MacCheckout - Before you use MacCheckout

The hardest part of setting up MacCheckout is trying to decide how to break up your equipment inventory into managable lists.

The first thing to do is to come up with 6 to 8 categories. These can be items like: Video, Printmaking, Film or Sound. When someone is using MacCheckout, these are the names that will appear in the menu bar under which all your equipment is listed. You want to limit this to 6 to 8 because there is a limited amount of menu bar space and it can result with items getting cut off. The OS X menu bar space is shorter due to the presence of the Application menu.

You then need to subdivide the equipment into types. These will be listed under the appropriate categories, e.g. Video could have Monitor, VCR, Camera and Tripod as associated types. This would be the list that the user would see if they selected Video from the menu bar.

Selecting the type will then present you with a list of the actual equipment numbers associated with that item. The numbers are in the format of letter-#-letter letter, e.g. M-1-TV. The first letter denotes the authorization code or department that owns the equipment. The number, which can be any size, denotes the equipment number in the system. The final two letter pair at the end denotes what kind of equipment it is. This example TV could denote Television.

Work all this out on paper before you start entering data into MacCheckout. This will pay dividends later on and make the transition from any paper based system to the MacCheckout computer based system easier.

MacCheckout for the Web does not have the same menu bar constraints. However it is recommended that you still limit the number of categories you have as the system operators have to memorize where all the equipment types are located.