The ONLYOFFICE CRM tool can help you improve your customer relations, and it only takes a few minutes to get it set up to meet the needs of your business. Jack Wallen shows you how.
ONLYOFFICE is a powerful platform that offers plenty of tools and features to meet the needs of your business. It includes Documents, Projects, Mail, People, Community, Talk, Calendar, RSS and a CRM. That CRM tool can be very helpful for the management of your customers (which is the purpose of CRM) with features like contacts, tasks, opportunities, invoices, cases and reports. And given it’s integrated with all of the other ONLYOFFICE features, this CRM might be just the platform your business has been missing.
I’ve already addressed deploying ONLYOFFICE using Docker and how to use the project management tool. This time, I want to help you get the CRM ready to use.
SEE: Feature comparison: Time tracking software and systems (TechRepublic Premium)
What you’ll need
The only things you’ll need to follow along with this how-to is a running instance of ONLYOFFICE and a working email account you can use.
How to set up an email account in ONLYOFFICE
The first thing you must do is set up an email account ONLYOFFICE will use. This is necessary for the invoicing feature (as you can’t send invoices without it). You can use either an internal or external account, so long as you have the email server settings for both incoming and outgoing emails. You’ll need the server address, port number, authentication type, SMTP server address and password for the account. So, before you start configuring ONLYOFFICE, track down that information first.
Once you have the necessary information, log into your ONLYOFFICE instance and click Mail from the main page (Figure A).
Figure A
On the resulting page, from the left sidebar, click Account Management (Figure B).
Figure B
Click Add New Account and then, when prompted, click Advanced (Figure C).
Figure C
Fill out all of the required details for your email account (Figure D) and click Save. Almost immediately you should see the Inbox populate with email. Congratulations, your default account has been created.
Figure D
How to configure CRM invoicing in ONLYOFFICE
The next step for you might be adding products and services for invoicing. Before you do that, you’ll first want to configure your company profile within the Invoices settings. You should find a listing for Organization Profile under CRM | Settings (Figure E).
Figure E
From the Organization Profile settings page (Figure F), customize it to your liking. This information will be included on your invoice, so it’s important that you take the time to do this.
Figure F
How to set up taxes in ONLYOFFICE
If you’re selling products, you might need to set up taxes. This is done in Settings | Invoice settings | Taxes. On that page (Figure G), click Create Tax.
Figure G
In the resulting popup (Figure H), fill out the information for the new tax setting and click Save.
Figure H
How to add products and services for invoicing in ONLYOFFICE
Next, we need to add products and services for invoicing purposes. To do this, click Invoice settings | Products & Services (in the left sidebar) and then click Create Item (Figure I).
Figure I
Fill out all of the information for the new item (Figure J) and click Save (or Save and Create New Item).
Figure J
The next thing you might want to do is add custom user fields. By default, the user fields are pretty common. You’ll find name, company, position, email, phone, website/social, address, tags, currency and description. Let’s say you want to add a field for interests (which can be helpful, given this is all about managing customer relations). For that, you’ll need to go to Settings | Other settings | User Fields. From there, click Create User Field (Figure K).
Figure K
In the resulting popup (Figure L), give the new field a name, select a type and customize the size.
Figure L
Once you’ve added the custom field, it will show up when you go to add a new contact in Persons (Figure M).
Figure M
At this point, it’s just a matter of repeating all of this (adding products/services, persons/businesses) until you have the CRM tool populated with your resources. As you get deeper into the product, you’ll find there are other advanced settings that will serve you well. Until you get to the point where you need those features, you should be good to go for some time.
Subscribe to TechRepublic’s How To Make Tech Work on YouTube for all the latest tech advice for business pros from Jack Wallen.
For all the latest Technology News Click Here
For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News.
