Cases: General Information

Cases (also referred to as support cases or tickets) help your company track customer requests, questions, problems, and other inquiries submitted by email, phone, website, or live chat and find the solutions requested by your customers. MYOB Advanced gives you the ability to easily create and track cases based on your customers' requests. This topic provides information about creating cases in MYOB Advanced.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

Become familiar with the ways of creating cases in MYOB Advanced
Develop a general understanding of case settings
Create a case manually

Applicable Scenarios

You may want to learn how to create cases in MYOB Advanced in scenarios that include the following:

You have received a request from your customer about your company's products or services and need to create a case in the system.
Your customer has created a case on the MYOB Advanced Customer Portal, and you need to solve the customer's problem related to the product or service that your company offers.

Creation of Cases in MYOB Advanced

In MYOB Advanced, a case is a record created and viewed on the Cases (CR306000) form that represents a new, open, or closed request from a customer or employee and has a variety of settings, such as the customer, the status of the case, and the user responsible for the case (that is, the owner of the case).

A case can be created in any of the following ways:

By a user manually entering the case data on the Cases form.
By a customer using the MYOB Advanced Customer Portal.
By an employee using the MYOB Advanced Customer Portal.
By a user through the MYOB mobile app.
By a user through the Acumatica add-in for Outlook.
Through import scenarios to import lists of cases on the Import by Scenario (SM206036) form. You can use the predefined Import Cases from Excel import scenario.

Settings of a Case

You can enter, view, and modify (if applicable) the following case settings on the Cases (CR306000) form:

In the Summary area, basic settings, such as the case’s ID, date reported, case class, customer, contact, owner, status, reason, subject, and priority. You can also specify the severity of the case, which may also relate to a time requirement; the reaction time (which determines the service level agreement) corresponding to each severity level is defined by the case class. (For details, see Case Classes: Severity Levels and Response Times.)
In the Contact box, you can select a case contact among contacts and employees. You can select an employee as a case contact for a case of a class if on the Case Classes (CR206000) form, the Allow Selecting Employee as Case Contact check box is selected for the class.
On the Details tab, the description of the case.
On the Additional Info tab, the customer settings, such as the business account, location, billing settings (billable work hours and billable overtime hours), workgroup, and time-related settings (work hours, overtime hours, and total hours spent on the case). For details about billing, see Case Management: Billable Cases.
You can also specify a contract or default contract if the Contract Management feature has been enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form. Contract cases require specifying a contract on entry, and standalone cases require specification of the customer and the customer's case class, which determines the default contract. For details, see Case Management: Billable Cases.
On the Attributes tab, the list of attributes, if they have been defined for the case class on the Case Classes form. Attributes may be used to help your company manage specific information that is useful for its business, such as the industry or number of employees in a customer company.
On the Activities tab, emails, tasks, events, and activities associated with the case. You can use this tab as a starting point for adding activities and for viewing the activities that have been performed.
On the Related Cases tab, the list of cases that block, depend on, are duplicates of, or are otherwise associated with this particular case (if any). For details, see Case Management: General Information.

Relations Between a Case and Its Associated Records

As you work with a case in MYOB Advanced, you can track the records associated with the case on the Relations tab of the Cases (CR306000) form. For details, see Managing Relations.

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.

For a lead, contact, business account, opportunity, sales quote, and case, the set of user-defined fields is applicable to either a particular class of the entity or all classes of the entity. For a class, each user-defined field can be defined as required or hidden; also, a default value can be specified for the field.

If user-defined fields have been added for a data entry form of a lead, contact, business account, opportunity, sales quote, and case, the original information in the Summary area of a record's form is displayed on the Document tab. The added user-defined fields are displayed on the User-Defined Fields tab. 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 Records

The values of user-defined fields can be copied between records—CRM entities, project quotes, and customers and vendors—when an associated record is created from another record on the following forms:

Leads (CR301000)
Contacts (CR302000)
Business Accounts (CR303000)
Opportunities (CR304000)
Sales Quotes (CR304500)
Cases (CR306000)
Activity (CR306010)
Task (CR306020)
Event (CR306030)
Customers (AR303000)
Vendors (AP303000)
Project Quotes (PM304500)

In this context, the original record is the record from which the associated record is created. If any user-defined fields are listed on the User-Defined Fields tab of both the original record's form (that is, the form used as a starting point for record creation) and the form of the new record, the system automatically copies the values of the shared user-defined fields to the same fields for the new record.

If a user-defined field has been both added to and defined as required on the form of the new record, the field is displayed on the User-Defined Fields tab of each of the following dialog boxes, which are used for record creation and opened using an action on the original record's form:

Create Contact on the Leads, Business Accounts, Opportunities, Customers, and Vendors forms: The set of user-defined fields depends on the class of the new record.
Create Account on the Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities forms: The set of user-defined fields depends on the class of the new record.
Create Opportunity on the Leads form: The set of user-defined fields depends on the class of the new record.
Create Quote on the Opportunities form: The set of user-defined fields depends on the selected type of the quote (Project Quote or Sales Quote).

Note: The user-defined field is listed in the dialog box regardless of whether it has been added to the form of the original record and whether it is required on this form.

These dialog boxes do not have rows that list the optional user-defined fields (those not defined as required on the form where the new record is created). If a customizer has specified a default value for a user-defined field in the original record, this default value is inserted in the same user-defined field for a new record associated with the original record.

If a user creates a new record by using any of the following records as a starting point, the system copies the values of shared user-defined fields to the new record whose form opens in a pop-up window:

A lead, opportunity, or case created on the Leads, Opportunities, or Cases tab, respectively, of the Business Accounts form
A lead, opportunity, or case created on the Leads, Opportunities, or Cases tab of the Contacts form
A sales order or invoice created when the user clicks Create Sales Order or Create Invoice (under Record Creation) on the More menu of the Opportunities form
A sales quote created when the user copies an existing sales quote on the Quotes tab of the Opportunities form
A sales quote created when the user copies the existing sales quote by clicking Copy Quote (under Other) on the More menu of the Sales Quotes form
A project quote created when the user copies the existing project quote by clicking Copy (under Other) on the More menu of the Project Quotes (PM304500) form
A service order created when the user clicks Create Service Order (under Services) on the More menu of the Cases (CR306000) or Opportunities form
An appointment created when the user clicks Create Appointment (under Services) on the More menu of the Opportunities form

A user can change the value in a user-defined field of any record at any time if the record's current status gives the user the ability to edit the settings' values in the record.

Also, a user can select the values of user-defined fields when the user merges duplicate records. For details, see Record Validation for Duplicates: General Information.