Remarks, Agenda and Work Tasks

Sooner or later somebody needs to write something down against a record. A customer called about invoice SIV-3417 and wants the delivery moved. A supplier's price list is out of date and the buyer should be told before the next order. A meeting decided that a contract gets renewed, and six months from now nobody will remember who decided it.

None of that fits in a field. Nama gives you three places to put it — remarks, the agenda, and work tasks — and they are available on every record in the system, without any setup.

The Remarks field is a different thing

Almost every document and master file already has a Remarks box on its own screen — a free-text field that is part of the document and is saved with it. That is not what this page is about.

A remark record is a separate record of its own, with its own code, date, classification, attachments and grid, that points at the document. One document can carry any number of them, each written by a different person on a different day, and none of them changes the document itself.

Three kinds of note that are really one

The system offers Remark, Detailed Remark and Meeting Remark. It is worth knowing up front that these are not three different features with three different behaviours. They hold exactly the same information: the same fields, the same classification levels, the same attachments, the same link back to the record. They are three separate drawers of identical shape.

What actually differs is what you see on screen and how each one is switched on:

	Remark	Detailed Remark	Meeting Remark
A grid for line-by-line entries	no	yes	yes
Date filled in with today automatically	yes	no	no
A second description box, and a main attachment	no	yes	yes
Its own pair of More-menu commands	yes	yes	yes
Its own list in Global Config	yes	yes	yes

So the practical rule is: use Remark for a short note — a paragraph, a date, a classification, and you are done. Use Detailed Remark or Meeting Remark when the note has parts — several points, each with its own date, time, text, number and attachment. Which of those two you use is a matter of convention in your organisation, not of capability. Most sites use Meeting Remark for minutes and Detailed Remark for everything else, and keep them apart so the two lists stay readable.

A remark carries a code like any master file, a Remark Date, up to five levels of classification (Remark Type through Remark Type 5), two attachments, a Description, and two generic links — Related Entity1 and Related Entity2 — which are what tie it to the record it is about. It also carries the usual dimensions, so remarks can be filtered by legal entity, branch and department like anything else.

The detailed and meeting versions add the grid:

Each line takes two related records, two dates, two times, two texts, two numbers and two attachments. The columns are deliberately generic — they are named Date 1, Text 1, Number 1 and so on — because the grid is meant to be relabelled per site with the Screen Modifier to match whatever you are actually recording.

Stamp the time automatically

Two switches on the header — Fill Date 1 Automaticaly With Line Insertion and the matching one for the time — put today's date and the current time into the first line columns the moment you add a line. For minutes of a meeting, or a running call log, that saves typing on every entry.

Writing a note against a record

You never have to leave the record you are looking at. Open any screen, click More, and the commands are there — the same seven on every screen in the product, from a sales invoice to an item to an employee.

They come in pairs: a Create … command that writes a new note, and a Related … command that shows you the notes already written. Between them sits Add To Agenda, which is covered further down.

Choosing Create Remark opens the remark screen in a window on top of the record you were on:

Related Entity1 arrives already filled in with the record you came from — that is the whole point of starting from the More menu rather than from the menu tree. Fill in the description, classify it if your site uses remark types, and press OK. The window closes and you are back on the invoice, which was never touched and never needed saving.

Everything else on the screen is optional. A remark has no required fields and no validation of its own, so a note with nothing but a description in it will save happily.

Reading the notes back

The Related … commands open the matching list in a window:

The list finds every note whose Related Entity1 or Related Entity2 points at the record you are on — so a note filed against the record in either slot shows up.

The window carries its own toolbar, and the Tree button on it regroups the list by remark type. That is what makes the classification worth filling in: with types in use, a record carrying forty notes reads as a handful of folders instead of a flat wall of rows.

Putting the notes on the record's own screen

Reaching for the More menu every time is fine for the occasional note. For records where notes are part of the daily routine — customers, contracts, service jobs — you can have the list appear as a tab on the record's own screen instead, always visible, no menu needed.

That is switched on centrally rather than per user. In Global Config, on the Entities Screens tab, the Screens Additions group holds one list per note type:

Add an entity to Add Related Remarks To and every screen of that type grows a Remarks tab showing its remarks. Add Detailed Remarks To and Add Meeting Remarks Page To do the same for the other two. See Entity Screens settings for the tab as a whole.

The tab only appears on the standard screen

The extra tab is added to the screen the product ships with. If that entity has been given a purpose-built screen of its own through the Screen Modifier, the tab is not added to it — the notes are still there and still reachable from the More menu, but the tab will not show up. If you switch this on and see no tab, that is the first thing to check.

The Employee screen is a special case: it always carries related detailed remarks and meeting remarks, with no configuration at all.

