WorkflowMax Implementation 101: Setup Your Software

In our previous article we looked at the scope required and areas to think about before setting up WorkflowMax, and now we will move onto the setup. We will attempt to cover off the main areas of setup which MUST be looked at prior to putting anything live through WorkflowMax, and talk about some of the effects that these have.

Admin Setup

All of the setup discussed in this area is available from the Admin tab in WorkflowMax (right hand side of the top toolbar). We recommend you review the areas below prior to using the system as they can have a profound effect on workflows and how you handle information.

• Users - make sure to invite everybody who needs access within your company. This is done by going to Admin > Staff, and then filling in the information. Name, email address and other personal information is all fairly obvious, but pay close attention to the security settings at the bottom of the page as you can set EXACTLY what each user has access to. For example, an accounts person may need to invoice and run reports in the system, but has no access to leads or quoting. Also ensure you have accurate cost rates and bill rates per employee.
• Preferences - review each and every option here and use this time as a good opportunity to set some ‘business rules’ for how you are going to work going forward. If you don’t currently have a standard answer for some of the items in the Preferences section, PLEASE think about them. I’ve seen too many businesses who have no processes and procedures and therefore everything lies in the directors head, that’s what we are keen to avoid by using a job management system such as WorkflowMax. There is a particularly good video tutorial on the Preferences area in WorkflowMax Support.
• Personalise - there are some useful fields in this section for customising things such as email defaults, email addresses to use for customers and also branding for your system. Although not essential to customise before using WorkflowMax, it’s a good one to check through.
• Notifications - there are lots of ways to use notifications in the system, both for some fairly standard events such as a job finishing right through to advanced things like cost vs budget allocations. Check through the two main tabs here and add notifications as you wish. If you are unsure, I recommend to clients to set up many notifications to see how useful they are, then remove the ones you feel that you don’t need.

Xero

As a general rule for the Xero connection you will want to do the following:

• Connect WorkflowMax to Xero (Admin > Connectors > Xero)
• Import your contacts (there is a button in the top left for this)
• Disconnect Xero.

This way you can get all your clients into WorkflowMax to start testing, but without anything that you do having an impact on Xero. Given that Xero contains the one source of truth for your financial accounting, the last thing you want is someone in your business testing things in WorkflowMax and pushing false invoices or other information into Xero.

Once you are ready to run live, you will need to come back to this page and re-connect Xero, and then run through the fields to set it up. I won’t touch specifically on the options here for Chart of Accounts and similar as these are best set up with the advice of your accountant or bookkeeper.

Tasks and Costs

Tasks and Costs are the building blocks of WorkflowMax, and used both for Quotes and Projects. Tasks are predominantly labour based items, whereas a cost is usually a physical item. For example, in a creative agency a task might be ‘concept design work’, however a cost is the printing of brochures, or the booking of a venue.

Both tasks and costs can be imported from an Excel spreadsheet, and for initial setup we certainly recommend you use this option as it can be VERY time consuming to set up potentially hundreds of tasks and costs.

For a task, the key things that you need to know are the name and description, cost price and sell price (both per hour, as they are labour centric), and finally the Xero tracking category and Sales Account, both of which allow detailed reporting.

For a cost, it’s very similar, with a name and description, cost and sell price (this time per unit, rather than hour specific), Xero tracking and Sales account - plus the additional fields for a purchase account and tax code mapping.

Next Steps …

This should give you plenty of ideas on setup of your WorkflowMax system to match your business processes, the next stage will be to run through some sample jobs and test everything for yourselves, as we will cover in the next article.

WorkflowMax implementation partners will get you set up for success from day one. Get in touch with a WorkflowMax implementation partner to help you get everything up and running smoothly.