The CRM submenu in Operations records your contacts with partners: phone calls, visits, meetings, service jobs or tasks. Each kind of contact is an activity type that you set up yourself, with the fields your business needs, and each active type has its own item in Operations → CRM. An activity changes no stock and no payments. Saving activities needs a Pro license.
How a business works with CRM
- Define the fields. In Activity Fields create what you want to record, for example Contact person as short text, Result as a dropdown with Interested, Call back and Not interested, Next contact as a date and Summary as long text. All types share these fields.
- Create the types. In Edit Activity Types create, for example, Phone call, Visit and Task. For each type choose its fields and their order, which of them are required, how they are grouped, whether a partner is required and whether the time is recorded.
- Add printed documents if you need them, for example a visit report that the customer signs. You name the document in the type and design it in Document Templates.
- Record the activities. After a call the user opens Operations → CRM → Phone call, selects the partner, fills in the fields and saves. See CRM Activity.
- Follow up. Find the activities in Edit CRM Activities, where you can search by any text field, for example all activities with Result Call back. The Last operations tab of a partner lists them as CRM – Phone call and so on, and Reports → CRM Activities… lists them for a period.
- Turn them into documents. With Transform Document a visit becomes an offer or a sale with the items of its Item fields, and a sale becomes a service visit with the sold item and its serial number filled in.
The E-mail activity type
The program adds a built-in type E-mail, which is not active at first. When you make it active, every document that you send with Send via e-mail from the print preview is saved as an E-mail activity of the partner of the document. It records Sender, Recipient, Subject, Message, Document and Document No., with a note that names the document, its number and the recipient. This works with a Pro license. The type and its fields cannot be deleted.
Pages in this section
- CRM Activity: the window of a new activity, opened from the item of its type in Operations → CRM.
- Edit Activity Types: the types, the fields of each type and their documents.
- Activity Fields: the fields that all types use, with their kinds, dropdown values and checks.
Saved activities are changed in Edit CRM Activities (Edit → Documents → CRM Activities…) and printed again in Reprint CRM Activities (Edit → Reprint Documents → CRM Activities…). Import Operations also imports CRM activities.
Licenses and permissions
| What | What it needs |
|---|---|
| Saving an activity | A Pro license. Without it the program shows “Saving activities requires a Pro license! To save your activity please purchase a Pro license.” |
| Making an inactive type active, for example E-mail | A Pro license. |
| The items of the types | Each active type has its own entry under CRM in Edit → Administration → Permissions…, so you can hide a type from a user. |
| Edit Activity Types… and Edit Activity Fields | Not allowed for Operators by default. |