- 1.0 Welcome
- Thank you for using 1CRM! Release 8.6 of the 1CRM Customer Relationship and Business Management (CRBM) System is designed to further energize your organization’s efforts to efficiently organize and maintain information that is crucial to many aspects of your business. 1CRM enables organizations to do business, better.
- The 1CRM system is available in four Editions:
- Startup Edition: Free for use On Premise. Request a license key and download link, and you can install Startup Edition on your own server at no charge. It offers all the features of 1CRM Professional Edition, but is limited to 3 Users, 300 Accounts, 750 Leads, 750 Contacts, and 750 Targets. Although it only offers Community support, and no updates, the Startup Edition is a great way for an early stage business to get itself organized and productive while operating on a shoestring budget!
- Startup+ Edition: Similar to the Startup Edition, but for somewhat larger firms, with capacity limits of 10 users, 600 Accounts, 1,500 Contacts, 1,500 Leads and 1,500 Targets. Unlike the Startup Edition, this is a commercial product, available on the 1CRM Cloud or for On Premise software installation.
- Professional Edition: 1CRM Professional is our mainstream small business CRM product offering, available on the 1CRM Cloud or for On Premise software installation. Includes the next generation 1CRM REST API for custom integration capabilities (also required to use the iPhone App).
- Enterprise Edition: Our premium product. It offers all the features of 1CRM Professional Edition, plus a number of additional features of particular interest to larger, more sophisticated businesses. Administrators can use the Module Designer and PDF Form Designer to create more advanced customizations. Price Books let you establish pricing for multiple client levels. The iOS client provides optimized system access from an iPhone. And Advanced Reporting offers more sophisticated reporting capabilities.
- Unlike most CRM solutions, 1CRM offers comprehensive Order Management. It includes a Product Catalog, plus the ability to create Quotations, Sales Orders and Invoices using products from the Catalog. Incoming Payments may be received and allocated against invoices, and the system can produce PDF documents for Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, Receipts, and Statements. Purchase Orders may also be created, and Outgoing Payments recorded against them.
- 1CRM also offers extensive features for Project Management, Service Management, and general office administration (including Expense Reports, Timesheets, Vacation scheduling and tracking, and HR).
- Most importantly, the 1CRM system seamlessly blends all of these capabilities into an intuitive and friendly interface. The instructions in this guide will introduce you to the most important CRM concepts and help you get familiar with using your 1CRM system.
- 1.1 Principal Features
- The principal features of the 1CRM System are –
- Customer Relationship Management:
- Account creation and management, with any number of Contacts associated with each Account;
- Activity history (Meetings, Calls, Tasks, Notes with optional file attachments, and Email) is tracked for Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, and Cases;
- Forum threads may be linked to almost any information in the system, and users may register to see when threads are updated; and
- Tasks may be assigned to users, and automatic email notifications may optionally be sent to advise users of new tasks.
- Sales Force Automation:
- Summary view on any Dashboard page of upcoming Activities, top Opportunities, open Tasks, Leads, sales pipeline graph, appointment calendar, and a quick contact entry facility;
- Sales Lead creation and tracking, and Conversion of Sales Leads into Opportunities;
- Sales Forecast management, with forecast roll-ups that follow the sales management hierarchy; and
- Graphical Dashboard display of Opportunity Pipeline, Lead Sources, & Outcomes.
- Order Management
- A product catalog with pricing, description, etc.. which may be bulk imported from supplier files;
- Product tracking of all products sold and supported on service contracts;
- The ability to prepare customer Quotes, Sales Orders and Invoices from products in the catalog, generate Acrobat PDFs from these Quotes and Invoices, and email them directly to clients from within the system;
- Shipping and Receiving modules support inventory management for one or more warehouses, and track partial shipments against Receiving and Shipment records as well as Sales and Purchase Orders;
- Incoming Payments may be received and allocated to Invoices;
- Receipts for Incoming Payments may be generated as Acrobat PDFs and printed;
- Statements may be generated as Acrobat PDFs to show partial payment of Invoices, as well as to provide statements of complete account status, detailing all open Invoices and any payments applied to them; and
- Purchase Orders may be created, and may be converted into Bills. In turn, Outgoing Payments may be recorded against Bills.
