Search results by user ID 6689

Can not get calendar appointments to sync - undescriptive problem occurs

sbonner — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 14:45:49 GMT

I can not seem to get calendar integration to work in Outlook.

I am using Outlook 2010. Some of my coworkers use Outlook 2013 (the desktop version, not 365). Calendar syncing does not work in either version.

I can create an appointment in outlook, and then click either 'Add to Method' or use the 'Syncronize'. It will bring up the table that asks me to select a contact. I choose a contact, and go on to the next screen where I tell it just add an activity for that contact. The third screen has all of the contact's information pre-populated, and I can write a short little email blurb. However, when I click 'Add to Method', I start getting a chain of issues.

After this point, I start getting a train of 'could not update one of your appointments' problems. The first issue is that "Assigned To:" always defaults to the email address that we use to log in to Method and the plugin, but what it's really looking for is our name. So this has to be manually changed each and every time., and there isn't a way to change what this defaults to. This isn't the show-stopper, though.

The second error I get is extremely ambigous. "We could not update one of your appointments because value x in the field y no longer exists. Please choose a new value and press OK to proceed." I have no idea where "field y" exists, or what would cause this error. If I try to just select 'Okay' and skip through it, the NEXT problem that comes up is "We could not update one of your appointments because the value 2014-04-20 17:00:00 in the field Start Date no longer exists." At this point, the last two errors just cycle repeatedly, no matter what I put in that date field.

This issue occurs regardless of what contact it's assigned to, or if people are just trying to sync to their calendars (I would prefer that they be able to just do the latter, none of my workers are going to agree to fill out forms every time they want to set an appointment).

Any help would be more than appreciated.

Re: Report Designer Rendering Differently

sbonner — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 15:44:43 GMT

Hi Adam!

Thank you for the response!

I found out that a lot of my issues were caused by using fonts which were not supported on Method's servers. I don't know how I missed this given that it's the first link on your help pages for Report Designer.

I also tried using property fields to realign lines and fields, and this did seem to solve all of my drifting issues.

Line Order in Estimates & Invoices

sbonner — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:55:46 GMT

I believe I had asked this question before sometime last year, but could not find where I had posted it (so it may have been in my imagination). If I did, I sincerely apologize!

I'm getting eaten alive by our sales folks over the ability to go back and permanently reorder line items on estimates and invoices. Sometimes, they'll add a ton of items to their estimate, and then decide once they're done that whatever is on line 12 MUST be on line 7 instead. Going back and redoing the entire estimate is obviously out of the question.

So, I went into the customization screen from estimates and added a line order field to the EstimateLine. Then, I told the estimate to sort by the line order field.

This only works 'sorta': sometimes when you swap the numbers on two line items and update, it'll completely ignore the changes you made. Sometimes it'll try, but will end up swapping the wrong items. Rarely, it will actually work. I noticed that it absolutely does not like to swap anything that's in the last position.

Is there a more eloquent way of doing this? Am I going about it all wrong? (And at this point, I'd love to request a more intuitive drag-and-drop feature!)

Report Designer Rendering Differently

sbonner — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 15:09:23 GMT

When creating a new report, I noticed that the report will render very differently between the design view and preview view in Report Designer and the actual, live 'Print Preview' inside MethodCRM. This is creating a world of OCD-aggravating problems for me.

For example -- drawn lines will change width or height; labels will drift out of position (sometimes dramatically), and font styling will either get stripped or altered. What's worse, is that some of these rendering issues can actually change report to report -- one customer estimate's header fields may be in one place, and the next customer's estimate's fields may be 30+ pixels off in another direction.

I can't predict any of this behavior by using the preview pane in Report Designer.

I could care less about some of these issues when it comes to internal report usage, but this is a huge problem for our estimates and invoice forms, and customer-facing forms.

So, to the question: What are some common mistakes or overlooked issues that can cause this?

Are there some 'best practices' that can be used to prevent styling problems? Or is this all just an unfortunate bug or limitation of the Report Designer?

Re: Customized Screen reverting to default settings

sbonner — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 16:42:27 GMT

Hey Justin,

Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for, and I was just not looking at the right fields.

I am having to tackle the wealth of customizaion requests from my company, and am learning this on the fly. Besides the webinars and help files, do you have any additional sources of in-depth documentation on customization?

Customized Screen reverting to default settings

sbonner — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 16:57:50 GMT

I am trying to learn how to customize some of our screens.

I started with the Estimate screen. I copied it and renamed it so that I could start editing it. The first thing everyone in my company wanted was for that little checkbox in Estimate screens that reads "Wait for Sync Approval?" to be checked by default. No biggie, I thought -- I went into my new estimate screen, found that field, and changed the tick box to default to ON.

I opened the screen and it appeared to have worked. HOWEVER, the moment I select a customer under "Customer Job," any changes that I made to the screen revert back to their defaults -- 'Wait for Sync Approval' goes back to being unchecked.

Is there something else I should be looking at, whenever a screen has data that can pre-populate other fields?

I figured I'd look to see if maybe that value was getting changed as part of an action when Custoemr Job was filled, but I also can't figure out how to open the Actions screen.

Re: 'Copy' transaction feature, other functions

sbonner — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 20:19:07 GMT

I'll experiment with the closed orders and see if I can come up with a safe-for-the-books way to duplicate them. Hopefully, that'll lead to a solution I can present to the boss, and if it's workable, I'll share it here. To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised that a 'Copy this Order' option wasn't already available, since Method has so many other well-done features.

As for the price-books, I really need precise pricing per item, because the primary use for this is going to be GSA pricing -- so it's not like a percentage discount. I'm figuring that this isn't natively supported -- and short of duplicating the SKUs and marking them as special -- I was hoping someone had found a work-around or third-party way of doing it.

'Copy' transaction feature, other functions

sbonner — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 16:47:46 GMT

Hello!

I am setting out to learn how to use Method so that I can come up with an onboarding solution for the rest of our company.

We get a lot of customer requests to simply repeat one of their previous orders. Rather than having sales techs rebuild a whole new estimate from scratch, is there a way to copy a pre-existing estimate or invoice?

Also, has anyone found a way to simulate the functionality of pricebooks? I know this is not a native feature of Quickbooks, but it is a feature of many CRM packages, so I was hoping Method would have found a way to imcorporate it. Essentially, many of our customers have negotiated for special pricing that we must honor, and it has always been a hassle to look up each individual SKU on a given estimate or invoice to apply that specific pricing.