Building Automated Checklists with ACT! Smart Tasks

Do you use checklists?  Would you like to make your checklists smarter?  Today we will look at how to incorporate your checklists into your ACT! database and have them fill themselves out automatically based on the work you already do in ACT!

We are actually a little breathless about the possibilities of this particular capability and can’t wait to show you how it works.

Using an example based on a realtor’s model we will look at a checklist of actions that need to be completed on behalf of a new listing client.  As you may know every item on a realtor’s list must be completed in order to get to a closing successfully, and when there are several properties to track it could quickly become unmanageable if the lists are on a spreadsheet, on paper in a file, or in our head...

In our example we are using a database with some customized opportunity fields, each representing a necessary step in the process of getting to a Closing.  Here, when a property is listed, there are nine checklist items that need to be completed within ten days of the home being listed.  We need to know, at a glance, which ones are Pending and which ones are Done.  We also need to be certain an activity has been scheduled on behalf of each required item without overpopulating our calendar.  And we need to mark the item as complete as soon as the activity is complete without manually updating the field.

This calls for automation.  This automation removes any uncertainty you may currently experience with paper files, spreadsheets, or a reluctant memory.

To automate our checklist we will use the Smart Task feature released with ACT! 2013 that allows us to query the database every few minutes in the background looking for records that match our criteria and update records and activities accordingly. 

Here is the list of fields used to track the progress of the new property listing after they have been added to the database in the opportunity entity and revealed on the layout: (Apply these steps to your own checklist in ACT!)

We will set up this checklist by querying on three opportunity fields (for your list you may query on contact fields, as well), the Stage field, the Status control, and the Open Date field.

To begin the process of automating the process we will go to the Schedule menu and select Manage Smart Tasks…

From the Manage Smart Tasks box we will click on the button, New Smart Task and fill in the appropriate information to describe our Smart Task.  We will want to be pretty specific as our Smart Task Name will be used on the list of all Smart Tasks and we will want to be able to find it easily on the list. 

Here we will call this Smart Task “New Listing Setup” and give it a pretty definitive description.  Here we will also keep the default setting for Access, leaving the radio button set to Public so all users can use this feature, and since we are updating a checklist contained on the Opportunity record we will select Opportunity from the record type.

There are three available Triggers, and ours will be “Run when conditions are met”, referring to the aforementioned opportunity fields.

Below, after clicking on the Edit Conditions… button we put in our conditions so the Smart Task knows the records to which it must take action.  For the opportunity Process, Property Sale the first stage is “Property Listed”, and we include this in the query by adding the condition:

Opportunity field “Stage” equals the value “Property Listed”.

The status of any opportunity is either Open (active) and has at this status a value of zero (0).  FYI, the remaining status values are one (1) for Closed Won, two (2) for Closed Lost, and three (3) for Inactive.  Here, we use the value”0”.

Finally, we optionally want our checklist automation to run against the system date field, Open Date, with the query capturing only the records on or before today.

Finally, we make sure to ask the Smart Task to run only one time against any record it finds matching the criteria by clicking on the Run Only Once for any Record checkbox since we do not need it to run multiple times.

As you see below, we can click on the hyperlink to learn more about the option to Run Only Once.

Now we can see below our New Listing Setup criteria and description are embedded as a Smart Task template, with a green box containing the information we just entered.  Since we are initiating the checklist for this Property Sale we want to tell ACT! our Setup checklist is activated by showing all the tasks are marked as “Pending”.  To accomplish the field updates down the list we need to add a step for each field on the Setup checklist by asking the Smart Task to Update those fields.

Click the “Click here to add a step” button, and select Update Field from the resulting list.

As you see here, all we need to do is give the step a reasonably precise name, tell it which field to update, and offer a value.  In this database we gave the checklist fields a prefix of CL so they would all be grouped together in the field list in the dropdown selection.  Our first field is called “CL File Front Office”, meaning that a file has been created to hold all the important documents generated during the sales process.  We mark the field value as “Pending” and ensure the action happens automatically by checking the appropriate checkbox.

…and we continue to add a step for each of the fields on our checklist so the end result looks like the diagram below.  To automate the Smart Task we then click on the Enable Auto-Run button before closing the Smart Task box.

Smart Tasks in ACT! are set up to run every two minutes.  After the Smart Task runs a refreshed records will show our updates with “Pending” in each of the Setup fields.  We are halfway to automating our entire New Listing process.

Activity Series

Next we will want a nearly identical process that will schedule activities on behalf of the New Listing.  Once a task is completed we will want to mark the task “Done” and then schedule the next task.  We should be able to look at the list and always know where we stand.  We will also have the added benefit of looking at our History and seeing that the activity has been completed.  Our Smart Task will set up the entire process and only be finished when either the final task is complete OR when the record no longer matches the conditions we established in the beginning.

To save a lot of work we can elect to copy our existing Smart Task template and then modify elements of the template to meet our new requirement.  Below, from the Manage Smart Task box on the Templates tab we simply select “Duplicate”.

…and then we modify the Smart Task Name to reflect our new purpose.  In this case we want to set up activities that, once completed, mark the appropriate checklist fields as “Done”.

Below, our first step is to schedule a To-Do.  The activity will be scheduled on behalf of the Smart Task user (that’s us) to create the file for the front office one day after the listing has been opened.  Close inspection of the Smart Task’s version of what an activity looks like will show you the Schedule Activity dialog box is subtley different that one of ACT!’s standard Schedule Activity dialogs.

Here we have an option to delay the start of the activity, so we will initiate a Start Date on 1 day after the step is triggered.  Subsequent activities may go out further.

Since we duplicated the first Smart Task we created we will have inserted this new step right after the New Listing Checklist Setup Activities initial step:

…then we modify the Update Field step to automatically mark the checklist field that the activity has been complete by changing the field from “Pending” to “Done”.

…and so on, down the list, until each of the steps has a corresponding activity associated with the required task.

Ensure that the Smart Task is enabled to Auto-Run.

The behavior we can now anticipate is that an activity will be scheduled.  Checking our Pending Smart Task Steps (from the Schedule menu) might show us something like this:

…and when we check the Activities tab on the record we will be rewarded with something like this:

…and when we clear the activity we might be rewarded with this:

Never again will we drop this particular ball.  No matter how many listings meet the conditions all the tasks associate with every one of them will now be managed automatically because we (and ACT!) are now Smart Task proficient.

Do you have a scenario you think would be well-served with Smart Tasks?  If you would like some help getting your own processes automated in ACT! feel free to contact Bevan Wistar at Zip City, bwistar@zip-city.com  or 503-381-5654.  It’s what we do all day, every day.