NewsLetters > NewsLetter June 2026

Well, we've been hard at work making Digital Wrench easier to use and adding more features.

As you probably know, we publish all features, additions, changes, and fixes on our webpage that you can view by going to the VMT Icon or File/Check for New Updates.

We've added a new credit card processor (PayBright). While it doesn't yet send data to a terminal, it does send individual customer data to its back-end payment processor. We're using it here at VMT, and it works quite well. This time, we wanted to verify that things would work before creating an interface for their terminal. But even without the terminal, you can process transactions pretty easily using their payment processor on the web.

We haven't implemented AI in our software, as it would require internet access. We want to keep the program available to run offline. Of course, you will always need the internet to send Email, get online codes (although that can be done manually), or get tech support.

That being said, we partner with Data Health. With Data Health, you can have them back up your system to their cloud servers. Or you can have them set up a Windows Server for you so you can run Digital Wrench online from anywhere with an internet connection. This is great for mobile services.

We do, however, increasingly use AI to create interfaces. We used it to interface with Stripe Card processing, which we use on our website. That was using a different language, so that was interesting. And we just used it to create an interface to SaaSAnt, which integrates with QuickBooks.

Recently, we added an interface to SaaSAnt that connects to QuickBooks. I'll discuss that below.

My wife says my newsletters are boring and insisted I insert a joke.

So I asked AI to make a joke about AI and here it is:

The given sentence, "Make a joke about AI," is a directive or a request for someone to create or express a humorous comment, quip, or anecdote that relates to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The core of the sentence is to prompt the creation or telling of a joke that takes AI—its capabilities, limitations, or popular perceptions—as its subject... blah blah blah.

I added the blah blah blah obviously because it just kept droning on and on and on.

Let's try ChatGPT:

I asked an AI if it could take over my job.

It replied, “I’m sorry, but replacing humans is outside my scope.”

Then it scheduled my meetings, wrote my emails, fixed my code, and generated my performance review.

Another one:

AI is like a very confident intern:

It can explain quantum physics in perfect grammar,

and then tell you that the capital of France is a toaster.

So then, I asked Monday, a GPT on ChatGPT to tell a joke about AI:

AI is amazing. It can write poetry, diagnose problems, generate images, and answer questions from millions of people.

And yet somehow half its day is spent answering things like:

"Can I microwave a fork?"

Humanity built a machine trained on the sum of human knowledge and immediately used it to recreate the experience of working retail.

A triumph of civilization. A small, weird triumph. But a triumph.

Seems like more of a joke on how humanity is using AI. Monday is a smartaleck though!

Anyway, it's fun, for now. And it's a great tool when used correctly. But never just blindly trust it.

With AI serving as an assistant junior developer, the process of creating interfaces that once required months can now be completed in a significantly shorter time-frame.

Digital Wrench itself is not AI based. I'm not sure if I would trust programming that was not created by a human for a human. I've noticed lately there are AI haters and AI lovers. All I can say to both of those groups is, AI is a machine. It's not a personality, a god, or a demon. It's just a machine. No reason to get mad at it or fall in love with it. Use it, like you would any other tool.

So enough about AI, let's talk about some of the newest things in Digital Wrench.

If you have ongoing monthly rentals like vehicle storage, or maybe mooring or dock rentals, anything monthly really, we've built a new rental system into our Point of Sale program. If you're not familiar with our Point of Sale, it creates invoices automatically for selling parts. It's great for businesses with store fronts. Many motorcycle shops get it so they can sell parts, helmets, gloves, oil, etc. quickly. On completion of the sale, it creates an invoice identical to the invoices created by Digital Wrench (although you can print out a 2 inch receipt). It uses the same inventory and the same customer base. The other thing it can do is take the money for completed RO's at the same time. Click a button and Completed RO's that have not been paid for show up on the screen. You can then add other items to sell to the customer. When completed, it will create a separate invoice for items sold, and apply the money to the RO's on the screen.

The rental option does pretty much the same thing. There will be a rental tab. You can add recurring rentals to the screen. Then you transfer the rental to the Point of Sale tab, then process the transaction. The Point of Sale will complete and create an invoice for that rental, and update the rental to be ready for next month. There are other things, like rental packages to make it easy to add rentals, security deposits, plus you can add a customers vehicle to that rental so you can see exactly what is being kept in a certain storage space. There is a lot more. It is simple to setup and simple to operate. Call us if you'd like to get a tour of how it works.

