Accounts
An account is a customer. From a marketing standpoint it is the following step to Lead and opportunity, it is an opportunity closed as won.
Account Structure
The module for Accounts works with a Parent-Child structure, where a “child account" will have one and only one “parent account", but a parent account can have one or more child accounts.
PICTURE 4.01 - Pending GRAPH PARENT CHILD
Accounts are directly related with Contacts, but the structure is not the same.
Each child account must have a Main Contact and can have one or more secondary contacts, and these contacts will always be related to the parent account.
In other words, each contact will have a parent account to which it will be related, and in turn said contact can be related to one or more child accounts.
PICTURE 4.02 - GRÁFICO STRUCTURE CON CONTACTOS
Account protection
The protection feature exists to avoid “stealing” accounts between Account Managers. Protection is visible on the User Intereface with a Green Padlock when it is protected, or with a Red Padlock when it is protected by an account manager.
Protection is always triggered from the edition of a contact, and which is related to a Lead or an Account.
Those users who do not have special permissions to edit a contact's data will only be able to access with read-only permissions.
The person responsible for the account or lead is the only user with editing permission during the protection period. Once the time is up and the contact is unprotected, all users can see and edit its information.
In some rare cases, there may be an account with shared ownership. For example, a technician who unknowingly creates an RPH on an account that already exists, and when he loads the RPH the system allows him to have part of that property. Anyway, this person would not be the true owner of said account, but yet they would have the permission to edit it.
Account and contacts
When a user modifies the information related to the contact of an account, the system automatically changes the status of the account to protected so that no one can modify it except the new owner. At the same time, the system not only protects that account but all those that are related to said contact.
In the event that the account was already protected and that user with sufficient permissions to modify it makes any modification, the system will restart the protection period for such account.
The contact is the key link that generates the relationships within the system.
Accounts Menu
New Accounts
This option takes the user to the “New Account” form. For more details on how to create an Account and this form, please redirect to the section in this document "How to create an Account"
View Accounts
The system allows to list all the existing Accounts on the platform and easily identify whether it is a child or parent account. All the parent account’s rows will be highlighted in yellow color.
Here is possible to see the list of the existing Accounts in the database, filtered by specific parameters. There is also a search bar that can be used to refine the search by looking among the shown results.
Filters available are:
- Bulleted list item
- Owner: filter by the owner of the Account
- Quick Search: filter by predefined range of time
- Property type
It is also possible to activate the “Custom Search” that will enable more fields of filtering, such as:
- From date (creation)
- To date (creation)
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Once the filtering is done, the system will show the results in a list. The user can search among the results by writing on the “Search” field (magnifying glass) and it will refine the results if there are matches with any field.
On the bar above at the right, there are 2 buttons available that work as shortcut:
- “+Account”: quick account creation form access
- “+RPH”: quick RPH creation form access
The results can be extracted and downloaded to the local disk in different formats such as CSV, Excel, PDF or can be directly printed or copied to the clipboard.
Information shown in this columns:
- Management Company: the Parent account of the shown account.
- Account: work as a shortcut to access to the account.
- Main Contact: is the main contact of the account.
- Street: account address
- City: account city
- State: account state
- Quotes: indicates whether there are quotes for the account. If yes, the icon IMAGE will be shown.
- Prot.: indicates if the account is protected or not.
- PARC: indicates if there is any PARC Agreement with that account, and what is the status (enabled or expired).
- Last Act.: last activity within/related to the account
- Created: date of account creation
- Owner: owner of the account. Who protected the account at the moment.
From this list there is also access to the column “Options”, with more buttons that work as shortcuts to:
Merge Accounts
This module allows the user to merge and/or delete accounts.
When merging an account, all the related info will be moved to the selected destiny account and the merged account will be deleted.
To delete an account the same process needs to be followed, but in this case there is no need of selecting a destiny account.
The form to merge accounts is divided in 10 sections:
- Account Info
- Child Account Info
- Contact Info
- Opportunity Info
- Events
- Tasks Info
- Notes Info
- Emails Info
- Calls Info
- Documents Info
The reason for these sections is to make it easier to select and edit the information the user wants to merge. Nevertheless, these sections don’t need to be all used and can be either hidden or shown. Only the first section contains mandatory fields, which for this case it means it is the minimum information that will be transferred (merged) to the destiny account.
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Steps to merge:
- Select Account
- Select the values wishing to keep (include the Account)
- Select the Related info to keep in the selected Master Account
- After this, press “Merge button to start the process
- Users can use the option Delete After Merge to remove the account with the remaining related data
How to create an Account?
Very similar to RPH creation, there are three ways in which an account can be created: two are manual, performed by the users on the CRM or from the CRM in the Lead module, when choosing the option “Lead to account conversion”; and the automated one, triggered by the system after the Lead conversion.
- Automated: Once an opportunity is created for a Lead and closed as won, the system automatically converts the Lead into an Account.
- Manual: this option is available for those cases in which an Account needs to manually be created by a user, accessible thru the bar menu.
