GoldMine CRM

I’ve had a few calls over the last couple weeks with folks who’d like to use their histories in GoldMine to generate billing for clients. I actually do this myself every week. Where the challenge lies is in the fact that the “Duration” field on a History item reads like this: “00:30:00” (30 minutes).
This makes any totaling of these durations (say, on a report or within a query) difficult to say the least.

I find it much easier to enter in “Decimal” times for my histories. So, instead of using “00:30:00” for a half hour, I use “.5” Note that the Duration field is a simple text field, and will accept almost any input you give it. So my 01:45:00 becomes 1.75 and so on.

This way, any totaling you want to do becomes easy. It is possible to “parse” out the HH:MM:SS duration value, but you’ll spend more time doing  that than working on the report itself…
This also brings up a good concept; whenever possible, structure your data entry model to make reporting easier.

Try it, and have fun!

Did you know that fields can be set up to auto-fill when a user starts to type in the field?

1. Go to the field you want to have auto filled.

2. Click on the arrow at the end of the field box to give you the pop-up box with the drop
down list.

3. Click on Setup.

4. Check the box next to Auto Fill and click Okay.

5. Anytime anyone starts to type in that field it will automatically fill the field from the list.

The GoldMine Process Monitor. Love it, hate it; either way we must all deal with it. It shows, for instance, automatic e-mail retrieval history, global update and deletion logs; it is the essential window into troubleshooting the GoldMine universe.

But why is it set to auto-hide itself by default? Untouched, the Process Monitor will hide itself along the bottom edge of your GoldMine. To view it, the idea is to float your mouse cursor over the top edge and it appears like magic.

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A GoldMine customer asks: There are so many items in the History tab that I can’t find what I am looking for.

To correct this:
* Within the History tab, Right-click > Options > Filter.
* This brings up the Activity Filter window.

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Did you know that you can “tag” Contact Records within your Search Center, making them a “pseudo-group”?

When viewing results in your Search Center, you can check the box on the left of each row to Tag the record in question. Once one or more records are Tagged, this becomes an “Active Filter”, which means it can work with all the Filter-aware function of GoldMine. These include Building a Group, Merging an Template, Global Replace, etc.

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Wow, just wow. It’s not every day that I get to learn something new about GoldMine. Check this out;

One of the biggest issue we see in the field involves the non-completion of scheduled items. This can lead to messy and loaded calendars, and worse; it leads to capturing no good history.

Did you know that you can mass-complete from within the Activity List? The way it works is this;

1. Open your Activity List via Go To | Activities.
2. Using the drop downs (User, Date, etc) get the list of Activities you want to auto-complete.
3. Right-click within the list, select Options, then Auto-Update.

From here, you can Complete or Delete the list of Activities all at once. You can also use the Activity Types and Date Range checkboxes to further control what is actually Completed/Deleted.

I highly recommend backing up your GoldMine before doing this!

This is one of the best kept secrets of GoldMine. Want to change your default Search Field? Easy;

1. Go to Tools | Options from the top level menu.
2. Select the “Lookup” Tab.
3. From here, you can select either Contact, Company or “Remember Lookup By”, which acts as you might expect; it remembers the last lookup field that you used.

But this is crap; almost everyone I know searches by LastName. So, how do we do that? It’s laughably easy.

Just double-click on whatever field name you want to search by directly from the Contact Record itself. Not in the field, but directly on the field name (or “label”). Want to search by last name, click on it! City, State, Zip, Address, click on it!

Pro Tip : Don’t forget you can use a percent sign (%) as a wildcard when searching!

Did you know that you can customize the bottom “Tab Strip” of the Contact Record in GoldMine?

Within GoldMine,

1. Select Tools | Options from the top-level menu.
2. Click on the “Record” tab.
3. Click the “Tabs” button.
4. From here, you can manage the bottom tab strip.
5. Use the “Customize Globally” checkbox to manage tabs for all GoldMine users at once. Otherwise, all changes are specific to the user currently logged in.
6. Users will need to restart their GoldMine to get the change.

Pro Tip : You can manage this for any user via Tools | Users Settings | Preferences if you have MASTER rights.