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Under review
Assignments in People card
I am posting this question here instead of via the Service Desk because it might be of interest to other Smart Projects users too. The People card is still a bit unclear to me. My questions are:
- Where do you predefine the (a) Account Manager and (b) Project Coordinator so you don't have to do that for each project? I can find the setting for the Sales Person and Project Manager per customer.
Example for Project Coordinator:
We have PM team leaders for client groups. I would thus like to use the Project Coordinator for the team leader and the logged in user is automatically set to be the Project Manager for the newly created project. This way, the Project Coordinator can better monitor his team and, if requested, can be copied on certain project-specific correspondence in the notifications. - How do you differentiate between the client project contact who receives all project-specific correspondence and files and the client invoice recipient, if the invoicing contact is not centralised per client but is project-specific?
Example:
The contact at the client's advertising agency is the project contact for correspondence and files, but the project confirmation should also be sent to the end client contact who will receive the invoice after project completion. Currently we have to add the end client contact who will receive the invoice (and is thus the principal contact for accounting purposes) as the Client Main Contact and the agency contact as Additional Contact. To avoid having to shift around who receives which communication and delete certain contacts from the notifications in edit mode, it would be much more elegant to divide up the Client Contact Persons in (a) Project Contacts and (b) Invoice Contact (which can be prepopulated with (a) but can be changed to differentiate between the two).
Customer support service by UserEcho
Sancho, are you not using the accounting contact option? For any client, you can go to "Main Data > Invoicing > Payment Terms" and you can mark any single (or many) client contact as the accounting contact. That person(s) will receive the invoice but not the project files.
Some challenges with this include that you'll need to list your contact as a contact with the advertising agency. Also, the accounting contact is set at the client level. And while it can be updated at the Invoice level, the PMs can't make any change to this.
Hi Mark. I do know of this feature, but the problem is that this does not cover our needs. Most of our customer contacts want to receive the invoice themselves and will then forward the invoice inhouse to their accounting department. That is why the central accounting contact for invoice purposes in XTRF does not help. If in addition to adding just one or several names, you could set the Accounting Contact to be the main project-specific client contact, then we would be in business.
@XTRF: Any ideas?
What I'd like to see is to have the Accounting contact added to the People card. And if there is no client accounting contact, allow for a setting to default to either the main customer contact or the main client contact. Would that help your needs?
If you used our Periodic Job for automatic client invoicing, an option there lets you create invoices per contact person:
Send Invoice to is populated with Contact Person from project (smart) or task (classic).
In other words, you end up with as many invoices per client as there were orders by various contacts representing that company.
We tried that feature out when we were in implementation phase, and I don't fully remember why it didn't work for us, but it didn't. It may have been in part that some of our clients we have many small jobs, and we didn't want to risk sending 50 invoices to them for a short time period. That may have been it, but I'm not sure. I'll try to think more about this. I remember thinking this would be the solution, but it wasn't what we needed for some reason.
While I like the idea of automatic invoicing, Smart Project is not yet advanced enough to accommodate such an automatic action. The reason is that some invoices have to be configured manually because several projects that are grouped with a Maser ID have to included in the same invoice. This will hopefully be addressed in the future when XTRF adds a project folder tailored to handle multi-batch projects.
Because of this constraint, the proposed solution does not work for us for the time being. Thanks for the idea though.
Exactly. That is what I had in mind too. Just wanted to see whether I was the only one.
So in that case, XTRF should either pre-populate the Accounting Contact in the project People card with the Accounting Person defined on client level, or if that Accounting Person is undefined, then the main project contact of the client. That serves both user groups. Any differing assignments on client side can then be made manually in the People card.
Any ideas on Project Coordinator and Account Manager?
What you describe is exactly what we need.
As for your project coordinator issue... I don't think I fully understand. We do assign what we call our team leads, as the project coordinator for many projects. I see that as a manual hack, but not really a limitation. I could see adding more functionality to this area, but this hasn't really be a focus of our internal needs at this point. Could you explain your needs a bit more? Maybe it will spark an ah-ha moment...
We plan to use the Project Coordinator role for the same purpose, i.e. for the team leader. In other words, when a certain PM creates a new project, his/her team leader should be added to the project as Project Coordinator by default. Currently I do not see how this is possible. Only the Sales Manager and Project Manager can be configured to be added automatically upon project creation. Adding the Project Coordinator manually for every project is a bit of a nuisance, in addition to a notification being generated for each project, which spams the inbox of the team leader.