Having the ability to attach photos and documents to Opportunities, Tasks, and Sales Orders is great.
Having them automatically be added to the Customer’s Hub and adding the ability to pull photos/docs from the Hub for additional Opportunities, Tasks and Sales Orders would be greater.
Often, the workflow is:
- Get an opportunity with project photos, idea photos, and building plans.
- A task is created to meet with the customer to get more information, get measurements, and more photos.
- A sales order is created, with photos and documents that explain the project. It gets approved, and a deposit paid.
- Tasks get created to order products, fabricate products, and install products. Each of these tasks need photos and docs from the sales order to explain the work to be done as well as a PDF of the pick list version of the sales order because the item list doesn’t get merged to the task.
- As those tasks get completed, photos of work before, in-progress and completed all get added to each task.
- There are follow-up tasks created for punch list items with photos of any issues, or uncompleted work.
- Down the road, service sales orders and tasks are created for the job, all needing photos/docs from the original installation and gaining resulting photos/docs.
- Warranty service sales orders and tasks are created for the job, all needing photos from the original installation and new photos/docs explaining issues and gaining resulting photos/docs.
Right now, every time a document gets added to the new sales orders/tasks, it is downloaded, and reuploaded to the system. This not only is a waste of time, but an enormous load on server storage, as each customer can have 6+ copies of multiple files being stored.
If these docs were automatically added to the customer’s hub, where they could be pulled from to add to new transactions and tasks, it would be an enormous savings of time and resources.
If they were automatically organized by where they originated from - Location, Opportunity, Sales Order, Task, Invoice, Payment, etc… it would be even better. The reduced cost of server storage, over time, should far outweigh the cost of implementation, while creating a much more user friendly system.