The system has two ways to manually create Accounts:
- From the Account menu, under the “New Account” button
- And from the “Create Account” button available from the “View Account” button on the Account module.
Either way the same form needs to be filled and is explained in detail in the following sections.
Information contained within an Account
The account information can be found in tabs that contain different types of information, and which is unique for such Account.
These Tabs are:
- Account
- Map Location
- Child Account
- Contacts
- Opportunities
- External Proposals
- Reported PH´s
- Event & Activities
- Documents
- History
- Work History
- Payments (only for Account type “Child”)
Account
This tab contains basic information about the Account. It is separated in subsections for a better sorting of the information. Note that this information is the same that needs to be filled in the “New Account Form” when creating a new Account.
Account Information
- Owner: the name of the account manager
- Company/Site: this name must be unique. After the user type the three first characters the system will show you all similar names.
- Management Company: the parent account.
- Main Phone
- Fax
- Property Type
- Región
- Website
- Email Domain
- Lead Source
- Main Contact: If working with a Child account, only the contacts related to the Parent will be able to be selected. If does not exist, must be added previously.
- Acc Payable: is the contact of the person in charge of processing payments on the client side (for whom the work is performed).
- Where Obtained
- Self Managed (Checkbox): defines that the account is Self Managed, therefore does not have Parent Account.
- Major Player (Checkbox): defines if is a big account.
- Payment Terms: used to calculate the Invoice Due Date. If the invoice is not paid before the Due Date, the customer will be charged with penalties.
- Account Description
Compliance Vendor
A special fee has to be paid to the government when Pothole Repair creates invoices for certain companies. In order to fulfill this requirement, the system allows the user to set up the account to select the Compliance Vendor (the existing agreement), define the Vendor ID, add notes related to that process and also the Fees.
E.G.: Pothole must pay 5% of the total of an invoice to the government, the company can automatically add that amount to the customer invoice by setting a “Fee value” and a “Fee type”. Furthermore, it is possible to select the ranges of dates in which the extra fee will be applied.
The fields to setup this process are:
- Compliance Vendor: this is a dropdown list where users can choose from the vendor that applies for the account.
- Vendor ID: See explanation below.
- Compliance Vendor Notes
- Fee Value: according to compliance vendor
- Fee Type: according to compliance vendor
- Start Date/End Date
Address Information
Accounts have address validation through Google Maps. The address information section has a “Validate Address” button to get the correct street and map coordinates (latitude and longitude values). States and Cities brackets are connected, and each one has a search field to easily identify values of states or cities.
- State
- City
- Street
When validating an address, the system verifies that there is no other account or lead with exactly the same address than the one added. If that happens, the system will show a notificacion and will not validate the address
Billing Address Information
Just like the section before, the validation through Google Maps is also available. The only difference here is the information on these fields will be used to create the invoices.
Usually the information is taken from the Billing Address ifnormation in the Parent Account, but can be modified if the Children account requires it.
Fields are:
- Suite
- Apartment
- Bill Box Number or PO: defines the PO number in case an invoice or something else needs to be sent by mail.
- Electronic Email Bill: defines an email address to where the invoice should be sent.
- Special Billing Instructions: in case the job is completed, notes regarding special billing instructions can be added.
Map Location
Shows a satellite view of the site location, using the Google Maps API. From here the user can see location coordinates and choose between map and satellite view (GMaps features).
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Child Account
From this section users can access and manage all the information regarding the child accounts, or existent leads related to the parent account if there were any.
The system will enlist all child accounts linked to the main one and sort them in the same exact view for the “view account” section, accessible from the top toolbar in the CRM.
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Information that can be found in this tab is:
- Child account name
- Open Quotes: if the child account has any open quote, a green “dollar sign” will be shown
- Main contact: main contact of the child account
- Address
- Región
- PARC agreement: indicates if there is any PARC Agreement with the child account
- Last activity: any kind of action triggered on the object will be considered as last activity
- Owner
- Creation date
Also, there is a column “options” with shortcuts to perform actions such as:
This is the same set of Action Tabs available in most of the sections in the CRM.
Additionally, data can be exported or copied as well to an external source.
Change Main Contact
There is a button to change the main contact for all the child accounts listed. This is a very important feature since editing the main contact will trigger the account protection and change it's owner.
When the user clicks on the button, instantly the column of “Main Contacts” is modified and each record enables a dropdown list so that the main contact for every single child account can be modified.
Contacts
This is a very important tab where users will find the contacts list for the account. Here they can access detailed information about each contact for the account and manage it through different actions.
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Add New Contact
This action will redirect to a form with the following sections
- Principal Contact Information
- Contact Description
- Address information
This is the same form used in the Lead module when adding a Lead for the very first time, and which is repeated throughout many other sections of the CRM
Relate Contact
Relate contact: this action allows the user to link to the account any contact (previous creation) within the CRM.
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This will open a pop-up window showing the available contacts and related contacts, so the user can choose from either list and add contacts from one list to the other.
