Stop the Jumping Judges
At long last, you won't have to put up with the "jumping judges" when doing your show setup. A new TAB control is being used which no longer swaps the "rows" of judges around during setup. This make it much easier to keep track of where you are while putting in your judges and their assignments. This is especially helpful for larger shows such as a 6x6 or the new 5x5 formats. This eliminates a major cause of "see sickness" for entry clerks!

Support for Organization Names
AECfa provides sophisticated support for personal names to make it simpler to enter contact/exhibitor names and search for them by "Last Name" as well as create the necessary exhibitor lists. The down side of this has been the firm rule that each name must have at least one first name (or initial) and one last name. For searching and in lists, the name is in "last, first" order. Everywhere else it appears in it's normal form, first last. This has make it virtually impossible to use "Organization" name, such as "Adams County Animal Welfare". AECfa is being modified to accept "Organization" names by replacing all "spaces" within the name with "_". So the previous example would be "Adams_County_Animal_Welfare". This form will be accepted as a contact name and/or an exhibitor name. Because it is a relaxation of the name validation rules, it will appear with a YELLOW background in the Contact Form to indicate that this name is being treated as a special case and extra care to insure it is correct should be taken by the entry clerk. This new feature is targeted for release in November 2008.

Improved Show Fees Validation
After several entry clerks have created considerable difficulty for themselves by incorrectly setting up their show fees, an more restrictive (but safer) version of the Fee Setup tab is being released as Version 1.6.68, sometime in November 2008. The newer version will prevent a large number of "invalid" fees from being created. Only some of the fields in each fee will be editable and will be completed automatically whenever possible. This should greatly decrease the "OOPS" factor and make life easier for everyone! Further changes to the Fee setup may be made depending on the feedback from this first set of changes.

Enhanced PayPal Support
AECfa has added increased support for PayPal. The fees for each PayPal payment are automatically calculated based on the type of PayPal account being used as specified in the Fees Setup. This amount is included in the financial summary report so the Entry Clerk and/or Club Treasurer can easily monitor the total cost of using PayPal. This feature is included in Version 1.6.61 and later.

Improved Email
Now AECfa is compatible with more Internet Service Providers than ever. Starting with Version 1.6.61, AECfa meets all the requirements for many of the more difficult eMail providers. As SPAM continues to plague the Internet, ISPs have really restricted the options available to send eMail, especially from accounts other than the primary account from your ISP. Many entry clerks prefer to use a club provided or secondary email address for entries to reduce the chances of "loosing" an emailed entry. AECfa now allows you to use a second email address other than your primary address as the "reply-to" address so when exhibitors respond to their confirmations, their replies are sent to the "reply-to" address rather than your personal address.

Automatic Color Classes
With the help of new Color Class information direct from CFA, AECfa now automatically selects the proper Color Class based on the cat's CFA Registration Number. With V 1.6.53 or later, you won't have to look up the Color Class # for any entry with a registration number. The information in your history file is automatically updated so cats entered in previous show years are automatically updated to the current year's Color Classes. No manual updates are required.

BREEDS/DIVISIONS/CLASSES/COLORs for the 2008 - 2009 show year available
AECfa has been updated with the new Breeds/Divisions/Classes/Color for the 2008 CFA Show year. If your show is scheduled later than April 20, 2008, update to V 1.6.48 or a later version as soon as possible to avoid having to "clean" up entries for your show.

New "6x6" Show Format
AECfa is being updated to fully support the newest CFA show format, two clubs putting on separate 6 ring one-day shows "back-to-back" at the same location in one weekend. This offer traveling exhibitors more bang for the buck by providing 12 rings in a single trip. AECfa is being used to produce the National Birman Fanciers / Stars & Stripes Cat Tabby and Tortie Cat Club shows on May 3 and 4, 2008 in Temple TX. This is CFA's first ever show of this new format. AECfa allows an entry clerk to process a single entry for either or both shows, greatly reducing the entry clerk effort. AECfa then produces all the documentation needed for both shows! Special pricing on this special version result in an additional 25% savings over using AECfa for two separate shows.

Improved Error Checking
To help eliminate common input errors, upgrade to V 1.6.39 or later. These version performs even more error checking as entries are processed, especially for Provisional, Miscellaneous and AOV entries. This leads to a cleaner catalog and fewer corrections for the Master Clerk. Less "bad" data in saved in the history files, making future shows cleaner as well. Further improvements in pagination for both catalogs is also included in this release.

Dot Matrix vs. Laser Judging Sheets
There is an ongoing debate about the use of the new laser printer NCR paper for judging sheets and master clerk catalogs vs. the traditional dot matrix printed forms. The new laser paper is a little harder for the judges to use because the sheets are loose and they have to be extra careful when moving their backer sheet to the next page. Some judges dislike the  8.5 x 11 in size since they traditionally saved the sheets by inserting them into their printed catalog for a show. But from the point of view of legibility, its hands down laser all the way. The initial left margin for the laser printed master clerk catalog. Punching holes for use of a binder could remove information! The margin has been widened to solve this problem.

All users should update to V 1.6.26 or later to get the latest refinements in support for both laser and dot matrix printer support.

SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! *#^&Q)**)
Email providers continue to fight the SPAM battle (with mixed results). The AECfa default provider mailshack.com is now lavabit.com. The bottom line here is that the AECfa default account option for email confirmations is now broken until a replacement service can be found and set up! So if you were depending on the default account, you need to set up a personal account. Exactly how to do that depends upon your ISP and your eMail account provider.

If your ISP also provides your email account life is good and you should have no trouble setting it up (unless you use AOL as an ISP)!

If you use a free account from someone like yahoo or AOL with a local  ISP, your in for a more difficult time! Many (maybe MOST) ISPs that support SMTP access for sending eMail now require that use their email server; NO MATTER WHO PROVIDES THE EMAIL ACCOUNT YOUR USING. They also generally require that you "authenticate" yourself before sending email through their server. This means that you must have at least one email account setup on their server, whether you want to use it or not!

If you haven't already published your usual email address, the simplest solution is to sign up for an email account with your ISP and use it for your entry clerk mail. This keeps it separate from your "personal" email account (making it easier to sort out what is show related and what isn't).

Balancing the Books
Entry clerks are doing a great job overall balancing the books with the help of AECfa! But in real life, stuff happens!  The issue is making a deposit with an incorrect amount! Once deposited, payments can no longer be edited! Although it's a good idea to add up the amounts on the actual checks that are part of a deposit to check that the amounts were entered correctly, sometimes one an incorrect amount pop up. Version 1.6.22 or later adds the ability to "edit" a payment that has already been deposited to get the deposit to match the banks amount. Club treasurers read on before having a heart attack!

Just go to the erroneous payment in the Entry View, right click on it and select "Change"! You can then correct the amount and/or check number etc. The original payment is marked as deleted and the corrected payment is added to the ledger. The affected deposit is also marked as deleted and a correct deposit is added. This provides an "audit" trail  to allow the club treasurer to have an accurate record of all transactions!

Spotting Incorrect Fees
If you notice that the Account area of the Entry View is red rather than green most of the time, you probably have an error in setting up your show price list! The most common error is entering Double Cages, Grooming Spaces etc. with a category of Entries L rather than Space J. This causes AECfa to fail to match the number of entries with the number of entry charges!