User Review
( votes)One of the most critical parts to any business is the day-to-day customer experience. I realize that goes without saying. Without revenue, how would a business survive? Dynamics GP has a limited weak spot when it comes to the sale side of the system, at least from an expediency standpoint, in cases where the customer is waiting on the phone or standing in front of you. This creates a necessity for companies to seek solutions that will enhance Dynamics GP’s sales capabilities.
To say that SalesPad saved my life would be a little over dramatic, but to say that SalesPad solved the majority of issues that my clients faced on the sales side of GP, along with promoting better business processes and increasing customer satisfaction, that would be a much more appropriate statement. I confidently wear a T-shirt that says SalesPad to promote one of my favorite “go to” solutions for our client base.
SalesPad is an ISV solution (add-on) which we implement for clients who are seeking a personalized, efficient customer service experience for their users. Its out-of-the-box functionality allows users to achieve feats that would require heavy customization to GP. SalesPad contains vital functions that make it my go-to for companies with significant customer service environments. Those functions include but are not limited to:
- Sales document workflows to move a document from start to finish, quote to order to invoice, with rules, flags, and any other combination one could dream of. This promotes a business process in which everyone can find where a document resides from start to finish in a sales process. Insights include answers to questions such as:
- Is the Picking Ticket printed?
- Has the item shipped?
- Have we collected payment?
- What do we do for the backorders? Is the item purchased?
- Quick access to information and lookups. The lookups in SalesPad function like a contains function in SmartList would. The search is quick, efficient, and can run through hundreds of thousands of records in seconds. This is because of the simplified business logic in the SalesPad application.
- In any window from customer lookup, sales document lookup, to item lookup one can type in part of any field and the lookup will locate all of the relevant data for the user. This makes order entry a snap since the user can quickly find an item based on any relevant data in the items setup. This is all done from the data entry line instead of having to go from one to another to another.
- Multiple Documents open at one time. This feature is a huge benefit for several clients because they can work on the large project order for a customer, take a call and enter a new document without closing the original work down and then having to locate it again. It may seem insignificant to some but is a huge deal comparing this to 3 to 4 times a day, each day, for a year.
- Customizable interface per user. I realize the idea of customization makes some nervous, but in this case it’s very easy. A user can add or remove any fields they don’t need to see. This allows for a very simplified entry window without clutter. The ability to add fields and move them around also promotes ease of entry for the user. In this case the user could move a relevant field closer to the beginning of the entry and move another down the line that maybe is less relevant or isn’t filled in until later in the order cycle.
- Unlimited user defined fields. This is a great benefit of the application. This function allows any company to add new fields of multiple formats including full note fields, phone numbers, text fields, and selection lists. These fields can be built into the workflows, added to reports and forms, and used in many other ways. Every business is different and needs to track different types of information. SalesPad allows this very easily out of the box.
- Built in report writer with emailing, faxing, PDF printing, export to Excel and more. One difficult area in GP is the report writer. If you haven’t had to deal with this function, good for you. However, it is a common hurdle I deal with. In most circumstances the changes a customer needs are simple, at first. As the company matures, the business starts to function in new ways. Maybe they need customized forms per customer, or vendor. Maybe they need to add user defined fields. Maybe they want images to print on the form. There are a multitude of different situations that the GP report writer quickly falls out of scope on without major customization time required. The SalesPad report writer solves this issue with an interface that is more user friendly but deep in capabilities which relate more to Crystal or SQL reports than that of the GP report writer.
Those are my highlights of the software solution, and I have only really covered the order processing / customer service benefits. SalesPad also ties into purchasing with a PO generator and a function that can automatically create order points and order up to based on your own calculations. It even has inventory adjustment and transfer capabilities, ties into manufacturing, and includes a CRM module. We tend to promote Salespad as the solution to simplify the sales side of a customer’s business, but it quickly evolves into so much more as the customer gets acclimated to the product.
