only, I will just cover the footer area.

You can add whatever you want here. Most folks will use the quote footer for terms and conditions along with a work order authorization and work order footer for the RTS.

Using the shortcut codes can prefill any data from the system like a customer’s name or tail number or a system user and your company info.

We have some canned example loaded for you and you access those by clicking the use default text link.

Now that you have your shop’s information set up, let’s talk about adding some customers and vendors to your system.

The process is almost identical, however customers have three methods and vendors have two.

Let’s first talk about customers.

We know that one tail number can have multiple owners and one owner can have multiple planes.

That’s why we designed AMI so that the customer is the person who pays the bill at the end of the job.

As I mentioned, there are three ways to add customers to AMI, you can add them through the FAA look up tool, add them manually, or import them using a spread sheet.

The recommended way to add a brand new customer using the FAA look up tool, it is simple and can be done while you have them on the phone.

Go to reports and select FAA Tail Number Lookup.

Simply enter in a tail number and hit submit.  A list of tail number will populate at the bottom of the screen, and then just select that customer’s plane.

Verify the information and click the action button and select create new customer.

That customer’s primary information is populated into the fields and the all you do is add a phone number and an email address, super easy.

What really nice about adding new customer this way is the tail number will be automatically inserted in the Linked Tail Numbers area in the customer details area.

We will do an example of this in the following lessons, so for now we will add a customer manually.

From the customer list page, click the actions menu and select add new customer,

Next just fill out the form with either a made up customer or a real customer, your choice, and then press submit.

Now if you can extract your existing customer base from another system like EBis, AVM, or even QuickBooks, you can import them into AMI.

We provide you with a template to download and fill out.

QuickBooks exports are awful and will require a ton of work; it would almost be easier to add users as the come in for new service.

The problem is the way them dump the data. QuickBooks like to put as much information as possible in a single column.

There are a couple of tricks using Excel, but if you are not experienced with Excel the process will be very painful.

It might actually be more fun to smash you head with hammer than try and tackle this.

There is a way that would help, but your customer list couldn’t be any larger than 200 rows.

Sign up for the free trial of Transaction Pro’s Importer Exported Deleter.

Link it to your QuickBooks and Export. This will separate the columns close enough to copy and paste into our template.

If you plan on using the Import into QuickBooks tool, you will need this program anyways.

Next, let’s add some vendors. The process is exactly the same as customers.

Let’s go to the inventory menu and select vendors, then click the actions menu,

From here you can add the vendor manually or import them using the template.

When you add the vendor manually, there is one field that unique to just vendors, the status field.

This refers to the quality standards of the vendor.

These statuses are in-line with ASA-100 and AS9120 quality standards.

We have canned three statuses: Approved, Unapproved, and Restricted.

These are not required fields, but an important part of inventory management.

Approved means the vendor has an approved quality standard. 

Unapproved means they do not have any quality standards at all, and restricted means they have some sort of a quality standard but nothing official.

The last thing I want to cover for customers and vendors is the QB Name field.

If you are using the Import into QuickBooks tool, it is very important to make sure you fill in these fields match exactly to your QuickBooks name.

If these do not match, you will duplicate the record in your QuickBooks.  

Next, we are going to cover inventory.

You will want to have anything you plan on adding to a job already in your inventory system.

I know some of you are thinking: I don’t typically have this in stock, why does it have to be in my inventory?

The part must be in your inventory to be to add it to a job.

AMI is a data based system, so the more data you have the better the system works.

You can have a ton of inventory with an in-stock quantity of zero.

The reason is so you can easily add parts to a job then create purchase orders if necessary.

Also, the more information you provide, the easier purchasing will be.

You will want to spend some time setting your parts room up to work with AMI, but right now I am just going to cover adding your first part into inventory.

You will at least 2 parts in inventory before you can create your first work order.

Like customers and venders, you can manually add inventory or do a bulk upload using the import tool.

For this example we are going to add the part manually.

I will take more in-depth look at inventory, inventory management practices, and we will cover importing and all the other features of the inventory module

 in the Inventory Course.

You can also reference The AMI manual which covers inventory feature very well if you need some extra guidance.

Go to your Inventory list and press the Add New Master Part button. Keep in mind, when you add a new master part you are also adding a stock line.

First enter part number, an alternate part number of, a quantity, and a description.

If you are tracking the weight of a part, enter it and a note if necessary.

Then add a reorder point, this will alert you with a low stock email when that number is reached.

All this information is used for the Master Record.

The rest of the fields are used for the detail record. I highly recommend filling in the supplier field.

That is information that will be used in the fulfillment system to help expedite future ordering.

If you are an AEA, click the checkbox to identify this part as an EEDirect part so it can add to the list.

Now we are going to cover adding tool to your tool crib.

Once you have added your tools and test equipment, you can attach them to work orders for solid tractability.

You will be able to identify what tools were used and if they were in calibration when you used them.

To get started, select tool crib from the inventory menu.

When you are on the Tool Crib list page, AMI will show how many tools are checked out, how many are coming due for calibration in the next 30 days, and how many tools are overdue for calibration.

Now let’s add a tool, click the actions menu and select add new tool, then complete the form.

Enter the tool or equipment’s model into the Name / Model field.

For example, if you have Ateq’s ADSE 650 air data tester, enter ADSE 650.

For control number, like seeding your documents use a scheme that works best for your shop.

I personally use a 4 number system that starts with 0001. This helps with sorting on the tool list page.

Then select the tool type from the from the tool type drop down then press the submit button.

Next we will all the important information about that tool.

Select the control number to pull up the tool’s detail page then click the actions menu select edit.

Add the tool’s calibration date and next calibration date.

Then select the calibration schedule from the calibration drop down.

The years, months, and days fields are used to indicate the calibration interval.

Once you have added all the import information about the tool, save the page.

Finally, to add a calibration cert, go back to the tool crib list page and click the documents icon to save it here.

You can add after every calibration cert so you can keep a running collection of all the cal certs for this tool.

One more thing, AMI has a nifty little feature, if you tool is out of calibration, it will alert you when you attach it to a work order.

The final topic I would like to cover is adding work order templates.

This not required for initial set up but does flow into best practices because these templates will dramatically decreases the time it takes to create new quotes and work orders.

Work Order templates are similar to a phrase library in other systems, only on steroids.

They allow you to add as many squawks as you want and you can include corrective actions, default technicians, set flat rates or adjust labor rates, and include parts.

These templates will also feed your squawk library when adding new squawks to existing work orders.

I highly recommend taking the time and adding a few before you really start using the system.

So when you have some down time, add a common squawks list and maybe a few jobs that you do a lot such as annuals or particular type of install.

Like always, just do what makes sense for your shop.

Here is little pro tip, you can add these while watching a ball game, you can just tell your significant other that you’re working and shouldn’t be disturbed.

Now that you completed your system’s basic set up, go to the next lesson: Creating a Simple Work Order

That wraps up Setting Your Company Up. You are ready for the next tutorial best practices for creating a work order.

I have included a link to the reference manual in the description below in case you need any additional help and you can contact me if you have any additional questions.

Please be sure to like this video and subscribe to this channel you can be notified when we drop new tutorials.

My name is Jaramey Ham and thanks for watching.

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami