Avitar Assessing Update 3.4.2

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1 Avitar Assessing Update This update should be run on each workstation on which you use the Avitar Assessing system. If your town has a separate server computer on which the system's data is maintained but the client application is not installed (i.e. you don't sit down at the server to view or edit data) then you do not need to run this update on your server machine. However, be sure to update every machine from which you view or edit data. As this update may register new components with your computer's Windows operating system, you may need to be logged in as an administrator if your town's network security settings prevent some users from being able to install and/or update applications. Updates & New Features: Assessment Card Changes This update includes a revised format of the assessment card. The new format provides space for two images to be printed for a single parcel and expands the space allotted to the land description, allowing it to contain the new factors outlined below. As a result, the sketch is slightly smaller than it was previously. In addition, we have modified the message box that asks you whether you wish to print assessment cards for parcels in the current recordset or in the print queue. The functionality is the same, but the buttons are more clearly labeled ("Print from Recordset"/"Print from Queue" vs. the previous "Yes"/"No"). Changes to Adding Photos/Pictures The Photo1 and Photo 2 tabs have been removed from the photo area of the Building tab. They have been replaced with a new way of adding and editing pictures. This is in response to the new assessment card that allows you to print two pictures for each parcel. Previously, each parcel had a Photo1 and a Photo2, and if you deleted Photo1 then Photo2 was reassigned to Photo1. Now, however, the images have been renamed Building Picture and Land Picture in accordance with where the images print on the assessment card (i.e. front vs. back of the assessment card). And now it is possible to have a Land Picture without having a Building Picture. The options to delete and export pictures have not changed. Previously, when a parcel had no building picture, you would see No Photo Available. Now you see No Building Picture and two new icons that will be grayed out until you add photos. The new icons indicate whether a building picture or land picture has been added. You can still either double-click where the photo will display or press the edit button to add pictures to a parcel. To add a building picture to a parcel, press the building icon then press the Add Picture button to browse to where your picture file is stored. Press the land/secondary icon to add a land picture. The icon selected determines where the photo will display on the card. If you do not press the intended icon you

2 may inadvertently replace the existing building photo. Press the Flip-flop pictures icon to reverse the order in which the pictures display on the card. Changes to the Land Information Tab You will notice new icons on the Land tab. Hover the mouse over these icons when you have the Assessing program open. These icons will allow you to toggle between the three different ways the system can now display the land columns; Standard Land Columns, All Land Columns, and Current Use Columns. The system default is set to Standard Land Columns (i.e. the picture above). When you press the icon to change the columns displayed it will lose its color. Press the icon in the middle to display All Land Columns or press the arrow pointing to the right to display Current Use Columns. These different methods of displaying the land information grid were necessitated by the addition of several new factors to the system: Site, Road, Driveway, and Topography. If your screen has a higher resolution, you may be able to display all of the columns at once (i.e. the middle All Land Columns option) without using scroll bars. Alternatively, you can either use the column display option settings or tolerate the scroll bars. New Site, Road, Driveway, and Topography Parameters Site, Road, and Driveway are now available as additional land modifiers to describe the entire parcel. Value Factors must be entered in Utilities Update Value Parameters Land Parameters Land Modifiers before they will have an affect on the parcel's land value. Initially, all modifiers have a factor of 100% such that selecting them will not alter the parcel's land value. You should not modify the Site, Road, and Driveway factors unless you have a clear understanding of the effects doing so will have on parcel values. You do not need to have a Site, Road, or Driveway description to enter land information. Topography has been added as a new modifier for each land line. Values must be entered in Utilities Update Value Parameters Land Parameters Land Modifiers before it will have an affect on the parcel's land value. Initially, all modifiers have a factor of 100% such that selecting them will not alter the parcel's land value. You should not modify the Topography factors unless you have a clear understanding of the effects doing so will have on parcel values. You do not need to have a Topography description to enter land information. Changes to the Edit General Information Dialog Box The improvements are seen when you edit information on the General tab and they are for the most part visual changes -- the functionality remains the same. You will notice

3 new icons throughout the program with this update. Try positioning your mouse over these new icons to reveal tooltips. (A Tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. If you hover the cursor over an item, without clicking it, a small "hover box" appears with supplementary information regarding the item being hovered over.) There is new Owner Lookup icon to select an existing owner and address from the database. Hover the mouse over this icon and you will see a tooltip that says Choose existing owner. There is a second new icon, the Refresh Grid Columns icon will reset the grids in the Sales History area should the columns get resized so as to prevent them from being readable. It is rare that you will need to use this. The Listing History and Edit Taxable Districts buttons used to access the expanded Listing History grid or the Taxable Districts controls (when in use) have been replaced with corresponding links named Edit Listing Details and Edit Taxable Districts. Menu Changes We have made a few slight changes to the structure and/or sequence of the menu items on the program's main window in order to accommodate new functions or to better organize existing ones. File Backup Database - We have made a slight change to the Backup Database Procedure. When you select File Backup Database you have press the button with the three dots to browse to the folder in which you want to backup the data. Once you have selected the proper folder press the Backup Data button. File Display Photos - The option to Display Photos has been removed from the File Menu. This option was originally provided years ago for slower machines on which photos took an inordinate amount of time to display. Technological advances have rendered this setting obsolete and occasionally this setting could inadvertently be unchecked causing photos to disappear and panic to ensue. As such we have decided to remove the option. Photos will always be displayed. Utilities Add New... and Utilities Delete... - Several of the add and delete functions (e.g. Add Card, Delete Building) have been consolidated into corresponding menu flyouts to make room for new menu item functions. Utilities Update Parameters - Significant changes have been made to Utilities menu concerning the Update Parameters menu item. In previous versions of the Assessing program only Power Users could access all of the settings found under Update Parameters. This proved to be a problem in cases when non-power users needed to modify settings such as the municipal information (e.g. address and phone number) or the database backup settings. Two new items have been added to the Utilities Menu: Utilities System Settings (settings that non-assessors can change) and Utilities Update Value

4 Parameters (settings that only assessors should change). Utilities System Options menu item allows you to configure many of the settings including municipal information, tax settings for calculating the warrant, exemption parameters, and system options for configuring backup settings and customizing the assessing card. Utilities Update Value Parameters menu item allows you to access all of the cost parameters, and additional system settings such as sales codes, building permit descriptions, and post-it types. Changes to Reports MS-1 Report We have updated the MS-1 to reflect the changes included in the DRA's latest revision, including the following: You can now enter values for the acreage removed from current use and/or the acreage removed from conservation restriction during the previous tax year. There is space to enter information regarding the Community Revitalization Tax Relief Incentive (RSA 79-E) if your community has adopted these. (Contact Avitar for more information if this includes you.) If you have Taxable Districts configured with in your database, you can now choose to include these as Tax Increment Finance Districts (TIFs). Once you elect to include a District as a TIF, you can provide information for the original assessment and the unretained captured assessed value and the system can calculate the remaining values for the report. (Call Avitar if you need help properly including Districts as TIFs on the MS-1.) Speed Mailer The Speed Mailer item has been renamed to Mailer/Correspondence but the functionality essentially remains the same with some improvements. The Reports Notices Mailer/Correspondence menu item enables you to send notices to residents with any message for any particular purpose. You can elect to generate mailers for the current record set, the parcels in the print queue, or all records. In order to utilize a correspondence, you must first create the correspondence itself. To create, modify, or delete a correspondence select Reports Notices Mailer/Correspondences. Within the Print Correspondences dialog box press the Setup button. Within the Setup options you have tabs for Add New, Edit, Delete, and Header Setup. Messages that you had previously configured under the old Speed Mailer function will be converted to the new format, but you should verify that this was done properly before generating them. Use the Add New tab to create a new correspondence message. This is everything (aside from the owner's name and address information) that will appear on the actual

5 correspondence. The message could be anything from a notice of a special town meeting for all town residents and another for your notice of an impact hearing for a handful of residents that abut a particular property. You have several options for creating a new correspondence: you can create a blank correspondence (to which you will subsequently add text on the Edit tab), you can create a new correspondence using an existing correspondence as a template, or you can import a correspondence from a file you already created in WordPad. If you are using correspondences for the first time, you will probably want to choose the blank correspondence option. Regardless of which option you choose, you will need to give the correspondence a title (e.g. Special Town Meeting). Use the Edit tab to modify the text of existing correspondences. If you choose to add a blank correspondence, you should immediately select the Edit tab to modify the blank correspondence. To edit an existing correspondence, first select the correspondence by name from the drop down list. Once you do, the existing text (if any) of the correspondence will appear in the large text box below. Type any new text or modify existing text as needed. Use the alignment, font, bold, italicize, and underline buttons in the upper right to modify the appearance of any highlighted text as needed. There are also check boxes to Include Parcel Values and Include PID at the bottom of the Edit screen. Press Save once you are done. Use the Delete tab to delete any existing correspondences which you no longer need. Simply select the correspondence by title from the dropdown list and press Delete. Use the Header Setup tab to determine how the system should format the header of your correspondences. (Note that the header setup applies to all correspondences you generate within the system.) You have several options for formatting the header. If you just want to use basic return address information, select the Use Return Address option and enter the appropriate information in the text boxes provided. The recipient's address will print in an area suitable for use with standard #10 window envelopes. If you plan on printing your correspondences to special paper which is pre-printed with your office or municipal letter head, select the Use Letter Head option. In this instance, the system will not print anything within the header area of your correspondences. Finally, if you wish to use a digital image in place of a pre-printed letter head, select Use Image Header and then use the browse button below to identify the digital image to be used. Note the appearance of the image on the printed correspondence will depend on the size of the image you use. To avoid distortion of the image that may result from stretching, you should use images that are approximately 4.5 times as wide as they are high. Once you have configured your header, press Save. Changes to the Standard User Defined Report The changes to the user defined report are for the most part cosmetic and do not change the functionality of this option, except in the case of some additional export options. These additional export options will be used primarily by advanced computer users. If you need help using these options to complete your export please call Software Support.

6 The cosmetic changes can be found on the first screen of the report where you select the fields to include in the report. The buttons to Check All and Uncheck All have been changed to links and Load Report and Format Report buttons have been moved. On the second screen of the report we have added a refresh grid columns icon to the upper right hand section of the screen. This can be used to reset the columns should they get stretched out too much as you are formatting your report. We have moved most of the existing buttons around to make the report easier to format, but other than the new Export Option and icon for additional export options, the functionality remains the same as in previous versions of the program. Changes to Audit Report The Audit Report is now more flexible. Previously, you could generate the report for a specified time period or for changes made to a certain parcel, but you could not generate the report for changes made to a certain parcel over a specified time period. This has been updated so that you can query for multiple parameters together. In addition, you can now search for changes of a specific type. Custom PID Format We have added the possibility of configuring your system to display PIDs in a manner different from the standard six character map, six character lot, and six character sublot. This is in response to the growing number of communities (predominantly towns that have had a remapping/renumbering project by Cartographic Associates) that have PIDs that do not conform to this standard. Previously, this could be accommodated within the existing 18 character PID framework but it was not always clean. The new Custom PID function allows you to configure a PID mask that divides the 18 available characters up into as many as six distinct sections of any length (e.g. six sections of three characters or one section of ten characters and another of eight characters). Additionally, you can choose to indicate a character that will separate each section and/or you can choose to suppress leading zeros from each section. Note that this function must be enabled by Avitar through an internal database setting. For some communities, we will not be able to make the function available until we have extended the same display functionality to other integrated Avitar applications which you may use (e.g. Tax Collect, Building Permit, Utility Billing). We will be working to do so in the coming months. However, review the description below and please contact us if you are interested in implementing a Custom PID format. By using the Custom PID Format option, you can choose to the system format the eighteen character PID in a manner different from the standard six character map, six character lot, and six character sublot format. For example, you could elect to choose six characters for the map, three for the lot, three for the sublot, and three for a building number, and three for a unit number. The image below illustrates some of the different options available with this new functionality.

7 Custom PID Mask -You must use the # symbol to indicate the placement of the individual PID characters within the mask. Then use another character (for example a space or a dash or a slash) to indicate the character you wish to use to separate the component sections of the PID. However, you can only use one character as the separator character. Custom PID Description - Enter a brief description of the entire PID (e.g. "Map/Lot/Sub/Bld/Unit"). This is the label that will appear on reports. It is best to use a capital letter for the first letter of each component and then lower-case letters for the rest. This will match the format of the rest of the program and report heading will look consistent. Custom PID Section Names - You can choose to enter a description for each component of the PID (e.g. "Map", "Lot", etc.). The Custom PID Section names are only visible when you hover over the individual boxes throughout the program used to enter PID values on which to search. Suppress Leading Zeros - Check this box to suppress the leading zeros in each section of the customized PID (e.g. "1 / 2 / 3" instead of " / / "). Pad Separators with Spaces - Check this option to add a space before and after each separator, making it easier to read in some instances (e.g. "1 / 2 / 3" instead of "1/2/3").

8 Changes to User Defined Query We have removed a few options from the list of available operators when establishing criteria for user defined queries. Previously, you had the ability to select the operators "NOT LIKE" and "< >" (i.e. not equal to). However, because of the complexities of the structure of the underlying database query, queries with these operators did not always evaluate as expected. However, with the addition of the capability to execute recursive queries against the current recordset, queries previously using these operators can now more effectively be executed using the "Remove From Current Recordset" option. As always, contact Avitar if you need assistance developing the proper query criteria for the data you seek. Map Settings Changes This update includes changes to the Map functionality to provide more flexibility to label layers and maintain display settings from session to session. Your existing Map configuration settings should be upgraded to the new format, but you may notice some changes after installing the update. Please contact Avitar if you need assistance reconfiguring your Maps within the program.