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Setting Alerts in C&P

This question is in regards to setting Alerts for users in C&P. I have the Alerts set to Alert my staff (for example) when they are entering their time and a job is within 80% of its budget for time allotted. I think this is a great alert because they are then instructed to let the A/E on the job know what is going on. However, we have some of our long-term clients who we do a lot of Time and Materials jobs for. Meaning they know us, call us and ask us to do a job that they do not need an estimate for the job. What happens is that my staff gets the Alerts on Time and Material jobs and this is rather frustrating for them since it happens so often. Does anyone else have this problem? If so, have you found a way to get around this problem? Thank you in advance for any help that you can give me.

Lynn Ebben
Marketlink Incorporated

If I understand the problem, I assume you have a "agency services" job open for time to be gathered on incidentals for a client. Add a bunch of hours to the estimate, just so staff has something to charge against. Doesn't mean you'll use them all, as you will only bill for what gets charged.

Roxanne Cowan
Rutherford Bolen Group Integrated Marketing

I haven't had this particular problem with time & material jobs but do have a situation where we started using the alerts which was great but if the staff don't tab from the hour column but just mouse click on the next it doesn't alert them. So as you can imagine I get staff bypassing them all the time. If anyone knows a solution to this please let me know.

Kristy Oxenham
Financial Controller
Creativebank

We use the status codes to stop people from entering any more time to jobs. We have created a couple examples, status code 40 Absolutely No More Time. we set it up to alert users at the production level and clicked the box to stop users immediately and we put in a message to contact Client Services immediately and dropped in a clip art of a stop sign. We set up another one 30 almost out of time and again had a message flash up to contact client services and dropped in an hour glass. We also use this feature to have jobs our there where we do not want any time or charges to go to the job because everything is housed under another job, but there are so many components that we need to schedule them individually so we open a job with a production status of 10 which is labeled scheduling only job. However, I just tried entering some time through time card and if you use the mouse you can override this status also. But at least they do not get the normal budget/estimate alert. This is something I think C & P needs to address, because there are other areas where the mouse will override and the alerts are very important.

On jobs we do not have budgets and estimates set up such as miscellaneous jobs and client non-billable jobs, I set the budgets really high and this seems to be working. Not an ideal situation, but it is a work around. The alerts are very important and if they see them all the time on jobs where they don't mean anything people begin to ignore them. On jobs that should have estimates and budgets we all want to make sure that the alerts do go off.

Pam Streitler
Director Accounting/Administration
BURDETTEB2B

I have encountered and have reported this problem in the past.

There are many overrides one can find using the alert features. Has not proven to be an insurmountable problem at mid-size agency level as manual controls are generally used as well.

But I see scalability problems with this if an agency gets bigger.

Roxanne Cowan
Rutherford Bolen Group Integrated Marketing

I absolutely agree that this is a pitfall that C&P should fix as soon as possible as it makes the alerts portion of their software totally irrelevant. If we make enough submissions to the wishlist about it maybe it will happen. I don't know about others but I quite often find little pitfalls like this where it doesn't do the most logical things.

Kristy Oxenham
Financial Controller
Creativebank

I've been keeping up with the messages on the alerts and would indeed be interested in how many people want to see it changed. Since I get all of the wish list e-mails, if anyone has an opinion please let me know. Thanks!

Mark Robillard
Developer, Clients & Profits

We also have run into the same problem. If someone gets an alert when entering time to a job, they can bypass our message by using their mouse.

Laura Pacino
Drone & Mueller

It has definitely been a stumbling block to us - the tabbing issue as well as the fact when you add change order hours it doesn't synch up with alerts. also maybe a way that an email could be generated to someone when alert comes instead of leaving it up to the one entering time to do something about it - thanks!

Tina Marie
Maryland Group

"also maybe a way that an email could be generated to someone when alert comes instead of leaving it up to the one entering time to do something about it"

I thought there was a way to set this up - to alert the AE. But my AE's haven't received any of these.

Rey Scott
Kich & Company

Keep in mind that you can send a change order e-mail. Currently, it's not an automatic e-mail, rather you need to select the e-mail recipient(s) at the bottom of the Add Change Order window before you save the change order.

Kent Richardson
C&P List Server Administrator

You can also enable the the C&P mail preference for "Always send e-mail about over-budget tasks" and every morning the AE of any open job that's over budget will e-mailed.

Rhonda Brazelton
Clients & Profits R&D

We also discovered that our employees were bombing out the initial startup of the first person logging on to C & P Classic and that it is a crucial step in making sure that emails are sent out. C & P told us that it is just the first person who logs in which can take awhile for it to activate, so we have one MAC designated as the startup MAC and then everybody else can go ahead and get on. You might check to see if this is happening.

Of course if budgets and/or estimates are not put in no one will get any messages and this was also a point our employees brought up.

Pam Streitler
Director Accounting/Administration
BURDETTEB2B