Is your business partially based on services you cater and partially on how you manage your relation with the customers? Or you have Sales Person/Account Managers who need constant reminders to call up your customers? At the same time, not being a complete service based industry you can’t afford to buy a full-fledged CRM but wish to use some functionality of your regular accounting software to cater to this nitty-gritty. Well you are in luck because the Comments feature of Sage 300 (formerly know as Accpac) AR (i.e. Accounts Receivable) Module is just what you need. You write and store comments, add validity period for these comments, Flag various teams to access these comments to perform mentioned activities, Use them in printing of reports, Store Birthdays or a ticket that is currently being solved for the Customer.
New Stuff: Customer credit limit in Sage 300 ERP
How Comments work:
It’s as simple as it sounds, just go to Comments tab of the A/R Customers and insert a new comment by pressing the ‘Insert’ key. Basic list of fields it stores is Date Inserted, Date Expiration, Date Follow-up, Comment Type, User Id and Comment. A Comment can be up to 2500 Characters long (which is almost as long as this article 🙂 ). Comments can be segregated using Comment Type, Let’s say Action Points or Reminders or Follow-ups or segregate them based on Teams just by giving them names of Teams who are responsible for the task.
Now say if you need to view the entire history of comments for a particular customer, then all you need to do is go to A/R Customer Reports and print the Customer Report with Report Type as Customer Comments which can be filtered by Follow-up dates, Customer Number and other similar criteria. This sorting will help in more than one ways, e.g. my billing department uses this report to process follow-ups to Customers based on due dates of invoices hence selecting the Sort type as ‘Billing Cycle’ and then running the report will give me sorted output of Customers that I need to follow-up for payments.
Apart from this the same feature can be used in printing reports. Let’s say you need to print various messages based on status of the payments or period of the year. Then you can ask your report developers to print the comment while printing each customer Invoice and update the same comment as and when the status changes or so does the season and you save lot of money on constantly updating your crystal reports.
One can also link it to the Macros and use to print/record it with transactions. Save Birthday reminders and earn brownie points by wishing clients on their birthdays, don’t forget to promote your latest product before ending the call.
All said and done, whenever you are done exploiting the full functionality of this feature you can proudly say you are ready to move on to a full-fledged ERP-CRM Integrated product and thy company’s IT investments are safe in your hands.
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