Purpose
This procedure is used to enter or modify the details of Notes Categories. These categories are used when editing notes against various elements in the system – like products, customers, suppliers and more.
To give an example: you may have reps entering sales related notes against a customer, and accounts clerks entering account related notes against a customer. You can set up a ‘reps’ and ‘accounts’ category to distinguish the notes. Users can be restricted to a set of note categories, thus you can have your rep and account users only viewing notes that are relevant to them.
Below is a list of some possible notes categories we have seen customers put to good use:
- Debt Collection Notes
- Account Rep Visits Notes
- Sales Calls Notes
- Customer Service Follow-ups
- Supplier Price Review Notes
- Customer Complaint Notes
- Product details/specification Notes
- GL Postings/Account “workings”
- Asset details/specification Notes
- CRM Notes
It is important to remember that not only can access to notes be limited by these categories, they can also be used as filters on reports so you can produce a summary of the activity for a Customer by Category, or for a User/Rep by Category to allow a review of the performance in a targeted area.
See related topics: User Details for more on restricting notes categories, and Notes for more details on entering notes.
Data Input
Step 1 – Code
Code
Enter a unique code for the Note Category – up to five characters.
The code “TFR” is reserved for notes pertaining to system transfers e.g. Product Transfers
For details on the use of “codes”, see The Role of “Codes” in Online Advantage
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Step 2 – Details
Description
Enter the Note Category description – up to 25 characters.
For more details on descriptions, see The Role of “Names & Descriptions” in Online Advantage
Note Category Type
Choose a type for the Note Category. The type allows Note Categories to be grouped together. For example, ‘Debt Collection notes’, ‘Asset notes’ and ‘GL Posting notes’ could be grouped under the type ‘Finance’, whilst ‘Rep Visit’, ‘Customer Review’ and ‘Sales Call’ might be grouped under ‘CRM’.
Note Retention
Specify the time period you would like to retain notes created under this category. For example, if you had a category of notes for debt collection, or promises to pay, you may only want to keep those for the last 7 years.
You can, of course, choose the ‘Never Delete’ option to retain notes indefinitely.
Pay special attention to the system note category ‘DH-Document History’. Notes under this category record the method of sending of documents such as Invoices, Credits and Purchase Orders. If you do not require a long history of this information then it is best to choose a short retention period for this category to optimise system performance. Note: if you make many sales to a cash customer account, then the volume of Document History notes is high for that account. You can choose to retain Document History notes for 3 months (for example) by this Notes Category function, and override that to 1 month via the Trading Terms function.
For the purposes of simplicity, a year is treated as 365 days and a month as 30 days. No leap year or variable month days are taken into account for retention purposes.