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Recent posts by our CRM Experts
Jan 24

ZOHO CRM – Activities, Notes and Emails all in one report!

By CRM, Zoho, Zoho CRM

Salespeople can use a variety of ways to log their interactions with Leads and Contacts.  Some put information in Notes, others log events or calls and others carry it all out in emails.  Now you can pull an “Interaction” report that will extract data from all three of these sources to see all sales activity in one report!

When selecting the data for your report (step one in report creation), choose, Activities, Notes and Emails as the three related modules, Choose tabular (or summary and group by Lead Owner if more than one salesperson), and select the following columns shown:

  Set the timeframe in the filters section to correspond with how frequently you plan on monitoring the activity.  If you’ll look at activity weekly, you can set the Lead last activity time to “Last week” and have the report delivered on Monday.

Jan 24

Zoho BOOKS – set a bank as the default

By Accounting, Zoho Books

When entering payments and purchases, you can establish one bank account as the “Primary” account which will then be the default bank account when entering payments and purchases – Here’s how:

  • Click on Banking, then click on the bank you want to set as default.
  • Click on the gear wheel then select Edit
  • Check the “Make this primary” box and click save.
Jan 24

Zoho CRM – how do I set or change the “From” field for an Email template in Zoho 2016?

By CRM, Zoho, Zoho CRM

Before the 2016 release, you would set the ‘From’ field in the email template itself.  You could chose a specific user, or select from merge options (Record Owner, Current User).  In the new template interface, that field isn’t there anymore, so where do you define who the email is from when sending an email with a template?  … well it depends on how you’re sending it…

If you use workflow to send it, the From field can now be found in the Alert definition, just below the template selection:

If you’re sending it via the zoho email client, as before, you use the dropdown (present only if you have multiple email addresses associated with your account.

Jan 10

Zoho Books – Managing Retainer Payments

By Accounting, Zoho Books

Zoho Books has a really easy to use built-in “Retainer Invoice” feature that allows you to easily bill and track money that is paid to you in advance, or on “Retainer”.  Here’s how:

Step 1 – create the Retainer Invoice:

  • Sales->Retainer Invoice, click the “+” sign.
  • Fill in the required information
  • Click Save

Step 2 – record payment against retainer Invoice

  • Open specific retainer invoice
  • click Record Payment
  • Enter Amount
  • Click Save

Step 3 – record your time and Expenses

  • Click Timesheet in left nav panel
  • (if not already) Create a Project and add tasks
  • Select Project and Click Log Time to enter your time spent against the defined tasks
  • click Save
  • Click the Expenses Tab to log expenses incurred for this project

Step 4 – Bill your Time and Expenses

->Timesheets

  • Select specific Project
  • Click Timesheet
  • Check boxes next to desired time entries
  • Under “New Transaction” menu ->Create Invoice
  • Option to check box “include all unbilled expenses”
  • Click Add
  • Select Salesperson (if more than one in the system)
  • Click Save and Send –> Save and Send Later
  • Top Green Banner – “Click Here”

Apply retainer to invoice.

that’s it!

Jan 10

ZOHO BOOKS – How to record shareholders distributions

By Accounting, Zoho, Zoho Books

It’s that time of year… and if you’re new to Books you might be wondering how you record your year-end distributions or pay-outs to your owners/shareholders.

Here’s how:

  • Click on Banking in the left side navigation panel
  • Click on the bank account from which you will be withdrawing the money
  • Under the Red Add Transaction drop down list, select Owner Drawings
  • Enter the required information on the form that pops up on the right
  • Click Save
Jan 08

Salesforce.com – Working with formula fields

By CRM, Salesforce CRM

I will get requests all the time to add fields to child objects (i.e., contacts) that belong on the parent account, but because we want to see it at the child record they want it there too.  For instance, you have account type (Customer, Prospect, Competitor) and when looking at a contact you want to see that account type at the person level, giving you the quick snapshot instead of navigating to the contact’s parent account.

I think you can do this (haven’t tried) in the process builder where you would add a field on the contact levels, then create a process to update the contact when changing the account’s type field.  You would also have to create a process to update the parent account’s type as well if changed on the contact (which would fire the first process to update all the contacts).  Confused yet?  I think you may even need a trigger.

