WorkflowMax Implementation: Review and Improve Systems

Ok, following on from our last blogs, we now need to look at what’s in WorkflowMax, and review to improve this. Hopefully at this point you have been putting live information into the system including such things as timesheets, jobs, quotes and invoicing. This will give you a healthy body of information to report on and use within your business to improve efficiency.

There are a couple of areas where you can modify the system to fit your internal workflows, and I highly recommend you look at these as soon as possible after you implement and go live.

Custom Fields and Templates

Firstly, WorkflowMax has a large set of options for adding ‘custom fields’ to records such as customers, suppliers, jobs and more. A custom field is used where you want to record a piece of information which does not it in the standard areas allowed for in simPRO.

Example: You add a customer in the system and there are fields for name, address, email address and many more - however you want to record their favourite sport. There is nothing in the system by default to help you here, but this is where custom fields come in. Navigate to Admin > Custom Field and then click New Custom Field from the left hand column. You can then pick the ‘type’ of field you want to record, which is particularly useful if you want to limit users ability to type anything into the field (i.e. you might only want to record a number). In this sports case above, I would select ‘dropdown list’ and then in the next page I can list out the choices for the user to pick from (rugby, football, tennis, cricket etc.)

Once this is complete, I can navigate to any customer in the system, or set up a new customer, and there will be a nice shiny new field to record this information. In addition to this (and we will get to this later), I can then report that field back out if I need to at any point. This is particularly useful for recording internal business KPI’s on jobs.

Your second main area of review and improve to look at in WorkflowMax is Custom Templates, which are primarily used to edit and customise forms within the system such as invoices and quotes. There are a huge amount of ways in which you can customise your invoices and quotes, however you will need a good knowledge of Microsoft Word and an understanding of mail merge tags to use these. There is a huge amount more information on this here.

If you are at all unsure, either get a professional to assist you, or at least set a new dummy template up and work with that, I’ve seen far too many customers play about with their default invoice template and then not be able to send invoices until they get it corrected up.

Reporting and Review

Finally, I would recommend all WorkflowMax clients to spend a full half day (at least) performing a system review and reporting after about a month of use. One month is ideal because you’ve had enough time to get good information into the system and perform most tasks, but it’s early enough to make any adjustments or corrections that you need to.

The first set of reports that you want to review are available from Reports > Financial Reports. For a first run our suggestion would be that you run one copy of every single report and familiarise yourself with the information, and what this report refers to, as well as decided whether it’s useful for your business to review each month going forward.

In addition to this, you can also create your own reports from Reports > Report Builder as required. Here you can follow the instructions in order to dynamically create any report that you wish. First, you name the report, then select the fields to record, then filters, and finally who within your business can edit or see the report. Below is a simple example I created to list out current jobs, cost and billable amounts. Again, as with templates if you are at all unsure please create dummy reports first or engage a professional to help.

Hopefully this four part series has been useful to give you a guide to WFM and implementation. As always, if you need any specific advice or hands on support you can contact us on info@ocisudigital.com or browse our website www.ociusdigital.com.au and send us a note. You can also follow us @ociusdigital for tips and tricks.

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.