Star Micro Systems Discussion Forums

Dear Michael,
I have been doing some testing of the Prospects Sheet and I like what I see. It is easy to use and provides much more "at your fingertips" information than our current filing system for Prospective Clients. I like that you can instantly add any of them into the regular database.
I have a few minor issues.

Could you please tie in the help so that pressing F1 at the Prospective Screen brings up the Prospective Help rather than the main help?

What would you place within and how would you use the Referral Code and Source Use on the Marketing Tab?

Problem:
I was adding a second prospect - inputted the address information - and needed to add some status types (pending, accepted, etc.) to the dropdowns regarding prospective status. I Added them to System - Prospects - Status Box. I then saved and returned to the prospective window. When I returned to the Prospective box they were properly added to the Status dropdown. However, when I checked the Referral Code and Source Use they suddenly had the same dropdowns. I returned to System - Prospects and found that somehow when I saved the Status Box information it copied that information to the Referral Code and Source Use boxes. I deleted the information in both boxes and saved, then returned to the prospective sheet where the Referral Code and Source Use dropdowns had returned to being empty. However, the address information on the second card was now gone and a third prospect card had been created which only had the information in the upper-right called "Deleted2". Strange eh?

Thanks again Michael!

Sincerely,
Michael Lerner
Lerner, Moore, Mammano, Strasser, and Silva
www.injuryatwork.com
(909) 889-1131

1. Could you please tie in the help so that pressing F1 at the Prospective Screen brings up the Prospective Help rather than the main help?

Good point - the Prospects module was the last major module I had added prior to the release of Version 4.0. I have already made the fixes so that prospects accesses "context sensitive help." This will be available in the next minor release 4.1.1 right here on the web. Thanks for noticing this.

2. What would you place within and how would you use the Referral Code and Source Use on the Marketing Tab?

The concept behind prospects lies in the flexibility for creating various reports. You may not use these right away but may see a need for them later on. The idea is that you may generate reports over just about any field or multiple fields. Therefore, you may decide to use the referral code and/or source as to whether the referred by is from a union or group in a union, etc. For example, you may decide to run a report of ALL the prospects that Jon Doe referred to you. Or you may run a report of all the prospects that Sally Smith referred to you. But, maybe Sally and Jon belong to the same group or union and you just want all of the cases that both Sally, Jon or anyone else in that group or union referred to you. Therefore, the Referral Source and Code may be assigned codes from a union or another group.


3. Problem:

Regarding this strange situation - I would say that if everything is working now, it's probably best to Save the prospect card you are working on before going into Configure System Defaults to change combo/dropdown defaults for the Prospects sheet. In general, I made it very easy to flip windows when adding prospects because I knew that offices will have a need to do this while putting people on hold on the telephone. I have made a few minor changes and fixes since the original 4.0 release (I'm not sure if you have the latest version 4.1.0).

Mike