How To Use An Unsold Department Status: Part 2

Read: How To Use An Unsold Department Status: Part 1

Some jobs need to be sold to the customer. The process from first contact to a signed contract is something that needs to be tracked before production can even begin. The easiest way to do this in Chronicle, while also keeping track of which jobs are sold and which are not, is from within the production department itself.  

 For the following instructions to work you must have already set up activity templates to work in tandem:

Step #1 – Enter the customer into the database and add a job to them.

Step #2 – Add the production department needed. In this example, add the Construction department to the job file making sure that the department status is set to Unsold on the first screen you see. You need not do anything else because you have already told the program which template must be added, which activities to add, and to do this automatically. Click OK.

Step #3 – You are then taken back to the job screen.  Notice that an unsold production department has been added with NO production activities. Only sale activities are displayed (first template used).  

Now move sales activities to completed, just as you would for any other department. In this example, when you get to the last activity: “upload signed contract” you have two choices:

1. If the customer says no thank you, you would set the department status to ‘cancel’ and that ends this job file. It is no longer active.
2. If the customer says yes and signs a contract you need to upload the contract to the job file and complete the activity “upload signed contract” and then set the Construction department’s status to active.

Step #4 – As you have already told the program in the Main System Setup that when this department is made active to also automatically add activities, a screen will automatically pop up to let you select which of the Construction activity templates you want to add to the job from the drop down. In this case, ‘basic interior job’ is selected and the production activities will be added (second template used). Click OK. You can always add more activities later for other work not listed in the selected template.

Step #5 – Now, you can see that production activities have been added to the active production department. Now move these activities to completed, just as you would for any other department until the job is complete.

Here are four ways you use the status of unsold to do some reporting:

1. To search for all jobs by status go to the main Jobs tab> search queries on the left> all jobs by> select status> unsold.
2. To search for department jobs by status go to the main Jobs tab> search queries on the left> departments jobs by> status> select department> select status> unsold.
3. In the Job Manager> go to the activities sub-tab> and select only departments that are unsold.
4. The Dashboards can also use the field of department status to filter data.

NOTE: Development is still replacing the word “pending” with the word unsold, whenever they come across it in the program. So when you see pending it has the same function as unsold.