Effective communication is key to your team’s success and Collections Management definitely understands this aspect of your business by centralizing all your collections communications in one window: The Collections main window. This window efficiently documents your communications between your business and your customers by allowing your collections team to use two types of notes:
1. Microsoft Dynamics® GP OLE Notes ®
2. Collections Management Notes
Now, let’s dive into each one for more details and specific examples…
1. The Microsoft Dynamics® GP OLE Note ®
You can think of the OLE Notes as a high level type of note setup for the customer. For example, this information pertains to specific instructions you would like your team to follow when communicating to the customer or specific documents such as an agreement, receipt, or application form you would like to store on the customer record.
In this perspective, once created, the OLE Note can be accessible directly from the Collections main window, but also across all Microsoft Dynamics GP® windows enabling this feature (i.e: the customer maintenance window, the Sales Transaction Entry window, etc.).
Example: From the sales pane in Microsoft Dynamics® GP, let’s take a look at an OLE Note setup on this customer “Leisure & Travel Consultants”.
We can do this by going to Collections Main > Select the Customer ID > Double Click on the OLE Note icon located on the right end of the customer ID field, as shown in screen shot below.
In correlation with our description of the OLE note, these high level notes for will assist the Collections team as a whole when working with this specific customer, “Leisure & Travel Consultants”.
Furthermore, available in latest build of Collections Management (Build 67 and Build 4 in GP 2013 and GP 2015), users can attach specific customer documents such as an agreement, receipt, application form, email, or any other important documents you would like your Collections Team to have access to directly in the Collections Main Window using the Microsoft Dynamics GP ® OLE Note Document Attachment Feature.
As an illustration, on customer “Leisure & Travel Consultants”, we can access the customer PDF agreement by simply clicking on the “Document Attachment Management” button from the OLE Note as shown below. We can also preview this agreement by simply clicking “preview” in the “Document Attachment Management” window which will display the PDF customer agreement.
See screen shot below for an example:
2. The Collections Management Note
The second type of note available using Collections Management is the Collections Management Note. Unlike the OLE note which will be used to record your high level customer communications, the Collections note should be used to record your daily activities and communications with the customer. From a phone conversation or an email sent, to a collection plan ran for the customer, or any other activities performed on a daily basis, all your collections activities can be recorded in Collections Management using the Collections note feature.
We can simply do this by clicking on the new Note field from the Collections main window. Once opened, as featured in the screen shot below, the collections note window saves us some time in the note creation process by automatically adding the following data (The Customer ID, the Contact Date & Time, the note creator ID, and the customer contact).
One important aspect in note creation is to add an action, which can be done by simply selecting one from the list of actions which comes preloaded with Collections Management or by selecting one of your customized Collections Actions.
Optionally we can also select the invoices the action pertains to. This will ensure the list of the invoices we select and the total action amount will automatically default for us in the Note Text of the Collections note.
To illustrate this process, let’s take a look at a Collections note added on this customer LEISURET0001, by double clicking on this “Call 1” Action Note.
This call action provides us some information as to the date and time when it was completed, but also the invoice this note pertains to.
Furthermore, we can see a good audit trail is kept for all collections notes, as we are able to click on the revision number and browse through all of the changes that have been made to the note.
Finally, in the Collections main window, we can see that the Collector followed up with the customer as stated in the previous Call Action note and accesses the content of the email sent to the customer as shown below.
For an effective communication process within your Collections team, centralize your communication in Microsoft Dynamics GP by efficiently using Collections Management.
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If you liked this blog post, you might also be interested in reading my other blog post: Using Collections Management to Email PDF Documents >>