Emails and Activities: Activities

In MYOB Advanced, you can create miscellaneous activities—such as notes, chats, phone calls, escalations, messages, and work items—directly from the forms you use to create entities related to customer relationship management (CRM). These entities include leads, contacts, business accounts, marketing lists, marketing campaigns, opportunities, sales quotes, projects, project tasks, project quotes, cases, and employees. While viewing any of these entities on its data entry form, you can create an activity associated with it and track all activities related to the entity.

Tip: This topic is focused on the miscellaneous activities (listed above) that can be created for entities. For details on creating activities that are emails, tasks, or events, see Emails and Activities: Emails, Emails and Activities: Tasks, and Emails and Activities: Events, respectively.

Creation and Tracking of Activities for an Entity

You can create an activity associated with an entity by clicking the needed action on the Create Activity menu on the table toolbar of Activities tab of any of the following forms:

When you click the action, the Activity (CR306010) form opens in a pop-up window, where you can specify the needed details. When you save the activity, the system returns you to the form you added the activity from and adds a row with the Activity type to the Activities tab of the form.

On the Activities tab, you can view the details of this activity (or any listed activity) by clicking the link in the Summary column of the appropriate row, which opens the activity on the form used to create it (which varies depending on the activity type) in a pop-up window.

Copying of Lead-Related Activities to Related Entities

If you have created activities to keep track of all communication that is related to a particular lead, and then you create a contact or business account for the lead or convert the lead to an opportunity, the system copies all the activities listed on the Activities tab of the Leads (CR301000) form to the same tab of the Contacts (CR302000), Business Accounts (CR303000), or Opportunities (CR304000) form, respectively. Thus, the system preserves the history of activities created for the lead in the associated entities and copies this history to the entities associated with the lead.

Tip: Activities that you create on the Contacts, Business Accounts, and Opportunities forms are associated with only the entity (contact, business account, or opportunity) for which they have been created.

If based on your work processes you need to create your own set of activity types, you can add, view, edit, and delete types of activities on the Activity Types (CR102000) form.

Ability to Add User-Defined Fields to CRM Forms

User-defined fields are site-specific elements that have been defined to track information deemed as important to the organization. A customizer—a user with particular access rights in the system—can add user-defined fields to the Leads (CR301000), Contacts (CR302000), Business Accounts (CR303000), Opportunities (CR304000), Sales Quotes (CR304500), Cases (CR306000), Activity (CR306010), Task (CR306020), and Event (CR306030) form. From any of these forms, the customizer can open the Edit User Defined Fields (CS205020) form by clicking Manage User-Defined Fields in the Customization menu on the form title bar and specify a set of user-defined fields for the form.

On the Properties tab of the Edit User Defined Fields form, the Activity Type box has been added. This box is shown only when you open this form from the Activity, Task, or Event form. If you select an activity type in the Activity Type box, the set of user-defined fields applicable to this activity type will be shown.

If user-defined fields have been added for a data entry form of an activity, the original information in the Summary area of the form is displayed on the Document tab. The added user-defined fields are displayed on the User-Defined Fields tab of the Summary area. For a task or event, the added user-defined fields are displayed on the User-Defined Fields tab of the corresponding data entry form. On this tab, by using these fields, you can easily specify additional information about records they are working with. For details, see Attributes and User-Defined Fields.

Copying of User-Defined Fields Between Activities, Tasks, Events, and Other Entities

The values of user-defined fields can be copied between activities on the Activity (CR306010) form, tasks on the Task (CR306020) form, events on the Event (CR306030) form and an associated entity to which user-defined fields can be added.

In this context, the original record is the record from which the associated record is created. If you create an activity, task, or event from another task, event, or any entity in the system to which user-defined fields can be added, and both the original entity and the new entity has any of the same user-defined fields, the values of these fields are automatically copied to the new entity.

If both the new entity (activity, task, or event) and the original entity have default values that are defined for the same user-defined field, the field value from the original entity is copied to the corresponding field of the new entity.

For more details about the copying of user-defined fields between CRM entities, see Leads: General Information, Business Accounts: General Information, Contacts: General Information, Opportunities: General Information, or Cases: General Information.

Notifications About Assigning an Activity to an Owner

In MYOB Advanced, a system administrator can set up the automatic built-in notifications about the assigning of activities. You can receive these notifications by email in the following scenarios:

  • If you are assigned to a new activity and the creator of the activity is another user.

    To start sending notifications about these events, the system administrator should activate the CRNewActivity business event on the Business Events (SM302050) form.

  • If you are the owner of a related entity (such as a lead, a contact, a business account, an opportunity, or a case) and one of the following events for which you are not the creator has happened:
    • An activity has been created for the related entity and assigned to another user.
    • An existing activity associated with the related entity has been reassigned to another user.
    • An existing activity has been recently associated with this related entity and assigned to another user.

      To start sending notifications about these events, the system administrator should activate the CRNewThirdPartyActivity business event on the Business Events form.

For details, see Business Events.