Method Community

hello method friends,

I am trying to generate a list of wholesale customers with their contact info that have ordered in the last two years. I have tried generating reports with quick books and spoken with intuit directly bit in order to do so I will have to perform a number of convoluted tasks and ultimately need to employ pivot tables in excel. I am fine with doing that but I thought I would see if method integration crm could do this an save me a few steps.

in a nutshell all I need are my wholesale customers that have ordered in the laat two years and their contact info. Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Hi Scott,

With our Report Designer tool, you can make your own reports or edit the stock ones available in Method. Click here for an article about the Report Designer which has the download link to install the program, and also a few tutorial videos to learn how to use it. Once you have got your hands dirty a bit, if you still have questions about the using the Report Designer, feel free to post back here. Remember that once you have created your report in the Report Designer, you can generate it in Method with a Generate Report action. 

Jason

Thanks Jason!

I followed the link and watched the videos and was able to make some custom reports fine but I was unable to generate a report with just wholesale customers. If that is possible I then need to arrange them accrding to most recent order so that the customers who have not ordered in a long time are on the bottom. Or, if it would be easier, I would need to filter out customers who have not ordered since a particular date.

What do you think? Will this be possible to do with the report generator?

Hi Scott,

To get you started, you can filter your reports directly in Method. If you edit your Generate Report action, you'll see filtering options. In your case, it may be best to filter for "Wholesale" in the CustomerType field if this is where you categorize your customers. See my screenshot below. In this example, I used a stock report called CRM_ContactsList, and put the aforementioned filter on the report. 

By pressing the and Where button, you can add additional filters, including one that could filter out customers that have not ordered in a while. Hopefully this will put you in the right direction!

Jason

thank you Jason! That is exactly what I need!!! But I dont know how to get that screen that you are on or how to run the report from CRM. Can you help me get there? Sorry, I feel like this is pretty basic stuff, I'm just not sure exactly what is going on:(

Hi Scott,

Not a problem! We have some customization webinars that may help. Click here and scroll down to the Customization section near the bottom of the page. Basically, you need to choose a screen in Method where you want to generate your report and customize it. You can customize a screen by right clicking it and choosing Customize. You'll then be taken to the Screen Designer. You may want to throw a button object on the screen and then add a Generate Report action to it. The Generate Report action is where you'll find the filter options that I included as a screenshot in the last post. If you need help, you can also consider speaking to a Method in-house consultant, or a Method Solution Provider. 

Jason

thank you again Jason!!! I was able to make the button and generate the base report with wholesale customers, however, when it comes to adding the "and where" I don't see a way to filter out the customers as you mentioned in the previous post. I read through the filter options several times and am probably reading over the option I need to use, would you please tell me the option you had in mind? thanks again for everything this far! I am really excited because I feel like I am getting close to solving this problem:) I have been working with intuit for several weeks now trying to do this and I have has very little luck:( I should have tried speaking to method first!

Scott,

Glad you're getting close! If I understand you correctly, you need to also filter your list by contacts that have been invoiced in the last two years. This is a little more complicated, but definitely doable!

First thing you will need is a new field in your Entity table. It could be a Yes/No field called RecentlyOrdered. The trick is to loop through the Invoice table and update your RecentlyOrdered field to Yes where the DueDate is greater than two years ago. To make things a little simpler, you could put a DatePicker object on your screen, and loop where the DueDate is greater than the value in your (Value From Screen) DatePicker object. 

Make sure you link your RecentlyOrdered field from your Entity table into your Contacts table, and then you can filter your Contacts report by that field!

Try this, but let me know if and where you get stuck and I can explain a little further. 

Jason

Thank you again Jason! I do feel like we are close!!!

I understand exactly what you are trying to lead me to do which is very exciting:) I was easily able to create the recentlyordered field under entity but I do not know how to loop through the Invoice table. I have tried several things but to no avail. In the same vein I don't know how to further loop with datepicker and duedate but I am assuming once I can do one I can do them both. Aslo, I tried to link the newly created recentlyordered with the contacts table just to see if I could at least do that using the create linked field option but contacts did not show up as an available option so I think I need a new approach to that as well.

Sorry to ask you to walk me through this. I am just not able to apply what I learned in tehe webinars directly to this issue, but I am sure that is toatlly a problem with me just not being able to translate the information.

I may have spoken a little too soon, i found some info on the CRM help page about making loops. i am going to work on it tonight but I would still very much appreciate your counsel as well!

Hi Scott,

Unfortunately I can't help too much more from the forums, but I heard you booked a consultant to help with this customization job. This is great because you'll be able to figure this one out and more! I hope you find the session valuable.

Jason