vTiger 6 Beta has been out for a while now. After installing the latest version of vTiger you find yourself wondering what to do next. No worries, here’s our list of 5 things to do.
1) Update your Company Data & Logo
The first thing we should do is to enter our company data. This data will be used on system correspondence like emails and PDF documents, such as invoices.
Go to Settings > Templates > Company Details
Now, on the Company Details screen, click on the Edit button and simply enter your information
Now click Save. Your company info has been entered, and your logo has been uploaded.
2) Set up your outgoing server
Sending emails to our customers and recording them in our CRM is one of the most common features of any CRM, and vtiger offers a lot of possibilities like: Mass Emailing, Individual Emails, Email Notifications, Wordflow Emails, Email/PDF Invoices and more.
In order to send your emails through your CRM you would need to set up your outgoing email server.
To get started, go to Settings > Other Settings > Outgoing Server.
You can use any email provider you may like. Since I know many of you use gmail or google apps, in this post we will be using gmail as outgoing server.
For gmail server to work with vtiger, you would need to enter your server information as shown in the following image.
If everything works OK you should get an email from your CRM, to let you know that the server is working fine:
3) Upload your Users to get your team on board
If you are running a small company, you probably work with other people, so why not bring them on board?
Vtiger has a very sophisticated, role-based security model. You can control a user’s access to specific modules. You can even restrict access to specific fields, and finally you can also control users’ access to each other’s data.
The user model consists of profiles, roles, and users. Users can also be arranged in groups. So, how does it all work together?
Profiles: A profile in vtiger represents a set of actions that a user can perform: Create and Edit Records, View Records and Delete Records.
Roles: Roles can be linked to a position in a company like Sales Manager. It can be used to allow managers to follow up on their employee records and hide the manager records from their team.
Users: Are the people. Therefore, each given user would have a specific role in the company and a specific profile that would allow him or her to perform a set of actions.
To go further into vtiger security model I would recommend visiting vtiger’s wiki.You would find all the related information in there.
For now let’s go to Settings > Users & Access Control > Add New Users and create your first user. You can always create specific roles and profiles later if you need a more complex scenario.
4) Import your customer’s data and bring some life to your system
A CRM without any data will not be much of a help. vTiger already has an import functionality so lets start to upload some data on it.
To start go to the module you are planning to import, lets says for example, the contacts module, and export the first records to CSV file (Comma-separated values)
Once you export your module data, you can remove everything but the first two lines, and then start filling the CSV file with your own data.
Finally, go back to vtiger and hit the import button.
In the first step you will be prompted to upload the file you just created. Choose the delimiter, and then specify whether your file has headers or not.
In Step 4 you need to match each of your CSV columns, to one of the vtiger module fields
Finally hit next to start importing your records.
5) Fine tune your views: Create some filters
Filters are a powerful tool to manage and view the data inside our CRM. By using filters we can easily follow up on orders, contacts, tasks, etc.
To create a new filter in vTiger 6 all you need to do is go to the Module, and them choose filters to finally click the button: create new. Once you click the create new button, you will find the following screen where you need to enter the filters/view name. The columns and the filters conditions.
As an example, in the next image we will create a filter that will show us: the leads coming from our website and that have a status equal to Not Contacted. It may be a good idea to start contacting them, and move them to the next stages on your customer life cycle.
Bonus: Workflows, Webforms and E-Mails integrations
If you have read so far and implemented every step in this tutorial, you are on your way to make vtiger feel like your own system. Now you can checkout our extension store to find modules to improve your vtiger usage
If you want to take this a few steps further, please consider reading the following posts
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