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 Acumatica gives you the ability to easily create and track cases based on your customers' requests. This topic provides information about creating cases in MYOB Acumatica.

Learning Objectives

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

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

Applicable Scenarios

You may want to learn how to create cases in MYOB Acumatica 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 Acumatica 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 Acumatica

In MYOB Acumatica, 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. The case 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 Acumatica Customer Portal.
  • By an employee using the MYOB Acumatica 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. If the Case Commitments feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form, you can track fulfillment times of the company's commitments (which determine the service level agreement) corresponding to each severity level that are defined by the case class. (For details, see Case Classes: Case Commitments.)

    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 CRM Info tab, the customer settings, such as the workgroup, billing settings (billable time and billable overtime), time-related settings (total work hours and overtime hours spent on the case) and the activity statistics. For details about billing, see Case Management: Billable Cases. You can also track the commitment-related settings (initial response due, response due, resolution due, and the activity marked as including a solution for the case) that appear on the tab if the Case Commitments feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features form. For details, see Case Management: Tracking of Case Commitment Times.

    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.
  • On the Relations tab, the list of records related to the case. You can also use this tab to quickly create an entity associated with the case. For details, see Managing Relations.
  • On the Closure Notes tab, the case-related information. You can add, edit, and delete the information on this tab at any time.

The Initial Activity of a Case

At the moment of a case’s creation, the system checks whether the case has been created based on an initial activity, such as an incoming email. If no initial activity is found, the system automatically creates an activity of the System type on the Activity (CR306010) form and associates it with the case.

The system uses the date and time of the initial activity’s creation to calculate the period of time for fulfilling the case’s commitments. For details about case commitments, see Case Management: Tracking of Case Commitment Times.

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 related records—such as CRM entities, project quotes, customers, and vendors—when a new record is created from an original one. For details, see User-Defined Fields.

If both records have the same user-defined fields on their respective User-Defined Fields tabs, the system automatically copies the field values from the original record to the new one.

The system also copies user-defined fields when a user creates any of the following new records from the noted starting point:

  • A lead, opportunity, or case created by clicking the button on the table toolbar of the Leads, Opportunities, or Cases tab, respectively, of the Business Accounts or Contacts form
  • A sales order or invoice created by clicking Create Sales Order or Create Invoice on the More menu of the Opportunities form
  • A sales quote created by copying an existing one on the Quotes tab of the Opportunities form or by clicking Copy Quote on the More menu of the Sales Quotes form
  • A project quote created by clicking Copy on the More menu of the Project Quotes (PM304500) form
  • A service order created by clicking Create Service Order on the More menu of the Cases (CR306000) or Opportunities form
  • An appointment created by clicking Create Appointment on the More menu of the Opportunities form

In addition, the system copies user-defined fields if a user creates a new record by using the following dialog boxes:

  • Create Contact on the Leads (CR301000), Business Accounts (CR303000), Opportunities (CR304000), Sales Quotes (CR304500), Customers (AR303000), and Vendors (AP303000) forms. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new contact.
  • Create Account on the Leads, Contacts, Sales Quotes, and Opportunities forms. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new account.
  • Create Opportunity on the Leads form. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new opportunity.
  • Create Quote on the Opportunities form. In this case, the set of user-defined fields is determined by the selected type of the quote (Project Quote or Sales Quote).

For a record that a user creates by using a dialog box, the user-defined fields that are required for the new record will appear on the User-Defined Fields tab of the dialog box, even if these fields were not specified in or required in the original record.

If a user-defined field is not required on the new record's form, it will not appear in the dialog box. However, if default values for the fields have been specified in the original record, then the system will copy the default values automatically to the new record.

The user can change the values in user-defined fields 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.

Additionally, the user can select values for the user-defined fields when merging duplicate records. For details, see Record Validation for Duplicates: General Information.