Customer Relationship Management (Sales) in MRPeasy

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Transcript:

In this video, we talk about working with customers in MRPeasy.

It shows:

• How to gain a clear overview of all customer orders
• How to quickly estimate costs and lead time for a quotation
• How to track and process an order from quotation to delivery

Overview of customer orders

The CRM section of MRPeasy is designed for the sales manager.

The Customer Orders section is for tracking all orders from the quotation until delivery and payment, to make sure that products are delivered on time and properly invoiced.

There are several ways to get an overview of all the orders.

The sales pipeline view is very intuitive because it moves orders from left to right as they progress to various statuses.

At first, when a customer is waiting for a quotation, the status for the order is “Quotation.”

When the order is waiting for confirmation, extra information, or pre-payment, the status is “Waiting for confirmation.”

Once the order is approved for processing, the order is “Confirmed.”

The salesperson must manually assign these three statuses, but MRPeasy automatically assigns all the next statuses.

Once production has been planned, but not yet started, the order status will change to “Waiting for production.”

When a worker starts working on these products, the status will be automatically changed to “In production.”

When all products are in stock and ready to be shipped, the order status is changed to “Ready for shipment.”

When a stock worker reports picking up the products from the stock, the order status changes to “Shipped and invoiced” and it disappears from the sales pipeline.

In contrast, the list view is much more detailed and includes other information like:

• “Product status,” which indicates if products are booked, expected on time, or will be delayed
• “Invoice status,” which shows if and how much of the order has been invoiced
• “Payment status,” which shows if and how much of the invoices have been paid.
• And other information, like cost and profit, current workstations, associated manufacturing orders and more.
• Plus, it’s possible to filter the view, change which columns to display, and in which order these are displayed.

In addition, as a third view, you can see the whole list of ordered products, and detailed information for each line – for example, which items are ready for dispatch for partial delivery.

Overview of the next 5 workdays

Another beneficial view is the deliveries view for the next 5 workdays, which you could set up on a screen in your office, to always see which products must be shipped on each day.

This report is among the “All customer’s summary reports” of the “Customers” page.

Working with quotations and saving a request for a quotation

When a prospect requests a quotation, click “plus” to record the request.

We can choose from a list of previous customers, or we can enter a new customer.

Let’s say we have a new customer.

At the customer’s details page, you can also enter addresses, contact email, phone, and other key details.

We can, but don’t have to, enter all the details, like a default payment period, a customer credit limit, personal contacts and more.

Let’s save the customer’s details, go back, select the products, enter the quantities and save.

If we have sales prices or various pricelists saved, the software will automatically populate the price.

Checking stock levels

To see if and how many products we have in stock, we click the “Check stock and book items” button, where the software shows us how many products we have in stock and how many of these are available right now.

At the quotation stage, we don’t need to place any bookings, so let’s go back to the order screen.

If we don’t have default prices, or if we’re out of stock and we’d like to get a lead-time estimate, then we can have the software estimate the actual cost and lead-time of the products. This way, we can correctly price our products and provide a reliable lead-time estimate.

For this, let’s click on “Estimate costs and dates.”

On this screen, we can check whether existing stock of products and parts should be considered for the estimate, or not.

Also, let’s enter our desired margin.

Here we see the earliest available date for the 100 tables and a detailed breakdown of the estimated costs.

Sending a quotation

Now, let’s send the customer a quote.

We can do that in the Invoices section of the order, where you can create various documents – invoices, credit invoices, pro forma invoices, quotations and order confirmations.

By default, the document is a fully filled quote. If we want, we can even freely add additional lines, which can be useful for selling services, entering delivery price costs, or discounts.

You can download the PDF or have MRPeasy open your e-mail client with a pre-populated e-mail.

Lastly, let’s change the status to “Waiting for confirmation.”

Confirming a customer order

If a customer calls and places an order, we can create a new customer order, or we can open a previous quotation.

Depending on your internal policy, you might need to receive a down payment before you consider an order as confirmed. In that case, you can send an invoice to the customer for pre-payment at the “Invoices” section of the customer’s order.

Once you deem an order confirmed, update its status to “Confirmed,” and if necessary, send an order confirmation to the customer by creating the document in the “Invoices” section.

Booking products for the order

Once the order is confirmed, it is necessary to book the products for the order. To do this, let’s click on “Check stock and book items.” Here, we see how many products are available for booking.

In this video, we will only show the situation where products are available in stock or expected to become available in stock, as we can see from the numbers.

Other situations, when production has not yet been planned for the products, are discussed in detail in the production manager video, which explains production planning.

To book the products that are available, let’s click on “Book all items.”

Now, on each item’s line, we see the status of the products – if they are expected to arrive on time for delivery date, if they will be delayed, or if they are ready to be shipped to the customer.

If we need to release the bookings, then we must open the customer order’s reports, open the relevant booking and use the “Return to stock” button.

If an order has been canceled, then the bookings are canceled automatically.

Shipping the products

To ship the products, a shipment must be planned first.

A shipment can be planned from inside the customer order, or from the “Stock” section of MRPeasy.

Let’s open the customer order and click “plus” in the “Shipments” section, choose the date of dispatch, check the list of items to be shipped, delivery address and save.

Currently, this is a planned shipment – this screen is a digital picking list for reporting the shipment. Here, it’s also possible to print out the waybill and the picking list.

To report shipping, we can report pickings line-by-line, or all goods at once.

The goods are now written-off from stock.

Invoicing a shipment

If you send the invoice together with the shipment, then from the customer order, you can create an invoice for all the products of a shipment.

Going back to the customer order, we can see that the status of this order has automatically been changed to “Shipped and invoiced.”

If we receive a delivery confirmation, we can manually update the status to “Delivered.” However, the usage of this status is optional.

Saving payments

Once we receive a payment, we can save it in MRPeasy as well. Let’s open the invoice and save the received amount.

When we look back at the customer orders overview, we see that the payment status is automatically updated.

If you use Xero or QuickBooks Online, then the payments have automatically synchronized both ways – between MRPeasy and the accounting platform.

Tracking customers

To see which customers must be contacted today, we open the “Today’s contacts” tab of the CRM.

Here we see the list of all our customers who have been given a “Next contact” date for today, or earlier.

If we get in contact, we can track the details in the customer’s “Notes” section Then we can set a new/next contact date.

In this video, we demonstrated how to work with customers in MRPeasy.

To learn more about the functionality of MRPeasy, please see our other videos!

Thanks for watching!

Keywords: sales pipeline, quotation, customer order, invoice, shipment, discount, margin, tax, manufacturing quoting