Method:Classic General Q&A

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

edward — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 17:53:51 GMT

if you could get Ms. P. Phan to contact me in regards to this that would be great!

thanks,

Edward

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

Method_Justin — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 14:38:38 GMT

Hi Edward,

If you'd like to hire someone to do customization, you might want to consider an in-house consultant from our Professional Services team. Let me know if you're interested in that route and I'll have your account manager reach out to discuss the details with you.

Alternatively, you can hire a Method Partner to do the work. We have a directory of our Method Partners here.

- Justin

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

edward — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:38:58 GMT

Apparently I am not a programmer, and was wondering if you could point me in the direction of a programmer that could provide such a service that is trustworthy.

thanks

edward

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

Method_Justin — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 15:12:27 GMT

Hi Edward,

Sorry for the late reply. Customers and Contacts are two separate tables in Method, and have separate screens as a result. The Customer is the main one you're concerned with for QuickBooks-related purposes, they're the entity to which you attach Estimates, Invoices, etc., whereas a Contact would simply be a point of contact for a customer. For example, you might have a Customer "Joe Schmoe", but have Contacts for both Joe as well as Joe's receptionist Alfred.

If you would like to add birthdays for any Contact, then you'll want to add the field to the Contacts table. If you just want to track it for the main Customer, then you'll want to add the field to the Customer table. You'd then add that field to the appropriate screen(s).

From there, you can add actions to the Save and Save & New buttons on the New Customer or New Contact screen that create an activity in the Activity table for a week before the selected birthday. You could then create a follow-up activity manually for the following year when you complete that activity (send the card out). This would be the easiest way to accomplish what you're trying to do.

You could check the current and following year (or any other) to see if there are any activities for that Customer/Contact on the date your birthday activity should be on. If there isn't, you could add an activity. I'm not sure where would be best to place these particular actions (perhaps the Edit Customer / Edit Contact screen, but you'd want it to be somewhere you access semi-frequently, to ensure that it gets run at least once a year).

The logic for creating multiple activities gets pretty messy, particularly if you ever want to delete all the birthday activities at some point in the future. For this reason, I'd recommend creating one activity for the upcoming birthday and manually creating a follow-up when you complete that activity.

Hope this helps.

- Justin

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

edward — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 20:57:00 GMT

i would like to create a reccouring activity for each year, but would like to use the customer/ccontact edit screen to imput the birthday, and then from there it would create the activity(s) into the calandar to remind me to send out a birthday card.

I currently do not have any of thier birthdays, so i would imagine that i would create this for the specific client/contact.

Re: adding a birthday field to cients

Method_Justin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:05:45 GMT

Hi Edward,

You could add a "Birthday" field of type DateTime to the Contacts or Customer table, depending on whether you want to be able to add birthdays for each contact or just for the customer. You can add this field by going to Customize > Tables / Fields and clicking Edit Fields... for the table of your choice. You can then add that field to whichever screens you like.

For creating an Activity to send out a birthday card, there's a few ways you could do that. It really depends on how you'd like to go about it. Here are some things to consider:

How many activities do you want to create? Just one occurrence for the current year, or an occurrence for each year going forward?
What about a button somewhere which creates these activities for all your customers? Or a button on the Customer/Contact screen which creates a birthday activity for that specific Customer/Contact? Would you like these to be created when you save a Customer/Contact?

- Justin

adding a birthday field to cients

edward — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:23:44 GMT

I wanted to find out how to create a birthday field in the client/customer fields?

Once that is complete I wanted to find out how to add the above date into the activity

calandar, and add a remider to send out a birthday card in a week in advance.

thanks