For further information visit the Contacts page ADD LINK
Options
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Furthermore, users can also perform specific actions for contact from the “options” column in this tab. These are:
- Set main contact: this will instantly set the selected contact as the main contact for the account
- Remove contact account: this will instantly remove the contact from the account
- Add Call
- Add Event
- Add Note
For further information visit the Contacts page.
Opportunities
Through this tab the user can see and access all the opportunities related to the account. The Accounts can have 1, 2 or more opportunities active at the same time, unlike a Lead that can only have 1 opportunity active at the same time.
If it is a Parent account, all the Opportunities that belong to the related children accounts will be listed.
The fields available on this tab are:
- Opportunity name: works as a hyperlink to open the opportunity. Will always be the concatenation of the name of the account and the date when was created
- Contact: Main contact of the account that holds the opportunity
- Requested date
- Valid until: due date of the opportunity
- Closing Date
- Quotes: informs the status of the Quote
- TRs: amount of items that the opportunity has inside
- Amount
- Stage
- Owner
- Created
- Last activity
Also, there is a column “options” with shortcuts to perform actions such as:
For further information visit the Opportunity page.
External Proposals
External proposals that may be related to the Account will be visualized on this tab. It is also possible to create a new External Proposal and link it to the Account by clicking on the button “Add External Proposal”.
The External Proposal can be seen from this list by clicking on the Proposal # as well.
The information will be visualized in the following columns:
- Proposal #
- Partner
- Created by
- Created (date)
- Status
- Options
When it is a Parent account, all the External proposals that belong to the related children account will be listed too.
For further information visit the External Proposal page.
Reported PH’s
Shows the list of all the RPH’s linked to the Account, and allows the user to quickly work with the records using the functions available on the column “Options”
A Child Account can have only one RPH active at the same time.
But when it is a Parent account, all the RPH’s that belong to the children accounts will be listed
The visible columns of info are:
- Account/Lead: if the account is a parent account, all the children accounts that have RPHs related will be shown.
- Rel Opp: if exists a related opportunity to the RPH, the name will be shown and will work as a hyperlink.
- Status: RPH status
- Created by
- Created
- RPH Source
- Source
- RPH Assigned
- Where Obt
There is also a column named Options, which work as shortcut to manage the RPH, with buttons such as:
- View Damage Info
- Send Email
- View Audio Files
- View History
- View RPH Images
- Add RPH Images
- Change RPH status
To see the function of each button, please visit the RPH page.
Event & Activities
This tab shows the Notes, Call, Emails or Tasks related to the Accounts. The main purpose is to keep the communication flowing with the customer by logging all the activities.
If the user is working with a Child account, only the events and activities related to that account will be listed, but when working with a Parent account, all the events and activities related to all children accounts will be shown.
Objects that can been seen on this tab are:
- Open Tasks
- Closed Tasks
- Emails
- Calls
- Events
- Notes
Documents
On this tab Documents are stored and available for future download in case is necessary.
There exists generic documents related to the accounts, and also documents related to the CRM that are available in all the modules.
For further information refer to the Documents page.
History
Keeps a record of all the activities done on an Account. Any modification or information added/attached is logged in the system and shown in chronological order on this tab.
The user can see this in a list with the following columns:
- Modified Date: date and time of the log
- Type: event that triggered the log
- Owner: owner of the Lead
- Modified by: user that performed the activity that triggered the log
Work History
Keeps a record of all the Works done for the account; such as opportunity creation, opportunity closed, dispatch created, invoice created among others.
The information that can be found on the screen is:
- Opportunity Name
- Closing Date
- Location
- Amount/TR
- Dispatch Nro
- Dispatch Type
- Tech Lead
- Helpers
- Invoice no
Payments (only for “child account type”)
It is used when a customer overpays an invoice or just makes a payment without any invoice, then Pothole Repair needs to register that the customer has credit available to be used in a future work.
If the customer has a payment created, on the next invoice generation the system will detect this amount and will reduce it directly from the invoice.
Create New Payment
It is possible to quickly register a payment on the child account by using the shortcut “Payment”. The system will show a form where the user needs to enter the information and save the work; then the payment will be automatically associated to the account.
Actions available working on Accounts
Common Action
These are the actions common to most of the modules:
Available actions - Accounts Module:
Create Opportunity (IMAGE 412)
This shortcut enables the user to quickly create an opportunity related to the account. The only constraint is it will not be possible to create an opportunity, if an open RPH is not related to the account.
PARC Proposal (IMAGE 413)
Shortcut to create a PARC and associate it to the account. The process will simulate a proposal, dispatch, and invoice process creation, but the only Item on all the process will be a PARC item.
If a PARC already exists for the account, the system will validate this and will not allow a new PARC creation.
Add Child (IMAGE 417)
This is a shortcut to create a new account and relate that new account as a Child of the account in which the user is working.
The system will guide the user to the form explained in the section “How to create an account”
PARC Options (IMAGE 418)
This feature is only available for users with Admin role. It is a feature that enables to either modify the active PARC agreement or delete it.
If deleted, the system will automatically remove the dates and all the pending events that were triggered by and related to the PARC.
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