Designing efficient fields for reporting

[AndreaF]

Greetings all,

We are looking to make our system more efficient, so that we are able to provide our customers with any statistics they may require regarding their service contracts. With multiple clients, running multiple industry specific softwares....and a wide variety of network configurations, this is becoming quite a challenge.

I am trying to avoid creating such an overload of fields that people will want to be minimal when initially creating the ticket......but I do need all the additional information I can gather to make the reports sort properly. The only suggestion that has been brought up so far is to break down each account into several categories, so that most details can be chosen at the start under the one field.

I would be very interested in hearing if anyone else has come across this issue, and if so....how did you organize yourself? Many thanks

[asmbit]

Re: Designing efficient fields for reporting

just a quick though of reporting, wouldn't graphs be a better presentation for your clients?
internal use is okay, you can put up with all the text. But when you show a client their monthly expenses/usages. They would rather prefer it done in a graph or minimal on text. Just wondering if CommitCRM might be interested in adding this into the custom report feature?

[brills]

Re: Designing efficient fields for reporting

In a Yahoo forum a user stated that they submit their PSA grahical report to their client on a month-end basis. I emailed the user and they're going to email me a copy of that report tomorrow, Tuesday.

I have submitted some of my month-end reports to CommitCRM in hopes that it will give the design team at CommitCRM some ideas. I advise that if any of you have good reports that you manually create which could be integrated into a good month-end report to clients that you email those to Support @ .

In this slow economy our most important item is customer retention, so we're looking for any and all ways to show the value of what we're doing for our clients. We're looking to improve the reporting of our MSP services on our monthly invoice, we're looking for better graphical ways to show what we're seeing.

I'll keep posting back to this thread with more information as I get it.

Thank you,
Brian Williams
brian@advantechnw.com

[AndreaF]

Re: Designing efficient fields for reporting

Our requests are often for specific factors - i.e. how many calls have we received regarding one software program, how many printer failures in a specified time period... etc.

These reports need to be refined to track industry-specific software programs or ongoing printer problems - and while it is relatively simple to track the printer issues in the "type" field, it is more difficult when we have a specific software program we need to monitor.

Right now I have an Industry-based Software tag for the "type", then can narrow it down on the details tab to allow tracking a particular software program. I might also be able to create enough choices in the "type" menu to cover every single software that each company uses... but by the time we account for each application every client uses, we are looking at a lengthy list.

It is the actual setup I would be interested in hearing about - did anyone else find a way to track a variety of software programs for a number of clients....and how did you break down the original set up?

Thank you