Using Opportunities in Other Ways
This week I worked with an accounting firm that wanted to track how they handled documents sent to them by their clients. They weren't actively using the Opportunities feature, so I helped them to rework (and re-program) that feature in ACT! to meet their needs. As each document comes in the door, it's arrival is entered into ACT! as an Opportunity... tracking the type of document, indicating what forms or letters must be completed on the client's behalf, what accountant in the firm is responsible for the completion, and what stage the document is currently in. When the document/form is returned to the client, the opportunity is closed. Now they can use the Opportunity List view to actively track the status of all their in-house projects by staff member. The Days Open feature can also help them track the average turn-over rate for all their work by firm employee.
I would be interested in knowing a bit more about this. I had looked at using activity series for this but it didn't work well.
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Using Activity Series to plan and track the execution of steps is an excellent use of this feature. However, Activity Series should primarily be used to plan activities requiring a scheduled follow up. In this particular example, we used the Opportunity feature because there was no set time between the different steps. Instead the client wanted to track the location of the client documents in his office (which employee had the document, what was the status, where they waiting on a client signature or piece of information or was the internal employee still working on the paper work). Using the Expected Close Date also gave the management team an idea of when the document was expected to be completed so that if the client called, anyone could look at the Opportunity List and get an idea of when the client could expect the completed work.
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