- Email
- Inbound and outbound email support;
- Emails may be composed and sent from within the system;
- Users may create personal email folders for filing email;
- All email is automatically associated with related contact and account information – the system builds account and contact history automatically;
- Each user may read mail from one or more POP3 or IMAP mail accounts;
- Group email boxes (such as support@company.com) may be shared between users; and
- Email marketing campaigns are supported, with management of a mass email queue;
- The email Trash folder is automatically emptied according to rules specified by each user; and
- A spelling checker is provided when composing email.
- Project Management:
- Project creation and management, with income and cost forecasting and tracking vs: actual financial performance;
- Timesheets may be filed with time booked to Project Tasks, and resource costs attributed to projects automatically;
- Resources utilized by projects are tracked, and the business’ overall resource utilization may be monitored; and
- Each project links to related Account, Contacts, Notes, Documents, plus Call, Task and Meeting activity history.
- Customer Service:
- Service contracts may be defined for accounts, and supported products linked to them. Automatic email reminders are sent when contracts are close to expiry;
- A case management system allows users to track customer problems and resolutions. It allows each problem to have a lifecycle of information to improve customer satisfaction;
- Each case links to related Account, Contacts, Notes, associated files, plus Call and Meeting activity history;
- A Knowledge Base module allows Cases to be converted into Articles in the Knowledge Base, and Articles can be marked for public access via the Portal, or not; and
- A software bug tracking system for managing bugs reported against different revisions of software.
- Information Consolidation:
- A News Feed dashlet lets you select and manage your favorite RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds, and display them on any dashboard page.
- A Weather dashlet lets you select up to 10 cities, and see their updated weather info on any dashboard page - such as your Home Dashboard.
- A Stock Quotes dashlet lets you select any number of stock symbols and see their latest trading information.
- Document Repository:
- Organizes everything from HR claim forms and Marketing collateral to Engineering design documents, ensuring that only current and approved documents are available. Great for ISO!
- Documents in any format are filed and indexed with a title, description, file type, status, department, keywords, creation & revision dates, owner, and multiple revisions of the document itself.
- Corporate Calendar & Directory:
- Personal calendar views (by Day, Week, Month, or Year) of all business activities, with an associated Task list;
- Company calendar views, of all employees, or just selected employees, or those within a specific department;
- Resource calendar views (Day and Week) to check for free meeting rooms, projectors, etc..;
- Project task assignments may be viewed for all staff performing services work, to ensure high utilization;
- Group calendaring capabilities for viewing other user’s calendars to avoid scheduling conflicts; and
- Photographic company directory that offers such information as telephone extension, department, email address, mobile phone number, and SMS address.
- Security & Permission Management:
- The system may be configured so that all users may see and manipulate all data. Alternatively, permissions may be managed tightly via Roles and Teams, with associated permissions for individual users, or groups. Even the ability to import and export data is controlled.
- 1CRM is built on established open-source technologies and widely supported industry standards, including the PHP development environment, the MySQL relational database, the Apache web server, and the Linux or Windows Server operating systems. The system supports the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platforms, as well as macOS Server and the Microsoft Azure Cloud. See the 1CRM 8.6 Implementation Guide for recommended versions of these software components.
- 1.2 What’s New in this Version?
- With each revision of the 1CRM software, significant advances are made in both the feature set and usability of the software.
- The highlights of release 8.6 of 1CRM include:
- Support for the new WordPress Portal: 1CRM Customer Connection.
- A new Subscriptions module is added, allowing 1CRM to manage your client subscriptions for monthly or annual services. (Customer subscription self-management is available in the Customer Connection Portal.) This includes an integration with the Chargebee billing system.
