WORK[etc] Web App Blog

As a growing business owner, are you getting the most of your data?

One of the major benefits of WORK[etc] is that your CRM, Projects and Billing data is contained inside a single platform. With all of your small business CRM data inside one application, you can create powerful reports without the need to swivel chair between multiple IT systems.  With this in mind, we created the Smart Lists feature that allows you to slice and dice your data to generate real-time reports and lists of information that are meaningful to you.

Smart Lists let you create complex searches using multiple variables and save them on one page.  You can share these search results with your colleagues and enjoy updates in real time as your data changes.  The following examples are just a few of the many ways Smart Lists can bring valuable insights to your business.

Smart Lists for Sales CRM

Smart Lists are a great tool for the savvy sales rep.  With the capability to report on Contacts, Companies and Leads, it's simple to create meaningful sales reports in minutes without the need to resort to exports from multiple systems and playing with data in Excel spreadsheets.

Let's take a look at Sarah, the West Coast sales rep for a software company.  Sarah's interested in creating a list of her most important clients to follow up on.  Using Smart Lists, in a few clicks, Sarah can get a list of:

• All clients in California and Washington
• With active leads
• Where the customer is tagged as High Priority
• With a closing date within the next 45 days. 

After the Smart List is created, Sarah can run this report on demand to get a great list of customers she needs to focus on.

Smart Lists for Projects

Smart Lists are a great way to report across multiple Projects giving you the ability to stay on top of trouble areas before they become big problems.

Tom is the Senior Partner  of a law firm.  As Senior Partner, Tom doesn't work directly on cases, but often wants to check on the status of cases for his three major clients.  Using Smart Lists he could
create a report for

• His three major clients
• With High Priority ToDos that are overdue
• Sorted by Task Owner(s)

Using the report results, Tom knows exactly which tasks are late and can follow up with the overdue task owners to find out the cause of the delay.

Smart Lists for Customer Support

Actively managing support cases is an important part of ensuring customer satisfaction.  Smart Lists are a great way to mine your Support Cases enabling proactive management of your customer needs.

DreamIT Inc. makes custom servers for clients in the US and Canada.  The Customer Service Manager Brian thinks he's spotted a disturbing trend with power supplies from a specific vendor over the last few months.  Brian created the following Smart List report to confirm his suspicions:

• All Support Cases with
• Customers who purchased the particular server product
• Supplied by the suspect supplier
• Purchased in the last six months

Using this data, Brian can make an informed decision on whether there needs to be an investigation on this particular supplier.  The ability to report across Support Cases and purchase history show you how WORK[etc] brings the power of combined web based CRM for billing and help desk software.

As illustrated by the examples above, Smart Lists are an extremely flexible tool that lets you report on a variety of object types including Contacts, Support Cases, Invoices, Projects and even Tags and Custom Fields.  Smart Lists are a great way to get quick insights for your business, on demand.

Is your company using Smart Lists in an interesting way?  Be sure to Like, Share and Tweet this post and share with us how Smart Lists are helping you get more from your data.