Classifying notes — Remark Types

Remark types are what turn a pile of notes into something you can search. They are ordinary master files, set up under Basic → Remarks, and there are five independent levels of them so a site can classify along more than one axis at once — say the subject at level 1 and the department at level 2.

Level 1 is a tree: a type can have a parent, so you can build Complaint → Delivery → Late. The other four levels are flat lists that simply reference the levels above them, and picking a type at one level narrows what is on offer at the next.

Three settings on a type are worth understanding, because they decide where it can be used:

Accepts Elements controls whether the type can be chosen at all. Only types with this ticked are offered in the Remark Type field — the branches of the tree exist to organise the leaves, not to be selected themselves. If you create a type and then cannot find it in the field, this is why.

Related Type1 and Related Type2 restrict what the note can be attached to. Set Related Type1 to Customer on a type called Credit hold, and choosing that type on a blank remark limits Related Entity1 to customers. Note that this only applies while the field is still empty — a remark started from the More menu already has its Related Entity1 filled in, so the restriction has nothing to do.

The "Not Used With" switches — Not Used With Remark, Not Used With Detailed Remark, Not Used With Meeting Remark — remove the type from one of the three screens. This is how you keep a set of meeting-minute categories out of the ordinary remark list and vice versa, so each screen offers only the classifications that make sense on it.

The agenda

Add To Agenda on the More menu is the "come back to this" command. It does something quite different from the remark commands, and it is worth knowing what before you use it.

Each employee has an Employee Agenda — a single record holding a running list of dated entries. Add To Agenda finds yours, appends a line pointing at the record you were looking at, and opens your agenda on screen. You are taken off the record you were on, rather than shown a window over it.

The new line arrives with only the Related Document filled in. Type the Event Date — this one is required, so the agenda will not save without it — add the Event Time and a description of what you need to do, and save. If you had unsaved changes on the record you came from, deal with those first; the agenda opens as an unsaved record and you have to save it yourself.

What the agenda is, then, is a dated logbook: date, time, what happened or what to do, and the record it concerns. It is not a calendar and it does not chase you — there is no reminder, no alert and no notification when an entry falls due, and entries are not marked done. You read your agenda by opening it. If you want to be prompted, that is built separately with a notification driven by a scheduled task.

The agenda also grows indefinitely — every Add To Agenda appends to the same record rather than starting a new one per week or per month. On a heavily used agenda it is worth deleting lines you are done with, or filtering the grid by date, rather than scrolling.

Work tasks

A Work Task is the one member of this family that is genuinely a different thing. It is not a note about a record — it is a unit of work assigned to somebody, with a plan, a status and a percentage complete. It lives under Basic → Master Files → Work Task, and unlike remarks there is no More-menu command that creates one.

The screen is in three parts. Basic Information carries the name, the Responsible employee who owns the task, a Priority, a Task Status, an optional category, up to ten attachments, and Related To — the record the task concerns. Related To is deliberately narrow: a work task can be attached to an employee, a customer or a supplier, and nothing else. It is not the general "attach to anything" link that remarks have.

Task Status moves through Not Started → In Progress → Finished, with Cancelled for work that was dropped. A new task starts at Not Started. Five spare values (Other 1 to Other 5) are there for sites that need extra states of their own.

Then the same two dates twice over: Planned holds the start and end you intended, Actual the ones that happened, each with a Period beside it that stays in step with the dates — change the dates and the period recalculates, set the period and the end date follows. % Of Finished on the actual side is where progress is recorded; nothing derives it, somebody types it.

Splitting a task across several people

Responsible names one owner, which is enough for most work. When a task is shared, switch on Detailed Work Tasks in Global Config (Entities Screens → Screens Additions, the same group as the remark lists) and the task screen grows an extra Details page holding an Executers grid. Each row names an employee with their own planned and actual hours, planned and actual cost, and their own percentage complete — so a task can be costed per person rather than as a lump.

The neighbouring switch, Add Work Tasks List To Employee, puts a Work Tasks tab on the employee screen listing everything that employee is responsible for. Between the two, work tasks become a light per-person workload view.

Where to find everything on the menu

Everything here is reachable from the Basic module without going through a record:

Screen	Menu path
Remark, Detailed Remark, Meeting Remark	Basic → Remarks
Remark Type 1 to 5	Basic → Remarks
Employee Agenda	Basic → Remarks
Work Task, Work Task Category	Basic → Master Files

Opening them this way gives you the full list screen — filters, columns, export, mass operations — which is how you would review every open remark of a given type, or every unfinished work task, rather than looking at one record's notes.

Notes, agenda entries and work tasks are ordinary records in every other respect: they can be edited and deleted by anyone with rights to them, they are covered by the audit trail, and they respect record-level permissions and dimensions like anything else in the system. See Buttons on Every Screen for the rest of what the More menu offers.