QuickBooks interface has been requested by many people. We've managed to create an export of invoices (one at a time for the moment) that can be imported by QuickBooks. I used QuickBooks Online to test it, but it should work fine with QB Desktop as well. In order to do this, we interfaced with a company that interfaces your data with QB called SaaSAnt.

We can send an invoice to SaaSAnt, and it publishes it to QuickBooks. It works very well. We were going to interface directly to QuickBooks, but it would be an ongoing task, and we'd rather concentrate on Digital Wrench. The people at SaaSAnt can worry about what happens when Intuit changes its interface again —as they have several times before—so you're insulated from losing connections to QuickBooks. All we did was create the export they were expecting. As soon as we get some feedback from customers (we expect) that will be using this interface, we'll be adding more to it. Currently the export includes a payment if there was one. We are not exporting individual payments yet (unless the payment is already been made in Digital Wrench) as we need to see how our customers are using it.

Rounding to a nickel. Evidently it costs more to make a penny than a penny. Canada got rid of the penny years ago. I had at least one request to have the software account for that. I had no idea what to do. However, now that we in the US have no pennies (if dealing in cash), the request seemed more urgent. So, I came up with a fairly simple solution. First, if your customer pays in cash, you can now click a button so the invoice will round up or down and adjust the invoice to be nickel compatible. But, the money can't just disappear, so we added it to the discount field. If it's adjusting up, the discount will be negative, and if it's adjusting down, the discount will be positive. It's a bit confusing, but it works. In order to implement it, just right click on the Grand Total which is actually a button. You only need to do this if you're taking cash, and, you're out of pennies. If you don't do any discounting using the discount field, you'll actually be able to report on this. In theory, you will not gain nor lose much money, if any.

Processing money with a 3rd party. Most of our customers have a credit card processor they use, with a terminal to swipe or scan the card. We are currently interfaced with a company called Clearent, which allows our software to send the amount to the terminal, the customer swipes their card, then we get a code back, and some data, if it went through OK.

We are in the process of working on a new interface to a company called PayBright (https://www.gopaybright.com/ or https://ccareygopaybright.com if you want to get a message to Chas and ask him some questions). Currently we're not interfaced to the terminal, but we do have a couple of interfaces to their gateway so you can upload the customer information, then go to the gateway to process it). They have a nice recurring system that works well with recurring rentals. (We use it here at VMT for our recurring monthly subscriptions.)

I had a customer call me the other day and he used our report writer to add a QR code for his Venmo account. While not that many folks know how to use our report Writer, I decided to add a QR code to one of the invoices. You can have both a Paypal and a Venmo QR code that can be on the invoice you send to the customer. Then they can use their phone to pay for it. That's it. If you want a QR code on your invoice, let us know what invoice you are using and we can probably add it. I think Don probably won't charge you an arm and a leg. The invoice it's already in is VMTInvoice164.rpt in the report writer.

You can set up your user-name for PayPal or Venmo in the company setup under Other Settings. You'll have to dig into Paypal to setup your user-name with them.

While I was writing this newsletter, a customer called and said his VIN lookup didn't work, although it worked on an older machine. Finally with the help of our junior developer, Claude, we figured it out. This is a C# redistributable run-time that can be downloaded (then you run it).

•https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x86.exe Restart Digital Wrench after you install it.

There are a lot of changes that we are going to be doing for Digital Wrench. Go to File/Check for New Updates to see what we've done. I try and add everything to the help files, so if you notice something is not in the help files, please let us know. If you have any requests, be sure to go the File/Check for New Updates, and click on the Suggestion Box Button. If you find a bug, don't wait to call us.

Contacting us

I know it can be frustrating when you call a company, especially when something (like your software) isn't working, and it goes to voice-mail. The absolute quickest way to get a response from us is to leave a voice-mail message. On our side, we get an email that transcribes your voice-mail to a text. We go through our voice-mail messages first, so they get the priority. Once we're done with that, we try to go through all of the Caller-Id's. This is really laborious if we have your caller ID on there like 5 times, plus, it slows us down.

If we don't answer right away, there are really two options. Call the other number (Ray is at 541-582-4744 and Don is at 541-582-4544), or, just leave a message.

We at VMT Software hope you have a great year!