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Thursday, March 19, 2026

New tool (well, new to me)

I wonder how long that tool's been hiding in plain sight in a quiet corner of EPC?

OK, you're in EPC, what's the most useless menu in the top navbar? If you answered "all of them," you're not far off. "News" is pretty useless because you get a wide mishmash of stuff. "Tasks" and "Records" I use all the time. The last one, "Actions," doesn't have any actions I want to do (though the "Related Actions" link in the lower row of links can be useful).

That leaves the "Report" link, which is even more useless than "Actions" and "News." The only reason I ever use it is to navigate back to My Consultant Landing Page, but I almost never do that. Today I accidentally clicked on "Report" while trying to get to the "Records" page. I'm not sure what made me glance up at the first report today, but I saw "Invoice Line Summary Status" and I was intrigued. At first, it looked like a lot of search tools: a clumsy way to search for info that you can get more easily somewhere else (usually OpenData), but I discovered a reason that I'll be back to this tool.

If I put in an "Invoice Line Number" and click "Apply Filters" then scroll down, I get a one-line result. It looked useless until I scrolled all the way to the right and noticed the "Customer Billed Date" field. That's going to save me some work. See, if I get a Service Certification request, it gives me the invoice line number, but not the billed date. If it's a ServCert for a phone bill, how am I supposed to guess which month it's for? I had to write to the service provider and ask them, and that can be a frustrating experience.

But now I'll just take the invoice line number and head over to my friend the Invoice Line Summary Status report, put in the invoice line number et voila, I get the billed month. 

A tool useful for a very narrow circumstance, but quite useful in that circumstance.

What other useful tools lurk unnoticed in EPC? 

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