Process conditions & alpha testing

The marquee feature of Pathfinder (RPM 3.5) is the process & commission reconciliation. The core of this feature is matching commission items to forms and this done by evaluating conditions. There are various types of conditions you can specify, and type is mapping a commission item variable to a field in the form. For example, maybe for Qwest we have an "order id" that comes with the commission data and we're also able to enter that id in the order tracking process when the order is placed. To reconcile automatically by this ID, I setup a condition where the item "order id" must match the "order id" field in the form. Simple, except...

The first complication occurs when the data isn't formatted the same. Maybe we need to match up BTNs and the order system formats them like "(123) 555-1234" while the commission system uses "1235551234". To handle this situation we've given the power when defining conditions for text fields to use "is close to". This will strip out spaces, punctuation, etc. and ignore case. Example: "Acme, Inc." would match "ACME INC". We have similar options for matching dates by same day, same month, before, after, etc. Now today I was testing an alpha version of Pathfinder on some real world data from our largest master agent customer, and I found another problem situation...

The forms have a field "Order Number" that contains the Qwest order ID. This should be a simple match. However, I soon found out some orders had multiple order numbers entered into that one field. Example: "A12345, B67890". Well long story short we're adding functionality to deal with that too. In other words, if I had an item with order ID "A12345" and another item with "B67890", they would both be reconciled to that form. From what we can tell so far, this addition will not impact the delivery schedule.