Making heads and tails och services, etc in CRM 4.0?

Last post 08-03-2008 8:16 AM by pmasseycpa. 3 replies.
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  • 07-28-2008 1:07 AM

    Making heads and tails och services, etc in CRM 4.0?

    Hi all.

    I'm desperately trying to wrap my head around how services, contracts, contracts lines, cases and service activities all connect and I'm not making a lot of headway.

    I've been trying to dig up some resources online but there's not a lot of it to be found. There's the odd post on the CRM Team blog but that's about it.

    We invoice almost all of our projects on a monthly basis with no allotment in advance - the consultants report the actual time spent on the project the day before we send the invoice.

    This means that I need to be able to create some sort of entity that the conslutants can then add the actual time spent on the project to and that in turn can be invoiced on a monthly basis with the cost based on the time reported.

    In a worst case scenario we can create a manual invoice with the correct cost and then just attach a report of all the time spent on the project.

    Now, I've been fooling around with contracts and contract lines but the need an allotment as far as I understand and I also need to create a case to connect to the contract line and then in turn create a service activity that I connect to that case.

    This seems overly complicated (or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding how this is all supposed to work).

    Is there an easy way to do what I want to do? Do I even need a contract or is a case good enough? Can I use appointments or do I need a service activity?

    Any and all ideas are greatly appreciated.

    TIA!

  • 07-28-2008 4:49 PM In reply to

    Re: Making heads and tails och services, etc in CRM 4.0?

    In my experience, contracts is one of the least used parts of CRM. If you are not specifying time allocations or numbers of cases beforehand, I don't think you need to be overly concerned with contracts.

    Service activities are great for companies which have well-defined services which go for well-defined periods of time. Their strength comes from the service scheduling component. If you are not using CRM for scheduling times for services I wouldn't worry about this component either.

    Cases allow you to work through a problem and store activities against it. When a case is resolved, the total time is automatically calculated for you based on the total time of closed activities against the case. For this to work, the consultants will need to create and close their activities against the case. If this is too much like paperowkr, you could set up a field for them to enter the total time and report off this. If you plan to bill on the same case across multiple months, you may need to set up a child entity where you can store month and time spent against the case.

    As with much of CRM, use the bits you need and ignore the rest. For you, just using cases will do the job I believe. Hope it helps. 

    Leon Tribe 

  • 07-28-2008 11:26 PM In reply to

    Re: Making heads and tails och services, etc in CRM 4.0?

    Hi Leon.

    We will be using the service scheduling component, this is one of the reasons we are evaluating CRM 4.

    It does seem though as if a case would be enough although some of our assignments run on indefinitely. Still, I guess I can always filter out the time spent on the case during a specific time period.

    The idea is that our consultants use Outlook to link their appointments to an entitiy (case as it would be) and in this way report the time spent on the case.

    I'll focus on cases and ignore contracts for the time being.

    Thanks a ton for the pointers, much appreciated.

  • 08-03-2008 8:16 AM In reply to

    Re: Making heads and tails och services, etc in CRM 4.0?

    I know this is extra expense, but take a look at Alert Software. www.fieldpoint.net or www.alertsoftware.com
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