Thursday 14 April 2011

Using ACT! as a Service Database



Sage ACT! software was originally designed for sales people and very successful it has been too. One of the great things about ACT! is that it is easily customised to meet the requirements of the user and this is just one of the things we help you do when we come on site for an ACT Training day.

One neat customisation is to set up ACT! to work as a Service Database.

Now, one feature of running a service operation is that you probably want to keep track of the specific bits of kit that clients have under contract (e.g. model numbers and serial numbers). The other component is the ability to track "Tickets", i.e. open service requests.

Whilst we could start adding fields to the front Contact screen there's potentially a problem. Although you could easily add a "Model" and "Serial Number" field to the screen what do you do if a client has more than one item under contract? Your first thought is that we could add multiples of each field, so "Model 1", "Model 2", "Model 3" etc, which is fine providing no client ever has more that three items under contract.

The problem is that, in database jargon, this is a "one-to-many" relationship. In other words each single client could have one, two or fifty items under contract, you never know what the maximum number is going to be.

One company I know creates a Contact record for the actual name of the contact and company which has a service contract then they create a new contact record (by duplicating the original contact record) for each piece of kit under contract, and they put the serial number of that piece of equipment in the contact name field. Now although this seems a bit clunky it actually works quite well since you can record notes and history against each peice of equipment and it's eask yo look up a serial number and see the service history of that piece of equipment.

Another approach is to utilise one of the existing one-to-many tables in ACT! One that works quite well is the Opportunities feature. Normally used for creating a list of potential sales, the Opportunities can easily be customised for the service function. Firstly, you can add a new Sales/Stage Process called Service and then you can create a new set of Stages, such as New Ticket, Problem Diagnosed, Site Visit Required, Parts on Order, Ticket closed, to track the ststus of each service ticket. You can then add fields to record part Model Number and Serial Number etc to the Opportunity. One of the nice things about this approach is that you can use the Notes and History tabs within the Opportunity to add more detailed information on the work being done to fix the problem.

What's more, you can use the filters on Opportunity List View to select just the Service items, just the open service items or whatever. You can also use the standard "Export List to Excel" and the standard Sales Reports to summarise and report on the service business.

Another approach is to use one of the great add-on packages that are available at extra cost that do this really well buy utilising the hidden "custom tables" facility within ACT! These will give you additional functionality, but if your "road warriers" are accessing ACT! through the Web interface check that these add-ons can also be accessed over the web before buying!

If you think you business could benefit from some expert ACT! training and advice you can contact us through our web site.

www.bigbluemarketing.co.uk