- Milestone Billing feature allows you to easily collect initial deposits and intermediate milestone payments while delivering on an order – then generate the final milestone invoice with a single click.
- A new User Tracking solution has been added, with reports showing the time users spend in the system, and the number of records viewed or edited.
- A new Commissions module is added, allowing 1CRM to calculate and report on sales commissions based on percentages of gross profit or total sales. Aggregate commissions on a sale may be split across multiple sales staff.
- The Knowledge Base module is substantially updated, adding knowledge base categories, and obsoleting the use of Tags. (Customers can search the Knowledge Base in the Customer Connection Portal using full text searches, and browsing by Categories.)
- A new Storage Utilization screen is added, showing available or allocated storage, free space, and usage categories. Notifications may be sent for low free space, and regular storage utilization reports can be generated automatically.
- For Developers: The 1CRM REST API capabilities have been extended, and the Developer Guide content expanded to cover Webhooks.
- Major open source libraries are updated, including TC/PDF and SabreDAV.
- Google Maps integration significantly upgraded, including the ability to display multiple selected Accounts, Leads or Contacts on a common map, with identifying pop-up data displayed for each.
- Full text search added for Notes.
- Release 8.5 of 1CRM is fairly easy to notice, as it makes major changes to the user interface!
- The Flex theme is added, and the Long Reach theme is retired. The Flex theme features a strong flat design and a wide range of colour and background image options.
- The Claro theme now offers several selectable colour options, so now all four themes offer a choice of colours: Spectrum, Delight, Flex and Claro.
- All themes receive a make-over with new fonts, new icons, new field widgets, new touches everywhere. The list view filters and mass update panel have been updated, as well as the pagination controls.
- All the administration screens have been redesigned with a much more modern look.
- CRMFlex: Most importantly, all screens are now responsive - meaning they dynamically react to the width of the browser window in use. On a desktop or laptop computer you can see this dynamic re-formatting for yourself. Just bring up any 1CRM screen (detail view, list view or dashboard) and then drag the right edge of the browser window so it becomes wider or narrower - and watch what happens! This CRMFlex adaptive user interface ensures an excellent browser experience regardless of the size of the device you use to access 1CRM: Phone, Tablet or Laptop/Desktop.
- Data Privacy module added, tracking data privacy events such as Right to Erase Information, Consent to Process, and Withdrawal of Consent. New Access Control features added as well as several other changes to assist our clients in compliance to European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), and similar data privacy requirements worldwide.
- System performance has been greatly accelerated by asynchronous resource loading techniques which minimize full page loads.
- Drag ‘n Drop Support is now available, for adding files to 1CRM as Notes with attachments, and as Documents, in essentially all modules. Drag ‘n Drop support is available for adding attachments to emails as well.
- You can now manage the creation, re-ordering and deletion of tabs on all module detail views. The Layout editor adds support to move standard or custom fields to any tab desired.
- A new Activity module has been added: Chats. An integration with LiveChat has also been added, allowing live website chats to be logged within 1CRM. These are linked within the History sub-panel to existing Leads or Contacts, or they can create a new Lead as well. And inside the LiveChat system, operators benefit from enhanced information on website visitors when they are recognized as existing Leads or Contacts within 1CRM.
- The integration with the Lead Guerrilla Marketing Automation system has been enhanced, allowing both 1CRM Leads and Contacts to sync with Lead Guerrilla at the same time. This enables Lead Guerrilla to perform lead nurturing and deliver leads with lead scores and a detailed history into 1CRM. At the same time you can automatically stay in touch with existing clients in 1CRM using Lead Guerrilla campaigns targeted at their specific interests.
- Track email opening for individually sent emails (Campaign emails were already tracked). Show how many times opened, and from what locations. When Sent Email Tracking is enabled, two fields are added to the Email detail view - First Opened and Open Count. Also, a subpanel will be added to the Email detail view, to display the history of email opens.
