Transcript
as the host of this. If you joined one of these before in the last few months, today I'll actually be presenting and I am going to be talking about custom fields and invoices and some of the things you can do with them. Joining me is my colleague Marbeth. Marbeth will be answering questions and if you want to ask a question, please look in the top right of your screen for a section called questions. Use that, don't use the chats, the reason being that the questions bit is much more nicely organised and we can write answers in line to you and it also saves them all really nicely for us so that if there's anyone we can't get to during the live session, we can follow up with you afterwards. And I will be doing a bit of showing you around custom fields in Platform PSA, what you might have heard called ASIO until recently and showing you how they can work with workflows just to give you an idea and I'll also be mentioning a couple of other recent updates and improvements we've made and I've put Q&A here down at the end but really just go ahead and ask me questions as I'm going along. And if you haven't been to a Product Office Hours session before, firstly thank you for trying it out. We do these every Wednesday, they're always at the same time, that's 11am eastern time and it's always somebody from the product management team here in ConnectWise showing you either things we've released recently or best practice or kind of practical how-tos, the idea is to get people from the product team more in touch with you so we can hear from you, your questions, your feedback and you can hear directly from us and give us that feedback. So one thing people always ask is, is this going to be recorded? Yes, it is being recorded. If you are watching live, you're one of the people who signed up, you're going to get sent that recording from a GoToWebinar, it usually comes within a few hours to a day afterwards but even if you don't see that email, don't worry, it'll be on our YouTube channel, that's just the ConnectWise YouTube channel, at the end I'll show you a link for going directly. And let's just get to it. So custom fields, they are a really important and long-running feature in ConnectWise PSA and until quite recently they weren't available inside of the new PSA that we're building inside of Platform. That's something that we changed at the end of last year and it will now show the custom fields that you set up in the classic PSA. So I wanted to go through kind of what is there, what isn't there, what's kind of maybe coming a little bit later but what you can already do with it today. And what I was thinking is that, you know, custom fields obviously are very unique, they are unique to each company that uses them, you've probably got your own reasons for using custom fields, your own ways of using them, you know, there's a million different possibilities. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of inspiration by showing a really simple workflow I built with the Workflow Builder that's also available inside of Platform and hopefully that can give you some ideas. As for where to find them, let's go over from these slides actually into my live demo. So for the time being or rather the current situation is that any custom fields that you set up in classic PSA, so you go into setup tables and then you go into custom fields and then you choose, you know, which kind of area, which page, which box you want to add a custom field to, they will now show up in the new Platform PSA. We are working, it's one of our main, the kind of last big things we're doing to get everything fully matched up is we are working on moving our setup tables over into Platform so later this year you'll be able to manage your custom fields directly inside of Platform and you won't have to come back to classic PSA to do it. So just bear that in mind, current situation, set them up in classic PSA, they'll be in classic PSA and they'll work in classic PSA just like they always have and they will also now show up inside of Platform. So my example today is I'm going to use Invoice, we have them available in products as well, which my team also works on, but I'm going to use Invoice today and I was trying to think of, you know, how might I use it, why might this come up and I had one idea, very simple idea, is in the overview section of an invoice I'm going to add a check box called follow-up. So for some invoices we're going to want to mark these as requiring special attention, requiring a special follow-up to the, you know, the client who is getting that invoice. So I've created a check box, I've labelled it follow-up required, made sure to select to actually display on the screen because you can add custom fields which are only, which are not visible on the screen, you know, you might use them via an API but not have them in your UI, this will be visible and this is going to get added to any invoice for any location or department. And now to see that on an existing invoice that's already filled out with some information, so now I've moved over into the platform PSA and that was added to the overview box so that's the main box on the left here and if we just scroll down we see it here underneath the notes section follow-up required, it can be ticked and unticked and notice it was already ticked once I started editing it the option to save those changes became available on the top right of the screen with the save button there. If we instead add a new invoice, so I'll just create a special invoice, something like a miscellaneous one, you know, imagine if we were setting up, just we had to make a special charge to this company Photon Pharma for some reason and you can see a lot of it's already populated with, you know, the kind of standards for the invoice and we've got follow-up required there is which currently is ticked by default and okay great, I've ticked it, it appears on the invoice but what do I do next, you know, why is it actually important? Well, one way you could use this is that custom fields are available to the workflow builder so maybe you've used workflows in the kind of classic PSA, Connectwise Manage as you might still know, we have in platform this really nice modern visual workflow builder and what I've done here is I've created a very very simple workflow so basically create a service ticket so, you know, make a task that appears as a ticket on our board for one of our techs to pick up and follow up to this invoice but there are all sorts of different actions we could be taking, there are many many more steps and conditions that we can add to the workflow but I wanted to just show you something really really simple. So the trigger here then is when a new invoice is generated and there are many many different triggers available that relate to our own PSA but also some of the various products that we integrate with and we can go in and just take a look at this. Now obviously