CRM for The Small Business Enterprise

Act! has offered a relatively high level of customization for many years - businesses have long been able to create custom Word templates for merge documents, custom reports, and even create custom fields in their databases.  Starting with Act! 2005 an additional level of customization became available.

Tip #4:  Creating Custom Activities
Starting in Act! 2005 introduced in fall 2004, Act! added the ability for businesses to create custom activity types that fit their own business processes.  Historically the types of user activities that could be scheduled and logged in the Act!  system were limited to Call, Meeting, and To-Do.

That worked fine to a point.  If your business required that you regularly schedule meetings with differing goals (Sales Meeting as opposed to Project Status Meeting for example), being limited to just one ‘Meeting’ type made schedules and calendars less transparent than they could be.  Further, if you use reports, and were looking to create a report that only included a particular type of meeting, you couldn’t do this with just a single activity type of ‘Meeting’.

Act! 2005 changed this by allowing businesses to create custom activity types.  You can call them pretty much whatever you like and create as many as you need.  Further, you can add custom result types to each activity you create. 

To access this ability, from the Schedule menu, select Manage and then Activity Types.  (Be sure to read the details about this part of Act! in the help system before proceeding.)

Tip #3: Create Custom Tables (Act! v10.2 and newer):
More recently, starting with Act! 2008 patch 2 (ver 10.2), Sage added a HUGE capability to Act! that further distances the system from the runner-up competitors:  The ability to create custom tables.

I will offer some clarification in case you do not understand what I am talking about. 

If you envision a single tab in a Microsoft Excel workbook, in database terms this is called a ‘table’.  All of the contacts in an Act! database are in a table, whereas histories are another table, activities are another, etc.  Through some ‘magic’ behind the scenes which is beyond the scope of our discussion here today, the Act! database engine knows how to ‘connect’ the right history or activitiy records to the correct contact when you lookup records.

Historically, Act! has offered the ability to be customized such that new fields could be added to the contact or group record.  And that was exactly what you were doing – adding an additional field to the already existing contact or group or company table. 

In many cases this was fine.  Where it becomes a problem is when you need to track multiples of some entity – an example being Account Numbers, or Product Serial Numbers, or Support Contracts, etc.  How many Account Numbers do you need to add?  3?  or 8?  What happens with the inevitable day when one of your contacts needs more ’slots’ than you already have?  Add yet more fields?  Further, how do you search for a specific value across all these fields?  Not very easily as it turns out…  You have to run a lookup for the desired value for every field you created becuase there is no way to know which ’slot’ it was put in.

Custom tables side-step this dilemma by essentially allowing you to create new tables – ‘Accounts’, or ‘Product Details’ or ‘Support Contracts’.  At the time of creation you specify which primary entities (contact, group, or company – or any combo of all) are the ‘parent(s)’ of the new table – i.e. – where the newly created tab will be visible.  Custom tables appear as tabs alongside Notes, Histories, etc., one per new table created.

This new level of customization is a significant advancement for the benefits for your company using Act!, allowing the creation and support of a much wider scope of business process automation than was available previously, while still maintaining a very low software and implementation cost.

A few things to keep in mind regarding this feature:
1)  You have to be using Act! 2008 version 10.2 or newer.
2) This function does require purchase of one of the various table addons for Act! as Act! itself does not have a built in table builder tool.  (There are about 6 or so tools offering various levels of additional capabilities and pricing depending upon the level of functionality your business desires.  These tools are all relatively inexpensive, and most vendors offer price breaks depending upon the number of users you need.)
3) The Act! report engine does not support reporting on custom tables in the current versions of Act!  (There is rumor that Act! 2011 may offer this ability – this is a rumor only!!)

M. Scott Schaffernoth, ACC
www.winnovative.com