Method Community

*The following question came in via email and was posted on our forums with a response to follow.*

Looking for some pointers on custom portals. Didn’t find much in either of the documentation areas. We have a set of companies, each with a set of users. We’d like a portal where a user logs in, and is then presented the list of leads from their own company; if user1 from CompanyA puts in a lead, user2 and user3 from CompanyA should see it, but user4 from Company5 shouldn’t see it. We, of course, being the wholesaler, would see them all. Where should I start?

Hi there,

Before we direct you to using the portals, I have to ask if these users will be doing anything else other than creating leads and viewing them once in a while? If so, maybe it is best that we consider allowing them to log in as Method users rather than portal users. There are two main reasons for this.

It may be easier to just take advantage of our Share Records feature that is already build in to the leads and customers area. You can define the what leads are shared between users and you as the wholesaler can view them all. These are built in features!

It's just a thought for you to consider what makes more "cents" economically.

Now, if you wanted to proceed with portals, you would have to create screen or tweak our screen for lead entry and include fields to specify what company the lead belongs to (i.e. Company A). Once that is in place, continue to alter the screens, grids, drop-downs and other ares to filter based off this data field.

I guess what I"m looking for is to be told what would work best for us.  We're brand new to Method, you see.

In Quickbooks, we have, oh, around 8 or so customers, each with 1 to 1000 jobs.  Quickbooks deals with this correctly; Method does not seem to.  It sees 3000+ individual customers, which happen to have the format of CompanyName:JobName. 

We were told that Method would deal with this quite happily.  What we want, is for it to be dealt with in the obvious way.  We'd like company representatives to be able to log in, be it to Method, third party portal, whatever, and see all jobs/leads/etc that belong to that company.  Other company reps would log into their own company, and see all their subjobs/leads/whatever.

Hi there,

My suggestion is to have them log in as Method users. This would provide you with more off the shelf features, more robust and flexible options in the future.

As you start to ad your Method users to your account (Customize>>>Users) you can set up the sharing between them in step 6 of the wizard when you edit each user. We actually have a webinar on this topic as well (click here).

As for the customer vs job, this sounds like it's just a matter of identifying that Method displays its customers and jobs all in one list.

Company ABC
Company ABC:Job 1
Company ABC:Job 2

Etc…

If you wanted to filter the grids to show only companies or only jobs that can be done. But the nice thing about our existing grids is you can search by both.

Searching for "Company ABC" will yield the company as well as all the jobs.
Searching for "Job 1" will yield only "Company ABC:Job 1" in this example.

Method and QB sync these customer and job lists so we do handle it the same way but just display it slightly different…but that is all customizable and much more flexible in Method.

By the way - if you have not scheduled your free Initial Setup Services call with your Method Rep I would ask them about it. :)