Administration

An afternoon, once. The shared lists everybody picks from, the users and what each of them may see, two plain text files for mail and integrations, and an import that takes your existing customer list in.

The lists everybody picks from

Countries, cities, keywords, products and projects, roles, distributors, currencies, languages, invoicing companies and parent organisations are defined once and chosen everywhere else. That is what makes filtering work at all: eleven people cannot filter on a market that three of them spell differently. Deleting and renaming can be locked to administrators, so a shared list stays shared.

Add, reorder and remove — every list works the same way
Lock delete to non-admin, in one tick
The default product for new records
The licence gets a name of its own, so a workstation with two knows which is which

Users, and what each of them sees

An administrator adds a user with a name, an e-mail address — which is the login name — and a password. Users are either administrators or ordinary users, and visibility beyond that follows project jurisdiction: assign a user to projects and they see the records of those projects. It is set once and then nobody thinks about it again.

Administrator or user, chosen when the account is made
Assigned projects decide who sees which records
Users change their own password whenever they like
The first administrator is created by the program itself on a new licence

Two text files, both commented

mail.txt holds three setups: the SMTP account campaigns and alerts are sent from, and up to two IMAP mailboxes the activity flag watches. integrations.txt holds the external actions — open LinkedIn, search Outlook, run anything you can write a script for — and any block in it can be given a hotkey of its own. Both files are ordinary text with the reference written into them as comments.

SMTP for Gmail, Microsoft 365 or anything else standard
App passwords explained in the file itself, step by step
Integrations with placeholders: %EMAIL%, %MAILFROM% and the rest
Hotkey definition (Ctrl+): M — one line, and the action has a key

Your existing list, imported

Customers and leads come in from a CSV, and go back out to one. A modifier code per row chooses what the import does — add, update, fill in only what is empty — so a second pass that only adds the missing addresses cannot overwrite anything a colleague has since corrected. Rows are matched on the organisation, and several contacts for one organisation are ordinary rather than a special case.

Import customers and leads, export both
Import only some columns — an address sweep, for instance
The shared lists can be loaded from the same file
Chapter 16 of the manual documents every column

Keys worth learning on day one

The administration screens answer to the same keys as everything else.

F5: The Settings tab — and refresh, everywhere else
F11: Custom fields, and running a selected integration
Ctrl+M: Your own hotkey, once you have defined one

What this replaces

An administrator's job here is measured in hours per year, not per week.

A consultant to configure the CRM you bought
A per-admin licence tier
The user directory that drifts out of step with reality
Paying for an import someone else runs for you

Set it up in an afternoon

Fill in the lists, add the users, point mail.txt at your mailbox, import the customers you already have.

Download — free Back to Customers