- PieSync Integration has been added. This facilitates seamless 2-way contact sync between 1CRM and many of your favourite cloud apps. Popular syncs include MailChimp, FreshBooks, Shopify, Pardot, Marketo and others.
- Developers: An API client library for 1CRM has been added to GitHub https://github.com/1CRM/1crm-api-client-php to assist advanced integration projects using the 1CRM API. See documentation for the API client here: http://1crm.github.io/1crm-api-client-php/index.html
- An editor for System Notification messages has been added.
- The highlights of release 8.0 of 1CRM include:
- 1CRM Mobile iOS App: Release 1.3 – Filter and Sort controls for all list views; Notifications for Calls, Meetings and Tasks; Support for displaying and filtering by Favourites. See Apple App Store for history of releases 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 earlier this year.
- Support for PHP 7.x, and its significant performance gains (typically 25-33%).
- Major re-imagining of 1CRM Workflow system, adding power and flexibility system-wide.
- Major upgrade to 1CRM Notifications system. Every system notification and invitation email template is now more attractive, informative and based on a responsive design, with many containing new links and controls for the recipients.
- Integration with Lead Guerrilla Marketing Automation System. Enterprise Marketing Automation at a Small Business price.
- Advanced all-new self-documenting REST API (existing APIs will also remain in place) designed in conjunction with 3rd party app developers and our own Mobile client development, to promote easier development of 1CRM integrations, and faster performance. See more details in the Developer Guide.
- The Studio now allows four new types of Custom Field to be created:
- Related Record. These Related Record fields link to records in other modules.
- Value from Related Record. Custom fields which can show fields from any record related to the current record.
- Item Number. Shown in a Courier-like font suitable for part numbers.
- Status. For fields to be displayed as a status badge, not as text.
- PDF Form Designer can now reference fields in related modules, greatly increasing the scope of customizations available for 1CRM-generated PDFs.
- Mailboxes configured with the ability to auto-create Service Cases may now also auto-create Contacts. These new Contacts will be linked automatically to the received Email record as well as to the Service Case.
- Support for OAuth authentication, private clients, and registry of 3rd-party public clients.
- Enhanced security for CRMSync with DAV-specific password.
- Dynamic password strength indicator now displayed when setting passwords.
- Multiple login errors now lockout user accounts for progressively longer periods.
- Each user now has a mandatory password change at their initial login.
- New Login screen design, with Forgot your Password? feature.
- Master Service Contracts have been eliminated and the Service Subcontracts module now replaces it, with Subcontracts linked directly to Accounts.
- The key features of release 7.8 of 1CRM are:
- User preferences for reordering of Smart List Tabs, selecting a default list view for each module, and hiding Smart List Tabs.
- Drag and drop plus user preferences for reordering of detail view subpanels, as well as the ability to hide subpanels.
- Customer Satisfaction Rating & Surveys when customer service case is closed.
- Configurable auto-closing of pending customer service cases.
- Quick Setup option for user email setup, supporting Outlook, GMail/Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL and iCloud email accounts.
- Integration with the Stripe payment processing system. 1CRM accounts may now have a credit card registered to them, generating a Stripe ID for that Account.
- Recurring Services module can now automatically process payments via Stripe for each invoice generated.
- Integration with the RIngCentral™ cloud-based business phone service.
- Automated Call timer for professionals with billable Calls.
- Ability to book and bill hours spent on Calls, Meetings, Tasks
- Studio: Fields can be shown/hidden dependent on the value of a controlling Dropdown field, using the Custom Fields Editor, or the Module Designer for standard fields. Dropdown options offered to users can also be limited.
- Smart Convert feature copies data for matching custom fields when records are converted, such as a Quote to an Invoice, or a Lead to a Contact.
- The key features of release 7.7 of 1CRM are:
- CRMSync™ – syncs Contacts and Calendar info bi-directionally with iOS (iPad, iPhone), macOS, Android and Outlook. This feature provides handy access on your phone or tablet to view, edit and add contacts and appointments while online or offline.