that's going to run every time an invoice is generated but we want to check specifically for this custom field I created so the details, the really important part then is to add this follow-up condition so a condition could be grabbed from that left-hand menu there and of course you can put in different conditions at different stages of the workflow as it says you can use it to create multiple paths. So what I've done then is I've created just one condition which is check is that follow-up actually there and I think to show you this best actually I'm going to leave this pre-example, a pre-made example open. Let's just go into a new one because then I can show you some of the details of this. So if we just start by creating a new workflow and we can put it down as a billing category. So as you can see I've created a new workflow put it down as a billing category. So as you can see the trigger is already there because obviously any any workflow of this type needs to start with a trigger. So if we click on that we can see a few different options here and if we wanted to change it and I'm going to put in invoice into the search box and you can see here you know we could do it for updated invoices we can do one for invoices being past due so that's using a field that already exists you wouldn't even need a custom field to do that. Let's do new invoice generated and I can use the invoice I created previously as an example one. So this what I'm doing now is just a little test so basically validating the invoice. So I'm going to create a new invoice and I'm going to create a new invoice so this what I'm doing now is just a little test so basically validating will this actually you know kind of work in normal situations. So let's take that and you see we've got a success now obviously it's got a warning sign around it because it's not connected to anything so now we're going to add in a condition and link them up. And so you see as soon as I add a condition it starts off with two options a capsule which leads to a stop with a stop symbol there and then a condition path so this is where we're going to set up you know what do we what when do we want this to run this is where we're going to set up our filter basically for checking for that custom field so we can click on there we can also delete it with that little icon here and we'll call this follow up. And now we need to go down to the condition path so I just clicked on that smaller condition path label beneath the main one call that follow up as well in this case we've only got this very simple path so I don't need to worry about you know labeling things very separately from each other. Now this is an important thing to note if you go in here so this is all the different fields that exist in that invoice if you're using a custom field the first thing you need to do is to simply select custom fields so you won't see the custom field itself appearing in this first menu that's a really important thing to note it's actually something that I hadn't thought of or checked when I first did this I won't make sure to go back and read the documentation properly so choose custom fields first and then we've got here field name field value or just simply a field so if I choose the field name I can then add the name of my custom field and I'm just going to check exactly how I wrote it there we go follow up required so I'm going to paste that in here and so you see we've now got field name equals follow up required and then let's add another row I'm sorry I could also simply pick it from the list by using the plus there we go now I need to add another rule with add sub rule there we go field value true so if you're using a checkbox a checkbox is a classic boolean just means the output's either true or false so if it's checked it's going to be true and I do apologize I'm on my laptop screen it's a little bit squashed today um basically we've got the name of this path follow up you know we've got a rule in here for a custom field we've selected custom field as the first thing to check for and then having selected custom field then we can go down and look at all of our custom fields we can choose follow up required and then finally we can say is the value of that field we want it to be true so at this point let me go back over to my pre-made one so you can now see there we've got that follow up true condition that I was just talking about and then catch all simply means anything that doesn't match that rule so if the follow up field is not checked if it's false it will run down that catch all path and the workflow will simply stop there and if it is checked it'll then go ahead to an action so you see action appears in this left hand menu you just contract them on like that I'll delete this one now and for my example I've decided to create service ticket simply because it's one of uh you know the most obvious things you could do inside of PSA is to create service ticket and then you can just click on it and it'll create a service ticket and then you can just click on it and it'll create a service ticket most obvious things you can do inside of PSA is to create service tickets so every time we make one of these invoices as long as we have that thing checked we'll create a service ticket if we just scroll down I've made it very very simple it simply creates a ticket called follow up on invoice as it's the onboarding and licensing board it sets it the company to the same as the bill to company of the invoice because obviously they're the ones who you want to follow up for when it comes to paying an invoice to build your company and it'll be new but you could do more you know you could put a timer in there let's say and then inside of the timer you could choose something like adding a delay so you could add a delay to this rule and have it run after a certain number of days so you can just choose days from that menu there and give it like three days you could add further tasks so you could add a series of different tasks that apply to different parts of PSA or different actions that apply to different parts of PSA the idea I'm trying to get out clearly is that just as custom fields are customizable and can be shaped to whatever you need to do so can how you so can a workflow and how you decide to use those custom fields and interact with a workflow is very customizable so whatever makes sense for your business in terms of what do you need from your invoices what the custom fields achieve for you you can make them make them work with this and yeah I just mentioned there's a couple more things uh just while we're here because I haven't done one of these about the um billing and invoicing for a little while we're working on you know kind of several things some other parts that we've been making improvements to is we've brought over tax codes from classic PSA and that setup table is already here and available in platform PSA so if we go into