Snapshotting a sales pipeline using Quick Base Automations
[The Quick Base Knowledge Base is your library of frequently-asked questions that help you better customize your apps to solve your business problems.]
Introduction
People manage many kinds of business processes through Quick Base, and customers often ask us how they can follow changes in their data over time. Seeing long-term trends can give you insight into how your business is performing and can help you identify any issues for you to improve on.
Traditionally,this has been accomplished by creating a child table which includes snapshot fields. However, itÕs now easier than ever to do trend reporting using Quick Base Automations!
Have you even wanted quick access to trend data like you see below? This guide will show you how to set it up.
The problem
Before you begin, youÕll want to decide what your end goal is. Is there a specific report or chart your manager needs to see? What data would that need to include? For this example, weÕre going to snapshot opportunities in a sales pipeline. WeÕll want the snapshots to include:
- What week the opportunity was snapshotted (week start date)
- A $ estimate of what the opportunity is worth
- What company the opportunity is for
- Who is working the opportunity
- What pipeline stage the opportunity is currently in
Setting It Up
1. Create a Formula Ð Date field in the Opportunities table, called ÒWeek start formula (for snapshots)Ó. You can use this formula:
FirstDayOfWeek(Today())
2. Create a new table, called ÒPipeline SnapshotsÓ.
3. Add a field for each of the items above. ItÕs helpful to use the same field names as you have in your Opportunities table when possible, to keep things simple.
4. Create a table-to-table import, set to copy records from your Opportunities table to your Pipeline Snapshots table,and filtered to open opportunities. (To learn how to create a table-to-table import, please see our Copy Records in a Report to Another Quick Base Table help article.) It will look something like this:
5. Click Save to save your import without running it.
6. Create a new automation by going to the home page of your app and clicking Settings,then clicking + New next to Automations.
7. For the trigger, choose On a schedule.
8. Choose when you'd like the automation to run. You can choose daily, weekly, or monthly. If you choose weekly or monthly, you can choose specific days for the automation to run.
For snapshotting a sales pipeline, it might be helpful to run the automation weekly on Saturdays so you have up-to-date trend data waiting for you when you get to work on Monday.
9. Click Add an action.
10. In the Add an Action window, click Run table import, then click Finish.
11. For the Destination Table, choose Pipeline Snapshots.
12. Next,choose the table import you just created.
13. Give your automation a name and comment on the left side of the page so itÕs easy for you to look back at the automation later and understand what you built it for.
14. Click Save & close to finish.
Now you can build whatever kind of reports and charts you need on the Pipeline Snapshots table, and even put them on your appÕs home page for easy access. For example,I took the bar chart from above, which is filtered to include only snapshots from the past 4 weeks, and put it on my app home page:
TIP: Automations run sometime during the morning, US Eastern time, depending on the overall traffic for automations on that day. So, while the process above is a great way to do trend reporting, if you do need to take your snapshots at a specific time of day you might want to trigger your table import manually. Please see the How do I baseline a project or snapshot a sales pipeline? knowledgebase article for more information on that method.
Learn More
á About Quick Base Automations help article
á Automation Limits help article
á Working with Automations course in Quick Base University.
á Copy Records in a Report to Another Quick Base Table help article
á Creating a Chart help article
