How to automate repetitive processes and become more efficient?

How to have the overall picture and know what needs attention and when?

How do we grow the business?

How to have all customer contact information distributed among employees in one place?

How do we keep track of all customer initiatives?

How can we grow revenue per customer? Grow revenue per employee?

Workflow Management Software and CRM Software helps to manage these. There are several products available. The challenge is that while packaged software is affordable they are expensive to customize. The average Small business finds the development of customized software expensive and time-consuming.

If you are struggling with these issues then choose MetaBiz as your CRM platform as it offers cost effective and easy to customize solutions.

‘MetaBiz’ a Multi-platform business management software has all the core functionalities required by small and medium businesses. It can be quickly customized to suit different business processes! MetaBiz is a business & workflow management software built using FileMaker Pro making it highly accessible across multiple devices like desktop, iPad, and iPhone. Web access is possible as much as is natively supported by the WebDirect feature within FileMaker.

Some of the business processes where MetaBiz can add value:

1. Contact Management:
   

   This module offers more than just contact information. MetaBiz offers a solution through which you can organize all the details about a particular lead like contact details, communication History, invoices, project details, action details etc.

2. Inventory planning and management:
   

   Entrepreneurs should have a deep understanding of demand and supply equation across all products. A business software can help in lowering costs, prevent errors in demand and supply of stock and speed up fulfilling client orders. MetaBiz can play an important role here. The software stores product catalog along with specifications and pricing details in the system. The inventory log gets automatically updated whenever an invoice is generated. This helps in proper inventory planning and management.

3. Workflow Management:

   MetaBiz lets you streamline your workflow processes by setting up multiple actions. You can create alert for those who need to take a particular action, prioritize actions and mark them completed when it’s done, set deadlines and keep the process moving as per the timeline. This helps in effective workflow management. You can also view the ‘Actions’ in the calendar by checking on ‘Show on calendar’ settings.

4. Business analytics:

   A business needs to take sound commercial decisions by effectively interpreting the available data to provide actionable insights. MetaBiz just does that. It helps in determining accurate project cost on the basis of billable hours and product costs.  Predefined reports based on timesheet, invoices, and actions can be generated to get a detailed perspective. Also, invoices within a specific date range can be accessed easily. Additional reports can be created as needed.

5. User & Application Management:

   User management is important for setting up a secure system. MetaBiz User management system offers much more than just security. The software allows the Administrator to manage users and user roles, track their timesheets, set up and manage Company Info, Company logo, currency, Invoice templates and much more.

6. Mail management:
   

   MetaBiz can be configured to send emails via Email Client or SMTP server or Outlook account. The Outlook Manipulator plug-in in the software allows all the Outlook data – Mails, contacts, calendar to be accessed from within the application. All critical client related information is available at one place and not residing in individual mailboxes. Data resides centrally and accessible to authenticated users of the system. This is an Add-On feature offered by MetaBiz.

MetaBiz can be customized according to the business requirement of the client. For more information get in touch with us or download the trial version.

With Custom Web Publishing (CWP) FileMaker allows to build web applications using PHP as Front-End and FileMaker as Back-End. This is achieved using FMPHP API provided by FileMaker.

Almost every web application consists of forms that have a dropdown list/ selection list. For example:

In the case of Dynamic dropdown lists, data has to be fetched from backend FileMaker database every time the user accesses. If there are large number of records, then fetching them from the database and displaying on Web Page takes time to load and results in the slowness of the web page.

In order to avoid this and make the experience friendlier & faster for the user, following technique explains how it can be achieved in a simple way,

• Create a text file with all the required data separated by entering key in it.
  ex.
  Value1
  Value2
  Value3..

• This data will be the initial data containing in the FileMaker field on which you would like to base dropdown list.
• Place this file in the same location as your web page containing the dropdown list.
• Then in the PHP web page, using file read operations and while loop, fetch the data and display in the dropdown list.
• Create one more PHP web page, which will fire a query on FileMaker table/field to get dynamic data for the dropdown list and write to the text file described above.
• Admin person can call this web page via a web browser or web viewer of FileMaker whenever there is an update to the field data.
• This technique is more effective when the data in the required field is modified less frequently.