Introducing Date Calculation

1 Mar 2016

We often talk about how intelligent our CRM solution is and our most recent upgrade is further proof of this. We have added an intelligent, brand new feature which is in the recent update of OpenCRM – v3.9. This is a very specific feature, but there are many scenarios where it could come in handy.

To talk you through it, I am going to use the example of a café business to illustrate how useful this feature is. Of course this can be translated across many industries and business needs (this one just involves cake and why not!?!).

Introducing… the ‘Date Calculation’ field type.

But what on Earth is a Date Calculation field type?

Well, if you are a User of OpenCRM, you will be aware that you can add Custom Fields to the system to collect data which is specific to your company’s needs.

So, take our café business, they might want to record unique information on their customers. They could use different custom ‘field types’ like a Text Field to add a comment on a certain cake or flavour which a customer showed interest in, a Currency Field to log how much a customer tips on average per visit, or a Date Field to note a customer’s birthday or day they signed up to the café’s reward scheme.

There are two ways you can use a Date Calculation field. You can use the field to either add time to a specified date or to work out the difference between two dates in the system.

DateAdd field

Let’s say that our café owner would like to send a voucher on the one year anniversary of when the customer signed up for their rewards scheme. By using the DateAdd field type, they can easily hold this information on the Contact record.

The owner could then set up a Custom View which shows which customers have their anniversary in a given week or month to then email over their voucher (for a free slice of cake perhaps!?!).

DateDiff field

For the sake of argument, our café owner makes some pretty amazing cakes, using some very odd and exotic ingredients. In order to make sure these are never out of date when used, they use a DateDiff field to calculate the number of days between when an item was purchased and its expiry date.

When that number gets down to only 3 days, the Product shows up on another Custom View, alerting our café owner that they need to use it up and re-order some more.

These are a few basic examples of how this intelligent tool can be used to help personalise a customer journey with a company. Of course there are many scenarios where these fields could be used.

If you would like to know a little bit more about this feature take a look at this FAQ.