Often, when discussing reporting issues with clients I will bring up the Quota’s area of Sage SalesLogix. If you do not know where this functionality is located, go to your Tools/Manage/Quota menu and the following screen will appear.
On the upper pane you find a place to list the users you want to set a quota for. As each user is highlighted the list below changes to display the quota’s that have been established for that user.
Usually I bring up this area of SalesLogix when a conversation has to do with a way of tracking goals for the client’s user base. This area has been around in SalesLogix since pre version 6.X. I believe this area is over looked or unused because of two basic issues. First, there is no place to define what the Quota being set is for. This limits the use of a quota set for a user to only one because it could only have one meaning. Second, the Quota section is set up for currency only. If we look at a tool like Visual Analyzer you are seeing a trend of knowing the counts of items like Activities or History records. There is a third issue, I think the entire set of functionality should be labeled “User Goals”. This would provide a better understanding what the area is for. Oh yeah, one other thing, for you web users, the Quota functionality has been left out completely.
Today, I decided to fix at least 2 of these issues and bring this functionality to the web. I am making this available to the readers of this blog as I start down the trail of leading you through the building of a User based report. I will use the standard Visual Analyzer sheet and the Current SalesLogix Dash board to provide ideas of what we should include in this report. I am doing this to better show you that Crystal can, in most cases, meet you reporting needs.
Attached to this post you will find an attached zip file that contains two files. The LAN bundle labeled Update_LAN_ManageQuota_753.sxb should be installed first and will take the current functionality from what you see above to this:
You can now add numeric value in addition to the currency and can label the quota allowing the ability for multiple quotas or goals per user. The bundle has been tested down to SalesLogix version 7.5.0 and installed great.
The web bundle labeled Add_Quota_ToUsers_753Web.zip creates a new tab under User which is available in version 7.5.3 only.
The Quota Insert/Edit Screen looks like this.
I will provide links back to this post in the near future. The next step in preparing to write this report is to set your database up using SQL views to get the numbers from your data to compare these quotas against.
See how to collect Quota information for reporting by reading the next post.
Thanks for reading – Geo