- New Claro theme – a modern, open and simple theme for 1CRM. Small and simple header at the top of the screen, plus simplified screen layouts with more white space.
- PDF Form Designer (Enterprise Edition only) enhanced, including support for landscape format PDFs.
- Accounts, Contacts, Leads and Users have an image field for a photo, logo or other image.
- New In-Place image editor now used to edit all images in the system, such as your company logo, clients photos, etc ..
- Updated screen layouts – Record views now include a clean and visual summary panel at the top, with company logos, client pictures, quick icons to create related new emails, tasks, calls and meetings, plus record owner and team info.
- Unified detail/edit views – Data is now always in the same spot on both detail and edit views. When customizing screen layouts, now only customize the unified view, not Edit and then Detail view separately.
- Enhanced performance: 1CRM is faster than ever!
- The highlights of release 7.5 of 1CRM include:
- GoToMeeting integration (a popular web video conferencing service)
- iOS Client: An iPhone App you can use to access your 1CRM system
(Note: Enterprise Edition only)
- PDF Form Designer: Let’s you create custom layouts for the PDFs 1CRM generates for Invoices, Quotes, Sales & Purchase Orders, Statements, Expense Reports, Timesheets and Service Work Orders. (Note: Enterprise Edition only)
- In addition to the existing SkypeOut calling to normal phone numbers, 1CRM now adds Skype calling to Skype ID (i.e. free Skype-to-Skype call) for Users, Contacts and Leads. Hover on Skype ID links in 1CRM to choose Chat, Call or Video Call.
- Advanced Reporting: Includes support for multiple series of data
(Note: Enterprise Edition only)
- A new System Bulletins module is used to post news messages about system upgrades, planned outages, or any other news items that concern the CRM system. These messages will be shown as a popup to selected users after their next login.
- Price Books: Define multiple price books, and assign a default price book to each client. Now you can cater to a mix of retail and distribution clients, or smaller vs. larger clients, with a convenient price book for each pricing channel or level. (Note: Enterprise Edition only)
- Module Designer was formerly an optional feature for 1CRM Professional - now it is a standard feature of 1CRM Enterprise Edition
- Activities may now be related directly to Accounts, as well as having a variable relationship to other modules
- Data validation added for email addresses
- Product catalog import enhanced to add Update catalog mode
- New option to download system updates and then apply them as one continuous process, in addition to the usual method where downloading and applying them are two separate steps.
- Added the ability to import emails from an external email system’s Sent email folder then add those emails to the 1CRM user's Sent email folder, enabling 1CRM to track emails sent from other email clients
- Added ability to report on stock in multiple warehouses individually, in addition to overall total (achieved by supporting reporting values and totals on columns from SQL join tables)
- Added button on Report detail view, to show actual report SQL query.
- 1.3 About this Guide
- This guide is current with the details of operation for 1CRM System 8.6. It is designed for users who are new to 1CRM, or the areas of customer relationship management, project management, and web-based applications in general.
- The information in this guide describes how to use a Mac, PC or mobile device and a web browser to access 1CRM in order to perform a broad range of corporate information management tasks. Readers are not required to have any programming or software development knowledge, but should be generally familiar with the use of a personal computer, and Internet browser software such as Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox.
- 1.4 Who Should Read this Guide?
- This 1CRM User Guide provides information for conventional system users who wish to record and track company activities and outcomes.
- This guide is not intended for system administration personnel who need to install and configure the system as part of its initial implementation, or for ongoing system management. That information is provided in a separate document - the 1CRM Implementation Guide.
- 1.5 Additional Documentation
- The 1CRM Customer Relationship and Business Management (CRBM) system offers extensive documentation for the installation and use of its various components. Click on any link below to download that document, or click here to see all our 1CRM documentation:
- User Guide
- Mobile User Guide
- Implementation Guide
- Developer Guide