Customer Relationship Management (Sales) in MRPeasy

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Welcome!

In this video, we’ll explore how MRPeasy helps streamline Customer Relationship Management.
The CRM section of MRPeasy is designed for salespeople and project managers to closely track all orders.

Let’s dive into how to manage customer interactions effectively in MRPeasy.
The CRM -> Customer Orders section is for tracking all orders from the quotation until delivery and payment, to make sure that products are delivered on time and properly invoiced.

There are several ways to get an overview of all the orders.
The sales pipeline view is very intuitive because it moves orders from left to right as they progress to various statuses.

At first, when a customer is waiting for a quotation, the status for the order is “Quotation.”

When the order is waiting for confirmation, extra information, or pre-payment, the status is “Waiting for confirmation.”

Once the order is approved for processing, the order is “Confirmed.”

The salesperson must manually assign these three statuses, but MRPeasy automatically assigns all the next statuses.

Once production has been planned, but not yet started, the order status will change to “Waiting for production.”

When a worker starts working on these products, the status will be automatically changed to “In production.”

When all products are in stock and ready to be shipped, the order status is changed to “Ready for shipment.”

When a stock worker reports picking up the products from the stock, the order status changes to “Shipped” and it disappears from the sales pipeline.
In contrast, the list view is much more detailed and includes other information like:

“Product status,” which indicates if products are booked, expected on time, or will be delayed

“Invoice status,” which shows if and how much of the order has been invoiced

“Payment status,” which shows if and how much of the invoices have been paid.

And other information, like cost and profit, current workstations, associated manufacturing orders and more.

Plus, it’s possible to filter the view, change which columns to display, and in which order these are displayed.

In addition, as a third view, you can see the whole list of ordered products, and detailed information for each line – for example, which items are ready for dispatch for partial delivery.
The Customer Order Details page gathers the information about each sales order.

This page includes several sections:

The header contains general information about the order and the customer.

The products table lists all ordered products, quantities, and prices.

The Invoices and Quotation section tracks invoices, quotations, and other invoice-based commercial documents.

The Shipments section is for managing shipments and their documentation.

The Notes section allows you to store additional information specific to each customer order.

Now, let’s walk through the steps required for tracking order fulfillment.
The Customer Order is the central document for tracking each sales order.

The customer order lifecycle begins when you receive an order or a request for a quotation.

To deliver the products, three actions are necessary:

First, the actual products must be booked, which means reserved for the customer.

Secondly, a Shipment should be planned.

Lastly, the products must be picked for shipping.

The cost estimating, quoting, invoicing, and payment collection processes can be tracked in parallel.
We can create a new Customer Order from the CRM → Customer Orders page.

When filling in the order details, we must minimally choose the customer who placed the order and enter the products.

Additionally, for example, if the order is confirmed, we can set the status to “Confirmed”.

We can also enter the “Delivery date” on which the order is due. And many other details.

When entering the products, the prices will be automatically populated if we have saved the selling prices.
Once the order is confirmed, you’ll need to book products for it.

To start, click on “Check Stock and Book Items,” which will display the available stock for booking.

Here, the software displays how many products are in stock and how many are currently available.

This video will focus on cases where products are available in stock or expected soon, as indicated by the numbers here. Please see the production management video on production planning for other cases—like when production hasn’t yet been planned.

To automatically book available products, click ‘Book All Items.’

After booking, each item line shows the product’s status, indicating whether it’s on track for delivery, will be delayed, or is ready to ship.

If you need to release a booking, go to the “Check Stock and Book Items” page and press the “Cancel bookings” button on a single line or “Cancel all bookings” to cancel everything.

If an order is canceled, any bookings are automatically canceled as well.
If you have the Tracing functionality turned off, you will not be able to book products for customer orders manually. This is entirely automated.

To see the availability of products for a customer order, change the order status to “Confirmed” and save.

Considering the delivery date of this order and other orders for the same products, the product status will indicate whether the order can be shipped immediately or should wait.

The availability status for products in customer orders is determined as follows:

Customer orders without delivery dates should be fulfilled first.

And orders with delivery dates after them.

Note that in this configuration, the product status is a suggestion only. As long as you have physical stock, you can ship any order.
To ship products, start by planning a shipment. You can do this directly from the customer order or in the ‘Stock’ section of MRPeasy.

Let’s open the customer order and click the ‘plus’ button in the ‘Shipments’ section. It is prefilled, and we can change any details, e.g., the products to be delivered, or we can even include items from other orders of the same customer.

Once saved, this creates a planned shipment, which also serves as a digital picking list for reporting.

Here, you can print the waybill, packing list, and picking list if needed. If a tracking number has been provided by the carrier, you can add it to the shipment.

To report the shipment done, mark the items as picked either line-by-line or all at once. Once shipped, the goods are automatically written off from stock.
In MRPeasy, shipping and invoicing processes are separate. This means you can quote and invoice customers anytime, depending on your needs.
There are two ways to create quotes: without a customer order or together with a customer order.

If you do not need MRPeasy to estimate costs and lead times, and you do not want to track the quoting process within the customer order document, you can simply create a quote from the CRM -> Invoices tab.