So let’s go simpler shall we?  What I ALWAYS do is just try to teach my users that certain data belongs here and certain data belongs there.  For instance, customer type or account type is not something that belongs at the contact level.  It may be nice to see at each contact, but it belongs at the account level since it’s company data.  To DISPLAY the data at the contact, you can use a formula field – very easy to do.

To start, find your object or just search for it in the setup area (click Setup, then start searching – again, don’t hit enter as I always warn, just type).

Once I see what I need, I go to “Fields”, which I’m going to then scroll down and create a new field called “Account Type”.  When in the type of new field area, just choose “formula”.  Click next.

On the next screen, give it a name (label), the API name and choose the type of data that will be displayed.  When in doubt, choose text.

In this case I’ll just build the formula quickly, but I use the formula builder to insert the right field.  When you find it, click “Insert” to see the value.

In this case, because it’s a picklist I get an error when I save it.  So, I have to add the “text” formula function to just grab the value.  Now it looks like this:

Click next to add to the correct layout (and edit who can see it) and you’re all set.  Go ahead and move the field to where you want it on the contact record.

Your users can all now see the right account type at the contact level, however, to change it or modify they still have to navigate to the account record – again, the place where it belongs.

Jan 04

GoldMine : Display Summary Counts in Lists

By Uncategorized

Ah, nothing like a stupid pet trick! You can whip this out the next time you have GoldMine up at a company meeting. You’ll look like a million bucks!

Here it is; any list view in GoldMine can display the count of it’s contents.

Simply right-click and check the “Summary” box. Voila!

 
  You should immediately see the corresponding count in the lower left-hand corner of the list;
 This option to display Summaries is present almost everywhere the Output To… functionality is present.
  Try it and have fun!
Jan 04

GoldMine : Securing Picklists

By Uncategorized

Consider this a shortstop between you and inconsistent data. It can really help to “lock down” fields like Customer Type and Sales Rep to prevent bad entries.

Bring up the picklist by clicking into the field and then clicking the grey arrow to the right.

From there, click the “Setup” button.

What we are concerned with is “Allow Blank Input” and “Force Valid Input”. Forcing a valid input requires the end-user to use a value from the picklist.

But beware, disallowing Blank Input will prevent the end-user from “getting out” of the field until they choose something valid. So make sure that all appropriate picklist choices are available!

Jan 04

GoldMine : Identifying Bad Data

By Uncategorized

We’re concerned, here, with fields that should contain items from a known list of values. Fields like Customer Type, which is usually coded “Prospect”, “Customer”, or “Vendor”. Or Sales Rep, which simply contains a list of personnel.

This is actually an important part of producing accurate metrics via reporting. If you can’t rely on Sales Rep or Customer Type to be consistent, any numbers generated would always be questionable. We’re going to look at how to produce lists like in the following example.

Does your database contain Customer Types like this?

The first thing we must do before actually writing the query is to identify which field we are working with.  In GoldMine, the way to do this is;

Right-click on the field label, then select Properties.

On the Profile Tab, take note of the “Name in Database” value. For example, our Customer Type field is actually called “KEY1”.

Now we can actually write our SQL Query. In GoldMine, select Tools | SQL Query from the top level menu.

The query we’re using is simply an aggregate(count) of the field in question, grouped by all unique values. Copy and paste the following code into your query window;

SELECT KEY1, COUNT(*) FROM CONTACT1 GROUP BY KEY1

And then click “Query”. It’s just that easy. To get lists of other fields, just repeat the process using the different fieldname in place of KEY1.

For example, you can get a list of States with this;

SELECT STATE, COUNT(*) FROM CONTACT1 GROUP BY STATE

For user-defined fields (any field on the lower half of the record), substitute CONTACT2 for CONTACT1, like this;

SELECT USERDEF01, COUNT(*) FROM CONTACT2 GROUP BY USERDEF01

Remember, you can’t hurt anything by selecting data, so have at it and have fun!

 

 

 

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