If you have ever wished you had a better way to keep track of the status of transactions in Sage 50, and to automatically notify people when the status changes, The “Track It” feature in Sage 50 Quantum could be just what you have been looking for. Since many of you who are now on one of the industry specific versions of Sage 50 Premium will soon be moving up to Sage 50 Quantum, I thought this would be a good time to show off a feature that is only available in Quantum.
To get started, the first thing you’ll need to do is set up your list of possible statuses for each type of transaction. Open the Maintain menu and choose Workflow, then Tracking Status Settings. Down the left side of the Tracking Status Settings window you can choose a transaction type: quotes, sales orders, sales/invoicing, receipts, credit memos, purchase orders, purchases/receive inventory, payments, write checks, and vendor credit memos. After selecting a transaction type:
- Enter the status in the Name field. This can be anything up to 32 characters, such as “Waiting for approval” or “Ready to ship”, etc. (If some statuses have already been set up you’ll have to click the Add button first.)
- If you want this status to automatically be assigned to all new transactions of this type, check the Use as default for new transactions box.
- At When this tracking status is selected, automatically assign the transaction to: you can choose the person or role who should be responsible for tasks at this stage. If that varies, leave this blank. It’s important to note that this field lets you choose from the user names and security roles that you have set up in Sage 50, not your employee list. You can only choose someone who has at lest edit rights to this transaction type.
- The Next Steps box can hold instructions or notes that should always accompany this status.
- Click the Save button and your new status will be added to the list on the right. You can use the Move Up or Move Down buttons to change its placement in the list.
- Click the Add button and repeat the process until you have finished building your status list.
Assigning or changing a transaction’s status is usually done from the relevant transaction window. In a task window, such as Sales Orders, the Track It panel will display on the right side of the window. If you just see a grey bar with the words “Track It” click the bar and it will expand to show the whole panel. Choose a status from the drop down list. You can also assign the transaction to a user or role, and you can enter notes. If anything was entered under “next step” when this status was set up, it will show at the bottom of the panel. At the top there is also a history tab that shows the complete status history for this transaction.
Of course if you had to open the transaction every time you wanted to know the status, it wouldn’t be very useful. Fortunately, there are several place the status, notes, and assigned-to can be found.
In the general ledger reports (I know that seems like a weird place for it, but that’s where it is) there is a report called Transaction Detail By Status. It shows and can be filtered by status and assigned-to as well as transaction type and the other usual filters.
In the List windows, you can add columns for Tracking Status, Assigned To, and Tracking Note. Lists can be sorted and searched/filtered by any column you have displayed. This allows you to easily see the status of a transaction or see all transactions assigned to a certain status or user.
My Dashboard is like the Business Status page in Sage 50 Premium and lower. But it is more flexible because you can create tabs to organize different views of your data. First we want to look at My Inbox. If it isn’t showing, click the Customize This Page button at the top of the window, select My Inbox from the list and click Add. Click OK to return to the dashboard. In the My Inbox section you can choose to show transactions “assigned to me”, “assigned to another user/role”, or all transactions. Status, Assigned To, and Tracking Note are all shown. You can click on any column heading to sort by it. You can read long notes or add new notes by clicking on the Status Notes field. My Inbox is also the only place other than the transaction window that you can change a transaction’s status or assign to another user. You can do either of those individually by clicking on that field, or as a group by using the check boxes in the first column to select transactions and then clicking the Change Status Or Assigned To button.
Transactions by Tracking Status can also be added to the dashboard. Click the Customize This Page button, select Transactions by Tracking Status and click Add. You can also use the Move Up/Down buttons to reorder the sections. This section will show a summary of transactions by status. You will choose a transaction type from the drop down list, If you want to show a summary for more than one transaction type, just add the Transactions by Tracking Status to the dashboard as many times as you want. You can even rename them in the Customize This Page window. Once you set the transaction type for each section, it will remember your setting.
In the Customer Management Center, the Vendor Management Center, and on My Dashboard, you can add sections that display each type of transaction for a certain date range. Those sections are also customizable to show the Tracking Status, Assigned To, and Tracking Note. Just click the Customize button at the top right corner of that section and choose Settings.
Select a column from the list and click Add.
There is still one more thing you can do to add visibility if that’s not enough. You can set up notification rules. From the Maintain menu, choose Workflow, then Notification Rules. First, select a transaction type from the list. Then choose a condition that must be met for this notification rule to kick in. You can choose from:
- Is assigned to
- Tracking status is changed to
- Assignee and/or tracking status changes
Depending on your choice of condition, you will be allowed to select which statuses or assignees this rule applies to. You can enter a description for this rule. Finally, you can choose who you want to notify when the conditions are met and include a standard message.
Notifications appear in the lower left corner of the main Sage 50 Quantum window. When you have new notifications the link displays in blue and shows how many new items you have. You can double click the notification in the list to open the original transaction, or click the email link in the last column to start a new email with the notification message.
