Method Community

I really must be missing something... at least I hope I am.  I'm a brand new user to Method, and there's a glaring issue, maybe even enough to chase us away from what otherwise looks like a pretty cool piece of software.

When a potential customer / customer / lead / contact / calls me, the VERY FIRST THING I want to do is **quickly** review who said what to whom last time we spoke, what's going on, just grab a quick look at the notes on that caller.  Right now, the only thing I see in Method is to go to the customer screen (if they are a customer and not merely a lead), then hunt down the notes tab which is hidden under "other" and is called from the QuickBooks database.

Seriously?  That seems like a staggering amount of torture to go through just to see what the heck happened last time we touched that caller.

Is there an easy way (I'm no database programmer, and the things I read in the forum on SQL this and nullFields that are terrifying) to pull this off?  Like in 2 seconds, type in the first name of the caller, pick them from a list, then BAM, there are the notes related to that caller.

We get into some seriously technical stuff in our business, and write voluminous notes on exactly what's going on in the application and what the customer / potential customer needds.  Without some way to look over their application details and refresh our recollection on what we discussed last time, etc. it's just impossible.

Any help, thoughts, suggestions most welcome!  Please!d

Greetings,

Welcome to Method. I dont work for method but i use the program ALOT sometimes i think wayyyy to much but its a great program.

You have two ways of dealingn with this.  Say a customer calls up and there is no activites goingn on with them, so what you want to do is go to Customer list, click on the customer and at the bottom of the screen, there should be a bunch of tabs.  Each tab will have, Invoices, Activites, Docs and such like that. Activites is like a note for the customer. So if you call them and want to record that conversation its call a activitey. 

Now say you have a job going on with this customer and you want to see all the things going on with them,  go to the activites tab, and click on the activites list. From there you will see a list of active activites.  Click on the activite that refers to the client and from there another screen pops up.  That screenn will have everything from all the notes, phone calls, docs, and stuff like that.

Hope this helps.  Just remeber, workorders, recording of phone calles any thing you want to record or do is call a activitiy and the activiy section of method is the heart of the system. All roads lead to activity section. 

John M

@eskinpa - John's suggestions sound great. If you're looking for a quick and dirty way to add activities AND get a quick view of previous notes you might have had with a contact, use the activities tab. Picture this scenario.

1. Customer calls you on the phone so you want to log the call. You don't know if they are a lead or customer but you want to write down what they are saying. You click Activities > Log Call. (notice you have a bunch of other preset activity options but I'm using the log call since that is what you're referring to in your post).
2. From the "Log Call" tab link, in the "Contact" drop down list, start typing the name of the person who is calling in. While you type in the drop down list, Method is searching all of your active contacts dynamically. This means as it starts to find matches, your list of results will shrink. It will also search across all 3 columns in the drop down list. This means if you aren't sure if contact exists but you know their company name, you can search by that too. This will also include leads, customers, vendor leads, vendors and employees in the contact drop down.
3. Once you select the contact, you'll notice the left panel pre-fills with that contacts contact information and also gives you a brief history of the contacts last activities (when, who and what they spoke to you about) as well as an opportunities and cases you might have open for the contact.
4. Fill in your comments into the comments back and save the activity. This will now be placed in the contacts history.

You can also open the contacts records by clicking on the "Lead / Customer / Vendor / Employee Info" button in the top left corner of the screen. By the way, the new version of the activity screen, which should be released soon, will have the word (edit...) next to this button. We realize this could be way more obvious.

HTH

Danny

Thanks, guys... appreciate the thoughts.  It does indeed look like the world revolves around Activities... hadn't really appreciated that 'till now.  Will give it a try...

Ed