Using ServiceWorks for My Schedule

[sprayandclean]

I have set up a 'customer' that is myself, and use this customer for scheduling my calls/etc.
My question/ idea is how to schedule actual potential customers (prospects) for estimates... If a customer is set up, and has a schedule, then the customer becomes 'active'. Once 'active' they are obviously no longer 'prospective'... but how can I keep track of my truly prospective customers as prospective customers, and still use the software to schedule a call/estimate? Obviously my customer (myself) will work, but creates a calender thaat requires interpretation.. ie. all calls and estimates will be for 'me', and wont actually show the customer who needs the call/est.

After getting all of Janurary's and Feburary's customers 'in' the software, it is sure nice to know what my business did, the A/R, and have all in one place.

 

[Dan Flynn]

You can do a few things, and probably more I have not thought of. You can set up services as call, appt and so on.

To track the prospects you have called or estimated. You can use the custom fields under the detailed tab. You can use different titles.

I used R Estimated for residential estimates. When they become a customer I make them R Customer. Do the same for commercial. For the prospects you have not had contact with you can call them prospects.

I also list my gutter cleaning and window cleaning customers in the custom fields. The reason for this, I know I will call on them more and I like to send out mailing a few times a year to them.

If you do a search for these customers you can use the on screen choice to print labels. So I'm sure there are other ways. But that is how I do it and basically it gives me many options to track by including all the different reports.

Let me know what you decide to do.

Hope this helps.

 

[ServiceCEO]

Both yours and Dan's suggestions are good work arounds for now. But Bates you are right about the customer status changing and this is a situation that we have been wrestling with for a while now. We used to have customer status' be a manually changed field, to allow this flexibility that you are talking about. The major problem with this is that no one actually changed these statuses, and whenever someone tried to do mailings or sorting, they were all wrong. To alleviate that we made status fields actually tied in and automated, with this situation being a residual of it.

Now onto the future and how we plan on dealing with this situation and resolving it. This will definitely be in our CEO package within 90 days (and hopefully works soon thereafter, although I can not promise that, depends on how the different database's capability of handling the solution they build works out)

We are in the process of finalizing a deal with a larger customer that loves the CEO program and wants to add additional CRM capabilities into it, similar to what he has been using with Goldmine. This will be the core of an Internal Task Management functionality that will be added to the application. More custom fields with abilities to index and sub index these as well. Ringing alarms for to-do's, mailings, and phone calls as well as document linking to files related to the customer. (This is a great way to handle this estimating situation above).

 

[Mike Hughes]

Originally posted by ServiceCEO
We are in the process of finalizing a deal with a larger customer that loves the CEO program and wants to add additional CRM capabilities into it, similar to what he has been using with Goldmine. This will be the core of an Internal Task Management functionality that will be added to the application. More custom fields with abilities to index and sub index these as well. Ringing alarms for to-do's, mailings, and phone calls as well as document linking to files related to the customer. (This is a great way to handle this estimating situation above).

When are these features REALISTICALLY going to be available in the CEO version??

 

[ServiceCEO]

Realistically in the ServiceCEO program within 6 to 9 weeks after we sign the contract with this potential client. I will let everyone know when this occurs. If this client opts not to make this a custom project, we will be adding this type of functionality, it just won't be as high up in the development cycle. It would be more likely in the 4-8 month range in that case.

Just to keep everyone here in the know, here is what is being currently developed, mostly from our entering into the window cleaning industry with the desire to be the best solution.

Multi-Day and Tasking invoicing and scheduling. As our system is setup currently multi-day and task scheduling is possible by creating recurring frequencies as well as multiple services to a schedule. The limitation of this is that if a job is really only one job that is spanning multiple days, each day of it, is treated as a seperate invoice or occurence of the master schedule as a whole. Also each of the multiple services are batched together and treated as if they are all done concurrently. The new functionality will actually allow the ability to assign one service to one team or date, another service to be assinged to the same or different date as well as the same or different team, and batched together into one single invoice and job number. The flexibility this will allow is astronomical and we hope to have it released within 3 weeks.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions for how this feature can meet the needs within the power washing industry, please pipe up on the board and let us know. I also am looking for any other features that are needed for ServiceCEO to be the ultimate power washing management system. This is how we operate, by responding to your needs, we provide the tools that you need, as well as ensuring that our application is the best option for your industry.