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This part of the guide deals with how to set up your Manage360 site to get the most out of the sales tracking capabilities. This guide will cover how to create new customer accounts, how to customize and run your sales pipeline, how to deal with new leads and follow-ups, and how to run sales reports.
Before starting this section, make sure that you have gone over the previous section which covered the initial configuration.
Before you begin creating Accounts and Opportunities, there are a few things that you should set up first. You don’t need to think too hard about this configuration at first – once you go through the process of creating a few opportunities, you will have a much better idea of how you want to organize things.
Here is a quick checklist of items to set up for this section:
Make sure you go through the above list to get a general sense of the items included. As we learn how to create, use and report on customer accounts and opportunities, you will begin to see exactly how you can utilize these categories and configuration options to get at-a-glace updates of your sales pipeline and advanced analytics of the leads going through it.
The Home Page of Manage360 is the place to manage tasks. From here you can create and manage the entire list of tasks in your organization. You can create tasks for yourself or for others. This enables you to easily assign something like a client follow-up to a salesperson as a task, which ensures that they will get a task on their dashboard and optionally send them an email notification about their new task. We will cover tasks in detail in just a moment. To get back to the Home Page from somewhere else, click on the Home button or the Manage360 logo in the top left corner of the page.
A Task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time. An assignment of a task is under the responsibility of an assignee which should have a end date defined. Marking the task as completed should only be done upon completion of a task. Tasks can be linked to Accounts, Opportunities or Jobs which creates the task under the appropriate area.
To view your Tasks click on the Home button; the My Tasks view will open by default. This view displays tasks that have been added by you or for you by other DS|Manage360 users. You can change your view to the All Tasks view or any Custom View you have created by selecting the View drop down list.
All Tasks are either Future, Overdue, or Completed and to quickly identify this their Due Date is color coded as follows:
Entering new customers into Manage360 is a foundational step in the system – every sale begins with a customer, so your first step is to create an account for that customer. To create a new account in Manage360, navigate to the Contacts > Accounts menu. This area is where all of your customer accounts can be found. From here you can search for accounts, use views to filter your list of accounts down to certain cities or regions, and update certain settings for accounts in bulk like the assigned sales person or email later/print later preferences for invoices sent to QuickBooks. For now though, we will hit the blue “New Account” button in the top right corner.
When creating a new account, there are some required fields which we must enter to move forward. The account needs a name, of course; you may name your accounts however you like, but typical formats are LastName, FirstName for residential, and the company name for commercial. We next need to enter the address, phone number, and salesperson. After that, there is only one more requirement to create this account: a contact.
To understand the difference between accounts and contacts, you can think of the account as an entity that we are selling to (like ValleyViews HOA, or “The Smith Residence”), and the contacts as the people we actually know at the account. These could be employees of the commercial account we are doing business with, or they could be homeowners for a residential account. Either way, we need at least one contact to be entered. Give the contact at minimum a first and last name to move forward (if you named the account using LastName, FirstName format, you will notice the name has already been entered for you). If you want to add more than one contact, select the green “Add Contact” button below. You can select one contact to be the “primary contact” (the person you see by default in certain places in manage360 where the account’s primary contact is referenced), and optionally have a separate contact be the “billing contact” (by default, the person’s name that shows up on the invoice). You will have the option of showing all contact names on the proposal if you are doing an estimate for a residential customer, so don’t worry too much about assigning the primary contact.
Fill out the rest of the details account details as required. Below is an explanation of some of the special categories on the account details tab:
Once you have filled out the account details to your liking, you should move on to the Billing Info tab so we know how to bill the client. From here, you can enter a custom billing address that is separate from the main account (jobsite) address, or link the billing info for this account to another account. Linking the billing info to another account is typically used in situations when you have a client that owns multiple properties (each property is a separate account, but all billing info gets routed to the main account), or if you are dealing with an HOA.
You may also define the sales tax rate for the account here, which will affect the tax rate at which taxable items come on to estimates created for this account. As mentioned above, you can set default sales tax rates for commercial vs. residential accounts in Settings > Configuration, and also create new tax codes in Settings > Taxes.
Payment Terms is a field that will be displayed on any invoices made under this account, and this detail will be pushed to the Payment Terms field on the invoice in QuickBooks if you choose to send it over to QuickBooks. Payments Terms is a required field in QuickBooks, so if you are linking QuickBooks with Manage360 you should make sure the payments terms you have in Manage360 match exactly with what you have in QuickBooks. You can create/edit your list of payment terms in Settings > Payment Terms. You can also optionally show the payment terms on your proposals.
The final thing to check out on the Billing Info tab are the two checkboxes under Invoice Delivery. These two options, Print Later and Email Later, match with a field that appears on invoices in QuickBooks – so you only need to think about these checkboxes if you are linking Manage360 and QuickBooks together. If you have “Print Later” set on the customer’s account, then an invoice you make for them will also say “Print Later”. If you send that invoice over to QuickBooks, it will also say “Print Later”, and be added to your list of invoices to be printed.
There are several other tabs available on the account page – if you can only see details and billing info, then you have not saved the account yet, and the additional tabs will appear once you hit the save button. Below is a quick overview of what you can expect to find on these tabs, and more detailed explanations of the things contained within these tabs will be covered elsewhere.
Once you have everything set up, you will be ready to create opportunities for your accounts. Check out this video for a complete overview of the workflow for creating and managing your opportunities and sales pipeline.
