Microsoft CRM
A new financial year, I figured that I needed a better system than Excel and the Outlook calendar to track my working life. Sure, I have MYOB at the backend for accounts, but my system is clunky and inelegant - especially considering I am supposed to be cutting edge :)
So, what to do. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, I get a free copy of MS CRM. I thought "Fantastic, a handful of wizards and a lost weekend or two, and I should be right on track!". Oh how wrong I was.
CRM is incredibly powerful, and configurable. This sounds great, but what it means is that "out of the box" it is not going to be a perfect fit (I mean, nothing that attempts to do this will be 100% perfect out of the box).
Key to my issues is that the system apparently lets you invoice and quote - the two things that I wanted to do most. However, and this is the mother of all "however's", you can't actually send these quotes out, or even print them. "OMGWTFBBQHAX??!!11" I hear you ask, my question exactly.
It was at this point that I decided to crack out my super special MVP handshake and go on the prowl for an MS CRM MVP, and I found one. When I was first looking at this, and looking through my Technet Plus, MSDN, and Partner downloads, I found several versions of CRM, and had no idea what did what. At that time, I searched the MVP directory (which should be publicly available here -> https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx) for the answer to my question, and found Guy Riddle
Initially, I asked Guy a simple question as to "What is going on with all these versions" and got the answer quite simply of "They are all totally different, but you should be looking at CRM". Right, sorted - I have that in my Partner kit, winner.
I installed it, followed the guide (as much as any real IT guy/gal does) and started plugging in my data - wondering what I am going to do with territories, and static price lists - and ending up with something that looked like another version of my outlook contacts. So, I tried pushing it, creating an invoice for the new month for Client Number 1 and emailing it off - the email went, but with no attachment - turns out printing an invoice from CRM just aint possible (well, it can be, you can get custom reports going, but it isn't designed to do this "out of the box").
So, in a last ditch hope to try and get myself together, I sent another email to Guy, asking for help - I was wholy expecting that it would lead to me contracting his company to deploy CRM for me properly at whatever the going rate is. Guy emailed me, and we made a morning appointment.
I have to say right now what a great fellow that Guy is. He gave me over an hour of his time to go through CRM and showed me what I should be looking at; how to configure custom entities, their forms and attributes, and so on. He also confirmed that invoicing through CRM can be problematic, and that it is not something he uses (with custom reports). His solution was to use Excel as per normal, but to attach the emails to CRM using the Outlook client! Righto, good enough for me, that sorts out the majority of my accounting needs in CRM, but surely half an accounting system is not the end use of this giant of a program?
Not at all. I started this expecting it would be my accounting system with a few bonus sections, and maybe a bit of a knowledge base. Instead, Guy has shown me how to effectively remove all the information about my clients and my work and drop it into CRM - enabling me to not only forget a whole heap of information without consequence, but also to become more organised and plan details, and even more importantly allow me to easily hire somebody to step in and know everything I know without me having to say a word. Now we are talking! I have been planning to hire a junior for a little while now, especially now that I am getting busier - but what good is hiring someone to save me time if it takes twice as long for me to show them what they have to do?
Anyway, as of now, I am building a massive database of everything - configurations, hardware registers, software registers, etcetera - and just had to post about it to let all you other poor folks who are screaming for a solution to your business issue know that CRM isn't the unweildy beast that it appears. There is hope, and I would like to again thank Guy Riddle for his time and I whole heartedly advise any of you out there hoping to get the most out of CRM to call him now!
Kieran