Introduction To The Campaigns Module

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
www.dwaynewright.com
info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

A campaign is another name for a project. Records within the campaign module can include a consulting project for hire , a marketing effort, a job that has manufacturing elements or just about any endeavor that may need to be linked to any number of clients, events, vendors, e-mails or finance transactions.

A campaign has the basic information fields such as its name, type, status and priority. As with most form view of InBizness modules, there is a fair amount of tab panels that allows you to see more details about a particular aspect of that module.


This is a form view of each campaign record. It is currently broken into six different sections. These are Campaign Details, Campaign Comments, Billable Campaign Details, Campaign Operation Buttons, Events For The Campaign and Linked Clients To The Campaign.

BILLABLE CAMPAIGN TRACKING
In some cases, I use a campaign to track client projects. That is to say a customer may call me and want me to work on their FileMaker database. I work up a quote and they purchase a block of hours. I then create a campaign for that project. In this area, I put in the client id for the person that is the billable contact for the project. The contact, email and phone number is viewed via the linking of the client id.

I then fill in the hourly rate and the amount paid fields. I do require that all projects / campaigns be paid in full before starting a project. For very large projects, I break the projects into smaller milestones and create a campaign record for each.

The amount due, total hours and hours remaining fields are calculation fields. When I work on this project, I click a button on the campaign record to create a new event. The linked event then records the time that I spent on the project and calculates the amount of money spent for that event session. The sum total of all events is used to calculate the amount due and hours remaining fields. The total hours field is the amount paid divided by the hourly rate.

Now you can adjust the hourly rate on new events and even perform events that have no charge to the client.

CAMPAIGN EVENTS TAB PANEL
As I mentioned, a campaign is likely to have many events attached to it. There is a tab panel dedicated for related events and I placed a number of portals that allow you to see the most recent linked events. There is a magnifying glass icon next to each event to quickly view its information. You can also click the red text of View As List, to see the entire list of related events. This button will take you away from the campaign table and to the events table.

Key Features Of The Campaigns Module
- Ability to link to multiple modules
- Ability to assign multiple events to a campaign
- Ability to link to multiple media files
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2008 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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