Hi Conga blog readers! I'm Melissa. I was a Business Analyst at Conga and am excited to now be helping the Marketing team. I'll be sharing some posts now and then. Thanks for taking the time to read our blog!
Yes, you read that right. Not only are we the providers of the Conga® Suite, we are also users (and we can be pretty demanding users at times!). Customers and prospective customers often ask us how other businesses are using Conga products. Knowing how powerful our tools are, it only makes sense that we would use our products internally. So how does Conga use Conga? Today we’ll take a look at how we take advantage of Conga Conductor to send unacknowledged invoice reminders.
You can likely relate to our dilemma with invoicing. An invoice is sent out, and in an ideal world, the customer makes payment and the process is complete. The reality of the situation is emails get lost in an inbox or the customer might misplace or forget to pay the invoice. Work is busy and it’s hard to find time to follow up on outstanding invoices.
Using a scheduled Conductor routine, we send invoice reminders to unpaid and unacknowledged invoices. In order to ensure we don’t email customers that have already made payment, we’ve setup several filters on our Conductor report. The records to be included in the Conductor batch are evaluated on the following criteria:
- Stage equals “Closed Unacknowledged” or “Closed Won”
- Days Since Close equals “7, 14”
- Reminder Sent not equal to “TODAY”
- Reminder Acknowledged field equals “null”
- Amount Paid equals “null”
.png.aspx) |
As you can tell, in our Conductor report, we use standard fields as report filters, as well as several custom fields we’ve created on the Opportunity. For example, the field, “Days Since Close” is a simple formula field: TODAY() – CloseDate.
Just as we don’t want to email customers who have already paid an invoice, we don’t want to send an additional reminder to someone who has already received one. To prevent this, we incorporate Master Field to Set parameters in our Conga Conductor URL field. When the Conductor process runs for a given Opportunity record, we update a custom field on the Opportunity record, “Reminder Sent” with today’s date. Using Master Field to Set to update the “Reminder Sent” field also allows any individual looking at the Opportunity record to determine the status of any follow up on the invoice.
Any Conga user looking at an Opportunity record can also track our invoice follow up efforts by viewing Activity History. If questions come up about communication, we can view the emails sent with Conductor as Task records in Activity History.
.png.aspx)
Using Conductor as a follow up tool saves all of us a lot of time following up on invoices. Conductor also helps prevent any unacknowledged invoices from slipping through the cracks. By following up, we help customers remember to make payment and avoid any interruption in service. It’s a win-win situation for us and our customers. Unacknowledged invoice reminders are just one of the ways Conga uses the Conga Suite. Do you have a great Conga solution that you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear about it. Thanks for reading!