settings we go down to setup tables and you can easily find tax by searching there you can now get your tax codes you can actually migrate them from classic PSA into platform or you can set them up manually and we have also been working on our integration with QuickBooks online so if you use the QBO integration that's that little app that sort of sits in between PSA and QuickBooks online itself where you can kind of see your batches and send them over we've made some usability improvements that I know people have been asking for it um it's just some very simple things like being able to to view and select large groups of batches um save how many you want to appear on the screen if you want to have you know 1 or 5 or 10 or 25 at once you can do that too and what we're currently working on next is making some improvements to credit memos allowing you to create credit memos from a closed invoice and also on saving the one price for opportunities which I know some people are needing to um manage how they do their reporting so I'll just briefly stop my screen share for a bit and just check how we're doing with questions Ashley asked will this webinar be recorded yeah it'll be recorded actually this will be sent to you automatically or also be available on our YouTube usually either later today or tomorrow I'll show at the end how to get to YouTube um I also wanted to while I was here um ask you all that I'm often looking for people to speak to we're working on a lot of big things that will need your input um I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear me but if you can please let me know and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you ask you all that I'm often looking for people to speak to we're working on a lot of big things that will need your input um we've got some big plans for invoicing and how we create invoices coming up we're also looking at the ad products um flow if I go back onto the screen share I'll show you what I mean by that and we do want to make some improvements there as well so if you are interested and you would be up for talking to me about some of those things please let me know you can either just with the question and answer thing here inside go to webinar uh just leave your name and say yes I'm interested um in doing user interviews I'll be able to get your email from the registration list later so you don't need to publish your email for everyone and the other thing is I do use the virtual community so if you don't go to virtual community I'll show you that in a minute and I just posted there today actually looking for some volunteers so if I go over to invoices I'll just show you what I mean about the ad products so let's take our example invoices it's still open if I go over to products pretty quick access menu there on the right you see we've got no products here at the moment I can click on add products on the right and when I do that we open this this little module pops open where I've got a search and I can select things in search go next and enter a quantity we are looking if we can improve this a little bit just in terms of maybe what information is available or how that search works it's it's pretty good it's pretty flexible as a as an input box but I do wonder if we could do more with the results that come up and there's also we may want to add some other capabilities to it so that's one thing I'm looking for anyone who's used to using this and maybe has some feelings about if it could be better or actually if you're happy with the way it is now I'd like to talk to you about that and as I said the other one is is invoicing because we've got a lot of is invoicing because we've got invoicing is a huge topic how they're created templated how different things combined and that's something we're doing a lot of work on so do use to keep the question section so indicate if you're interested in doing that all right so yeah I said I would say about YouTube and recording so we add all of these to our YouTube channel connectwise on YouTube's very easy to find and we have a playlist just for product office hours where we put all of these sessions you can also use that QR code that's on screen right now to go there and in March we've got some really great sessions coming up we've got a couple of sort of members of the connectwise family haven't done product office hours yet so we've got Scott from service leadership index who's going to be talking next week on March the 4th about financial port financial performance and budgeting using service leadership and looking at how basically the top performing MSPs are using it we've then got RMM coming up they'll be looking at the new platform device details page so going back to what's new in the platform and then on March 18th we've got ScreenConnect, Catlin from ScreenConnect is going to be talking about the privilege access part of ScreenConnect and endpoint security so it's a hugely important topic and I'm looking forward to that one and then we'll have something else from RMM at the end of the month so if you want to sign up for the next session that service leadership index one here this QR code right now will take you there but the thing I always plug is in the connectwise university if you go into there go into resources look for the calendar we always list all of these product office hour sessions in the calendar and we also have lots of other things so the education team have loads of things going on they have their own webinars there are ask me anything sessions there are all sorts of live demos of things the calendar is a great place to find those and and sign up for them so we've got a few more questions Marbeth has been answering them so yeah Brian we can follow up with you about RPA so okay well we've got just a couple of minutes left so if you were going to ask a question me still got a minute or so to do it so please do let me know and if anyone wants me to jump back in to the screen share for a couple minutes I could also do that Michael that question about if you are delaying a workflow I will ask the workflow team about that and we can follow up with you by email so yeah so it's a good question and I'll talk to the workflow team and see what they say and then we can get back to you so yeah I also check sessions there are a lot I know there are people who do various kinds of like education sessions on on building workflows so I'll also check about that we can combine that into the answer for you okay well thank you very much everyone thanks for your questions and as I say if there is anything we didn't get to now we can get your emails from the sign up so we'll we'll follow up with them by email this will be recording up on YouTube and as always please do sign up for more of these project office hours like I say every Wednesday 11 EST and thank you mother for answering those questions in the Q&A section while I was demoing all right have a great day everyone
