I often get requests from clients they want to see ALL activity for a client, contact, or Sales Rep. It’s kind of hard because Calls, tasks, emails, meetings are a all in different modules.
Was thinking about creating a module for something like “Activities” and then either workflow or after save hooks to create a record in the Activities module each time a call/meeting/task was enterd… Then it would be easy to pull reports based on account, contact, tasks, emails, meetings, etc.
I get there are advanced reporting plugins that can do this. Kind of looking for a native way to do this without external software if I can help it.
Has anyone done something like this?
I use Mautic quite a bit and this is how they keep track of activities. You can even create and push “web activities” (website page visits) to suiteCRM in a similar way. I’m thinking the concept is good. I’d have to also do something that deals with changes and deletions, but I think I could do that with workflow maybe too. I could probably do most of it with worklfow and not even have to code anything.
nice idea to use Workflow - it is surprisingly powerful, I find as I’ve been using it more and more recently.
see ALL activity for a client, contact,
I’m probably missing something- doesn’t the Accounts and Contacts pages not already do that - showing in Activities and History sub-: panel; all the Calls, tasks, emails, meetings)
Yes, it does in the subpanel, but there is no way to generate a report lets say of “What was all the activity for account B this month” or “What was salesrep A’s activity this week” , etc. (At least none that I know of).
Or for example, what was the total activity for the sales team this week? I’m not a big fan of this type of activity management (or surveillance), but I get a lot of requests for this type of thing.
Looking for some more ideas here to develop this further…
I created a custom module for activities. Then I created a workflow to populate it with Calls (I plan to do meetings and call attempts as well). The goal is to get an overall picture by account of activity on one report.
The problem I’m running into is that the Parent relationship of the call may not be to the account. It may be to the opportunity or the contact. I really want to be able to capture by account.
I know I could do an on save hook, I was hoping to do this with workflow. Currently I’m making the parent type and parent ID of the call equal to the parent ID and parent type of the activity like so…
And I’m able to get this far with the report… Ideally I’d like to relate each one back (except for leads) to the account.
I ended up doing an on save hook. So now I can create a Sales Activity in my custom module for any email type= sales, call type = sales, meeting type=sales or task type = sales to give a complete picture in one report of all sales activities by account, by region by rep, whatever.
Each time a record saves in another module that meets the criteria it creates a SalesActivity record in the SalesActivity module. I know this seem like weird solution, but it just allows so much richer reporting, especially for clients to really want to monitor sales activities.
Why not create a custom fly-out in an Account record when it is opened? Have it show the activity. Use JS & CSS for the flyout and PHP to make the record requests from the database. I do something like this but on Leads List View for status. When the mouse is hovered over the right-hand flyout it ‘flys-out’ and shows a report/synopsis of what is going on with Leads. When the mouse is moved away from the synopsis the fly-out retracts and hides. You could easily do this with an individual record. We use a collaboration field also to document calls, emails, and other communication with the customer in our Leads and Accounts records.
