As an ERP implementation Partner or VAR, we do not have a team of salespeople. We have a team of consultants. In our industry, a consultant is not a freelance contractor. Consultant is the title for an employee that consults with our clients. We use Acumatica Cloud ERP internally to manage our own business, so we customized it to fit our business, including the Acumatica Consultant Dashboard.
Related article: Moving from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Acumatica: A Journey To a Single Version of the Truth
Most ERP systems have dashboards for salespeople. We wanted to use Generic Inquiries to customize our internal Acumatica system and create a dashboard for our consultants. The Acumatica consultant dashboard gives them the information on one single screen that they need to have on a daily basis to be productive.
In this case, we use the “My Account” feature. We can filter information by using @ME. In this way, a consultant has a home page that only shows the data that is assigned to them. Such as:
- Support cases
- Upgrade cases
- Development cases
- Cases on hold
- All assigned cases
We also recently added the ability for our consultants to track their own opportunities. They may recommend an add on product to a client, and we want them to be able to follow up on that interest and get credit for a resulting sale.
Acumatica has the ability to track tasks. With the @ME function, the consultant can easily see the tasks that are assigned to him or her personally, with the overdue tasks highlighted in red.
The lifeblood of a professional services firm is client billing. On this consultant dashboard, an individual can also see their billing for the past ten weeks, year to date, and year over year.
To speed up the process of adding a new case, we added a plus sign in the generic inquiry dashboard so that a consultant can quickly add a new support case, upgrade case, development case, or activity.
Each of our customers is assigned to a primary account owner. Using attributes in Acumatica, we added additional fields for the second and third alternate account owners. The owner of the account can now quickly look at a list to see which of his colleagues to contact for assistance.
Our consultants use the customer dashboard to get a complete view of their customers. But they use their own consultant dashboard to get a complete view of their job. This is a page they can land on in the morning to start their day.
Related article: How We Customized Our Customer Dashboard in Acumatica Cloud ERP
Anytime we create new dashboards and new generic inquiries in Acumatica it helps our customers because we are using the same system that they are using. The more that we learn about how we can make Acumatica more productive for CAL, the more we can help our customers without reinventing the wheel.
Are you ready to evaluate an ERP system that can be easily customized to make your team more productive? Let’s start the conversation. Contact CAL Business Solutions at sales@calszone.com or 860-485-0910 x4
Get Acumatica Tips: www.calszone.com/tips
By CAL Business Solutions, Connecticut based Acumatica Consultant and Microsoft Dynamics GP Consultant, www.calszone.com
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