Bid sheet versioning

Bid Sheet Versioning is a proposed feature to mitigate the problems associated with printing bid-sheets significantly before the show.

The problem

The show considers the bid sheet to be the "final say" should there be any discrepancy between it and the Control Forms or the database. This is sensible, as this is what is in front of the Bidders and what they're depending on to make their bid decisions.

While certainly not impossible beforehand, pre-printing bid-sheets gives an additional opportunity for information to diverge, especially if artists are permitted to update piece information on-line. Additionally, if information diverges, it is not a disaster, but it will cause additional work during time-critical aspects of the show

The solution

Whenever a bid sheet is printed, the details for the piece are "locked" and associated with a new version number. This version number (actually a letter in the current proposal) is appended to the piece barcode. When the piece is scanned during the location scan, the version number scanned is compared with the version in the database: if different, an alert is raised to indicate that the bid sheet may be out of date.

Once locked, the piece details will need to be "unlocked" to make future edits. This may be an explicit action, or implicitly on any changes. Once re-printed, the details are again "locked" with an incremented version number.

Furthermore, a comparison against "unlocked" details also raises an alert, and a piece scanned without a version number may also raise an alert.

Thus, during a location scan, the operator is alerted to any circumstance where the bidsheet scanned may not reflect the information stored in the database.

Other notes

If artists are printing their own bid sheets, decide if a version number is to be placed or not.

As a backup mechanism, if new bid sheets cannot be printed at show, barcode stickers should be made available at the show for all artists, and these will not have version numbers on them.

It is not too hard to re-print a bidsheet with a changed version number or other details, so this solution does not prevent malice.