Create a new document here.

Select the customer.

Choose the type “Quotation”.

Enter the products and prices, as well as any other details.

After saving, you can have MRPeasy open your computer’s e-mail client with a prefilled e-mail. Or, you can also download the PDF and send it manually.
If you do not have standard selling prices or need to determine lead times, MRPeasy can calculate a cost and lead-time estimate for you.

We start by first creating a new Customer Order.

We fill in the details, products, and quantities.

Once the order details are saved, we press the “Estimate Costs and Dates” button.

On the estimating screen, you can choose whether to consider any existing stock of products or parts in the estimate.

Then, we enter the desired margin.

To start the calculation, we press the Estimate Costs and Dates button.

Immediately, we can see the estimated cost, the sales price, the earliest product availability date, and a detailed cost breakdown.

We save the estimate and navigate back to the Customer Order details page, where we now see that estimated price.

To create a quotation, we add a new document to the “Invoices / Quotations” section.

The document is a fully prefilled quote, which you can edit.

Once saved, you can download the PDF or have MRPeasy open your e-mail client with a pre-populated e-mail.
To create an invoice for a customer order, open the customer order and add a new document in “Invoices / Quotations” section.

You will find the invoice prefilled.

In addition to the standard “Invoice,” several other special document types are based on the invoice layout.

By default, the invoice status is set to ‘dummy,’ meaning it is a draft. Changing the status from ‘dummy’ to ‘unpaid’ makes it valid and triggers accounting journals.

You can edit the invoice lines, add or remove lines, add free text notes to each line, or even have a line with free text only.

Once saved, you can send the invoice to the customer by downloading a PDF or having MRPeasy open our computer’s email client with a prefilled email.

There are also other ways to create an invoice.

For example, you can create an invoice corresponding to an existing Shipment from the Customer Order details page in the Shipments section by pressing the “Create an invoice” button on a Shipment’s line.

And lastly, you can always create an invoice at CRM → Invoices by pressing the “Create” button and filling out the details.
Once we receive a payment, we can save it in MRPeasy. Let’s open the invoice, scroll to the “Payments” section, and add the received amount.

Looking back at the customer orders overview, we can see that the payment status has been automatically updated.

MRPeasy provides tools to plan activities and track communications with customers.

You can enter new customer details at CRM → Customers. Or on the fly when creating a customer order.

On the customer’s details page, you can also enter addresses, contact emails, phone numbers, and other key details.

Once saved, we can add individual contacts in the contacts section.

Additionally, we can add notes to track important information or communications.

Here’s another good tip: you can access the customer information and notes from within the Customer Order by opening the customer details sidebar.
Open the CRM’s “Today’s contacts” tab to see which customers need to be contacted today.

Here is the list of all our customers who have been given a “Next contact” date for today or earlier.

We can track any details in the customer detail’s “Notes” section.

Finally, we should set a new “Next contact” date if a follow-up is necessary.
There are many sales-related reports inside MRPeasy.
Firstly, each customer order includes a list of reports providing detailed information, such as stock bookings, used raw materials, serial numbers, or missing raw materials.
In the CRM -> Customers list, you can access several reports related to each customer.

Their invoices, customer orders, manufacturing orders, products, and raw materials.
The customer list view offers several valuable reports for all customers:

“Deliveries” view that you can set up on a screen in your office to display deliveries scheduled for the next five workdays.

There’s an execution report that outlines the production stages for products in active customer orders.

And a “Bookings” report that provides a clear overview of inventory allocations for each order.

The Cash Flow Forecast Report provides a week-by-week cash flow projection for a specified period.
The CRM -> Statistics page provides statistical reports derived from shipped customer orders, including key metrics such as the cost of goods sold (COGS), selling price, on-time delivery statistics, profit margin, and more.

The “Customers” Report summarizes shipped orders by customer.

The “Customer Orders” Report summarizes shipped customer orders.

The “Goods Shipped” Report summarizes shipped goods.
Several additional functionalities can be added to the base CRM functionality.
For example, the Professional edition of MRPeasy includes:

The “Customer Portal” functionality which allows you to create a sales portal for your repeat customers.

The “Pricelists” functionality allows you to enter additional pricelists and use tiered selling prices.

The ”Custom fields” functionality allows you to add additional data fields to your database, for example, to items, customer orders, or invoices.
The Enterprise Edition includes:

“Return Merchandise Authorization“ functionality for managing customer returns related to repairs, maintenance, refunds, or replacements.

The “Backward scheduling” functionality allows automatic Manufacturing Order creation from Customer Orders for just-in-time delivery.

The “Sales management” reports track individual salespeople activities.

The “Multiple stock and production sites” functionality helps track multi-site fulfillment.
Plus, many integrations complement the MRPeasy CRM.

E-commerce and CRM integrations allow you to get sales orders into MRPeasy automatically.

Accounting integrations synchronize invoices, payments, and cost of goods sold.

The Zapier integration and API allow you to build your own integrations.
In this video, we covered most of what you will find in the MRPeasy CRM module.

For more information, please see our other videos.

Thank you for watching!