Execute better using Salesforce.com, Basecamp, and Quickbooks

One of the biggest challenges with any database, especially when they are easy to use for your whole team, is keeping the data accurate. The most common problem is duplicate data due to the variance in spellings, abbreviations, and other ways that information can be stored with a slight variance in syntax or specifically how it is written.

Salesforce.com definitely falls into the category of an easy to use database and the great potential of getting your entire team directly involved with the data can quickly change your data from a couple varieties of lettuce, each in their own bag to a large tossed salad with few or no ways to discern duplicates, the data of record for conflicts, or organize and separate the lettuce out again.

There are great solutions like RingLead that can proactively check for duplicates when entered and even help you sort them out quickly once saved. However, pricing is based on which features you use and the total number of records. I checked pricing on just the de-duping feature called Declone Data Cleansing for less than 3000 existing Accounts and Contacts and the price came back in excess of $1000 annually. (Their free trial enabled me to test their system on de-duping my Contacts with names ending in A – C which was a nice way to get a few records done.)

Due to the relational nature of Salesforce.com, various records like Tasks, Cases, Campaigns, and other information may be connected to a Contact or Account so keeping the Master Record, the one that is most accurate, and deleting the rest is not the best solution as any connected data either gets deleted or becomes orphaned.

The solution is Merging and Salesforce.com includes very simple wizards for merging up to three Contacts and Accounts at a time. Merge Contacts by clicking “Merge Contacts” button above the Contacts related list when viewing an Account. Merge Accounts by clicking the Accounts tab and then clicking the “Merge Accounts” link at the bottom under “Tools.” (more…)

As a Digital Coach, I leverage Basecamp in my business and coach others to do so as well. It helps managers better manage and everyone executes better because they know what is expected by when in a simple, easy to understand fashion.

One of the underused elements of Basecamp is it’s ability to render tables for columnar data. I used this when detailing out field, page layout, and formula changes prior to implementing them in Salesforce so they can all be seen at a glance and updated in a Writeboard before ever hitting the Salesforce.com admin portal.

Basecamp renders visual tables very well with the help of Textile.

However, there are many other reasons tables are generally useful. One example is sorting by a specific column. You cannot do this in Basecamp but you can in OpenOffice Calc or Excel. However, if it was easy to go back and forth between them then using the best of each when needed would be feasible. This is what I will be illustrating.

I prefer the former so this tip will be using OpenOffice.

I want to create a table in Basecamp but rather than create it as text and insert the pipe (”|”) symbols, etc. as I go, I start with a new Calc doc and drop in my column headings and fill in the rows.

OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet

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