Formulas and Fixtures

24 Jun 2014

An accountant friend of mine is running a little competition between friends. He put together a World Cup prediction spreadsheet and we all filled it out with our predictions for the group stages right through to the final. It was a piece of Excel genius.

I don’t know if he created it or copied it, but it is a thing of beauty and I don’t even like spreadsheets. This thing auto-populates the group tables, with the number of points gained and goals scored. It then populated the quarter finals and, when I’d added my prediction scores there, it just kept going.

We get awarded points for predicting the result and even more points for predicting the score. I’m not doing so well, but I figure this World Cup has been full of surprises, so I don’t feel that bad.

Now looking at this masterful spreadsheet, I can sort of see why so many people who come to us with their Excel spreadsheets full of Contacts and Leads. It all starts out great and you can do so much in a spreadsheet, but then, as time goes on, you start to realise that maybe you need a bit more control and a more elegant and sophisticated solution.

But wait!! I hear you cry…What about all my beautiful formulas?!

And that’s where our calculation fields come to the rescue! We have over 25 different custom field options for you to choose from, including a general and a currency calculation field.

Let’s say you’re in a phone call with one of your customers and you want to be able to easily tell them exactly how many bags of gravel they would need to cover the walkways in their garden. You could have a field set up where you simply input the square metres that need covering and a couple calculation fields that tell you the needed weight of gravel and the number of bags they would need.

So not only have you be able to give them that figure within just a couple of seconds, you now have, on their Contact record, the exact square metres they need covered for any future enquiries. You never have to ask them this information again, it’s all there for you.

Maybe in four years’ time I could run my own World Cup sweepstakes for everyone here at OpenCRM, through OpenCRM…maybe we could set up a whole World Cup system…and we could even…no, mustn’t get too caught up in World Cup fever!!