With a Google account, a super simple way is to use Google My Maps
I found this intriguing, so I looked at My Maps to see if I can make productive use of it. I'm just now digging into it, but I did see the following note: "A map can have up to 10,000 lines, shapes, or places." That's a pretty significant limitation, but if all I'm doing is putting in job location pins I'll be okay - in 30 years I've only accumulated about 1,700 jobs. For a large firm it could be a problem even without a lot of ancillary data.
Edit: I use Google Earth to keep track of my jobs, so I started exporting job number entries to KMZs and then importing those into My Maps. I quickly ran into a layer limit. I'm not sure what the limit is, but I hit it after loading a small percentage (somewhere below 5%) of my job pins. Some of the larger jobs have maybe 50 or so sub-entities (e.g. lines, polygons, additional pins), but most of them are just a placemark. I was creating a new layer for every group of job numbers (I have 50 such groups), so maybe I can figure out how to load everything into a single layer and bypass the layer limit.
Edit 2: I deleted everything, then tried loading all of my jobs as a single KMZ. It's only 130 KB, but My Maps choked after loading only a small percentage of the placemarks. An error message flashed across the screen, but the only part I was able to catch was something like "That's a big one." I saw another note about not loading files with more than 2,000 lines. I exported my jobs as a KML and saw that it's about 56,000 lines. My conclusion so far is that My Maps isn't really designed to handle the magnitude of data associated with even a small business like mine.
@mightymoe Now you have my brain wondering if i could somehow link the quickbooks to save data in a geodatabase as well. I imagine it’s possible anything is possible.
That's a hard line for us (and probably most firms) - no client financial or accounting information anywhere other than on a secure DB on a secure server.
But it's easy enough to use the project number/ID as the key between the accounting DB and the GDB. Could be done in-house and on a temporary basis (wipe the info after the analysis is done) if really needed.
Most of the time I wouldn't need accounting info when looking up data. I just need to know what we did, where, and when, and pull a link to the relevant datasets.
The job numbers and account numbers are connected in the set-up for the accounting program. We had to really up security a couple of years ago when our accountant was hacked.
We got a malware attack through them.
As far as the location program, job cards and scans those are disconnected from any accounting info, the account numbers don't appear anywhere connected to that data.
On purpose.
It's a fine line and needs not to be crossed.
@rover83 yes i could see that as being a issue. I would not want my or my clients financial information viewable to every co - worker either. Maybe some information but yes a client number or job number would tie across the bow. I think its a prime example of just because we can don’t mean we should for sure. I wish we would move to a geodatabase for all dwg raw data tbc etc. i preach it when the opportunity arises but way above my pay grade. I have a project starting next week that is scattered across a county and my geospatial brain would love a better way as it has many factors and geodata base would be awesome. But we work with what we have so google earth and a very detailed work flow in excel it is. Lol.
Good system you got there. Our survey section doesn't do any accounting. I'm inclined to do the shape file thing. I don't even know what GIS software the county uses, and I certainly wouldn't have any access to it. Maybe I could do something with QGIS. Hopefully a QGIS file would be compatible with what the county uses.
@jim-frame There are some limits on the layers and the number of items. Right now, I have about 1400 jobs in my map as pin locations shown on the prior image posted. In order to avoid the layer issue, I broke the layers into five year increments of jobs. I do not recall what all the limits were, but I know that with five year increments and guesstimated ±100 jobs a year, I figured that I could use the My Maps option to close out my career in about 15 or so years without passing those limits, if I continue on the same path of number of jobs.
I also keep a Global Mapper GIS running of the jobs as well, it is just easier to drop a pin location and enter the data on Google Maps, so Google is usually the more up to date job tracking option for me.
@field-dog Look ARCGIS Online, QGIS is also good. The state of Maryland supplies a QGIS data set for the state that was a great backbone.
