What's your Aspire Pro Tip?

Totally agree! The first few months on Aspire I kept to the basics. Now, over a year in, I have customized everything to see everything that I’m always looking for. Along with the headings, I use the “Advanced Search Save” lists in every area from Work Tickets, Property, Contacts, Receivables etc. Creating your own filters and groupings is easily the best thing for my productivity. 

I was just thinking about this topic the other day and was about to start a post and am happy I saw yours!

I personally love custom formulas in Aspire. My latest one takes [AmountRemaining]/[Amount] = Percentage Paid in Invoicing. I use this to create a list in Invoices that shows anything with a balance over 0 but the Percentage Paid under 1 is a short pay. 

If you’re doing the same repeated tasks over and over again, clicking the same buttons in sequence, (i.e. filling out estimates for multi-property contracts, adding tags, moving tickets on the schedule board..) chances are there’s probably a way to templatize/bulk action what you’re doing and get 90% of your time back.

Bulk action, Templates, Kits, Copying opportunities, etc. are all things I use as often as possible because that means Aspire is doing the work for me, instead of my slower manual entry.

Another hot tip, a progress bar dashboard dial for Extra Work goals has been an extremely powerful motivator for the Account Managers. 

Love this question!

@mwheeler, do you have some examples of extra work goal dials yall use that you could share?  Thanks!

Great Topic, and great tips so far!

To many this may be obvious and simple, but when creating lists that you share with others, don’t allow edit, and if it cannot be avoided, make a master list that isn’t shared so when someone deletes, saves with a different name (not Save As… grrrr...) you have something to fall back on.

Also, naming lists with a symbol in front to organize them. Such as all sales related lists have a dollar sign ($) before the name no matter the type they are; appointments, work tickets, opportunities, etc.

We’ve been with Aspire about 4 years and even with periodic cleanups, we have amassed quite a number of lists. Anything that helps us quickly identify which we are looking for helps.

Hope this helps!

1. Lists & Dashboards: Embrace your dashboards (but don’t let them become stale).  Meaning, if you have certain touches in the system you do every day build a dashboard so the list is at your fingertips.  As the season changes don’t be afraid to change the dashboard to what is relevant at that moment.  I use dashboards to track, pending approvals, draft batches, opportunities with no ops manager, emails that are not sent out (company wide).  In addition using the dashboard to see the information and then leaping over to the sidebar where the dashboard lives will bring you right to the list.  This is also true with building helpful lists with accurate filters.  If you learn how to use the filters within lists you can build some very helpful dashboards.
    
2. Templates: Templates are great, they help standardize services and presentation.  They are a great way to pull in the flow of information (especially when new people are hired).
    
3. Report Designer: try it out in sandbox if you are not comfortable with using it in live time, it is very helpful and if you enjoy the design / coding it can be extremely helpful in laying out opportunities, opportunity estimate summary sheets, invoices, purchase receipts, work tickets etc.

Aspire is an very powerful system, I keep active in the system and keep trying out new features that may help anyone in our organization.

@Scott Knussmann Hi Scott, we are super simple with ours. We have a yearly goal for total Extra Work revenue per branch, and the account managers have a progress bar dial with that goal as the override.

Estimates & Scheduled Tickets is the bread and butter with Aspire!  

I am going to bump this one today, 

Yesterday I discovered an issue with the PayApp layout that can’t be fixed. If you win a change order on a FPOB opportunity, and then try to send an invoice dated before that change order won date it will cause the balance to finish in the summary to act really funny. Just a heads up!

One thing I like to do - and maybe there is a better way so I’m shy to say it’s a tip or trick, is create lists that I then export and make pivot tables out of in google sheets or excel. I use this for some weekly KPI that we look at as a team that are easier to view there than in Aspire. But the key is that the list is formatted in Aspire and I just have to export it as it is and then my report in google sheets updates. 

^this is a pro tip 

​@mhellweg I’m curious! do you have an example of a list you pull and what KPI you are using the data to measure against? 

​@swirtholg Yes - as an example, I use Date Part to add anticipated close date year and anticipated close date month to an opportunity list of bidding construction jobs (this is custom formula, i’m sure you know this but just in case). Then I export the list with sales rep, estimated (or budgeted $) and anticipated close date and probably a few other fields into a google sheet. Then I make a pivot table off of that which has months in the columns and the rows are the sales reps. This way I can see what each sales rep is anticipating closing in the coming months. I use a similar list of all won opportunities to see how many opportunities reps have won, and can also compare these year to year. Not sure if that all makes sense. but that’s 1 example.

​@swirtholg I also put something to identify the list as an export into the list name like “Export Bidding Construction Opps” or something like that. So then I can easily export the same list as often as I want (maybe you made that suggestion, maybe someone else). Of course other people will have automated this activity but I haven’t been able to figure that out.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing! Sounds like ya’ll have a larger operation than we do, and a longer sales cycle. 

​@swirtholg We do design in house and some projects take a while to get won. : )

Does job inventory not move over to the stored material?