Category: Product News

Managing documents for sales processes or business agreements can take a lot of time and effort. Things can slow down even further when you’re trying to coordinate stakeholders and get your documents signed. With our newest integration, you can create these documents faster and easier by connecting Insightly CRM to PandaDoc.

PandaDoc has created a platform that significantly speeds up the process of creating and tracking proposals, quotes, and other sales collateral, as well as getting electronic signatures. The integration with Insightly takes the CRM data you’re actively viewing and merges it into a prepared document template, greatly reducing the time it takes to get a contract or other documents into the right hands.

If you’ve used mail merges or document templates before, you can understand the general idea behind PandaDoc: Create a template, add your fields, and send the document when it’s ready. You’ll also be surprised at how simple it is to create new documents with the Insightly-PandaDoc integration.

From your PandaDoc account, you’ll create templates for your day-to-day business documents, like proposals, contracts, and quotes. For your fields, you’ll use tokens as placeholders for information that will be merged from Insightly, such as first name, last name, and email address.

We’ve provided a full list of available Insightly tokens based on the records you’re already using in Insightly. You can even use the custom fields you’ve added to Insightly in your documents.

After your Insightly administrator enables the integration on your account, you’ll see the PandaDoc icon under the Files subtab on your contacts, leads, organizations, projects, and opportunities. Click the icon, log in to PandaDoc, and select one of the templates you’ve prepared.

Insightly will merge the information from the contact or lead you’re viewing right into the template to create a new document. You can make your final edits through the PandaDoc interface and then send or save the file. We’ll even pull in linked contact information if you’re viewing an organization, opportunity, or project.

Once you’ve saved or sent the document, you’ll have a link right in Insightly to click through to the document in PandaDoc. It’s a convenient way to view the status or activity of a document related to a record that you’re viewing.

This integration can change the way you create document templates and help you track documents as they’re created, sent, and signed. If you’re ready to save time and manage your documents in a more streamlined way, set it up and give it a try.

Integrations make life easier. Instead of manually transferring files or copying-and-pasting information from one application to another, integrations bring your data to you when you need it and where you need it.

For customers who love reporting, Insightly is happy to present our integration with Microsoft’s Power BI. We think you’ll be pleased, too.

Power BI is a free reporting tool that offers an abundance of visualization and reporting tools to analyze your CRM data in new ways, including funnel charts, geomapping, and calculated fields that we’ve provided.

We worked closely with Microsoft to create the Insightly content pack to get you started with a number of reports, graphs, and a dashboard. You’ll see them as soon as you’ve connected to Insightly and your data is retrieved.

To begin, you’ll need to sign up for a free Power BI account and connect it to Insightly using your API key. Power BI will fetch your CRM data and populate the provided set of standard reports, presenting you with a ready-to-work dashboard and report tabs.

The Insightly content pack includes access to your Insightly records and fields, including some common business metrics to help get you started. These include:

• Tables with “grouped” opportunity forecast close dates, opportunity actual close dates, project completion dates, and task completion dates for analysis by month, quarter, or year.
• A weighted value field for opportunities (opportunity value * probability of winning).
• Average and total duration fields for tasks, based on Start Date and Completed Date fields.
• Reports with calculated fields for opportunity win rate (count of won/count of total opportunities) and win rate value (value of won/value of total opportunities).

The real beauty of Power BI is that you can make these reports your own and share them with others in your organization. Hover over visualizations, click through to your data, and make modifications to suit your needs.

In each report you can switch to edit mode, where you can change or add additional visuals. On the right side of the screen, you’ll see a list of all the available Insightly tables and fields. Select the visual design, filters, and fields to modify reports or create new ones.

Insightly records that are visible to you in the CRM will also be visible in the Power BI reports and dashboards that you share with others. Explore them in new ways by diving into the many reporting options and creating reports that guide you toward your business goals.

At Insightly, we’re always working to connect your CRM to tools that can help increase your productivity and efficiency. With a connection to Power BI, you can get a new perspective on your business and make your data Big Data.

When your business is busy, there is probably a lot of data entry going on. Perhaps you have an assistant at the office entering leads into Insightly as calls come in, and a salesperson scanning business cards from a conference they’re attending. Maybe visitors on your website are submitting their information through webforms, and an intern is importing contacts.

With all this activity, you’re bound to discover a contact that should be in your sales pipeline, or a sales lead that is actually one of your suppliers and whom you want listed as a contact.

Our customers tell us that it’s not uncommon for these things to happen, and with the many ways to add contacts and leads to Insightly, that’s not too surprising. They have also told us they’d like a way to make corrections when this situation comes up, so we’ve made it easier to change one type of these records to another when you need to.

Every lead and contact record now includes an option called Change Lead To Contact or Change Contact To Lead. When you encounter a person in the CRM that isn’t set up properly for your workflow, click the Actions menu to change them to the right record.

In both cases, Insightly will create the new record, copy over as much information as possible, and delete the old record. For example, leads include fields like Lead Source and Lead Score that aren’t necessary for contacts, so those won’t be copied over. Contacts include links, but leads don’t, so the links cannot be copied because they have no place to go.

Common default fields shared by the records will be copied over to the new item, so you won’t lose the contact information you need to get in touch.

This new function should help keep your sales reports clean and your sales process moving with fewer bumps in the road. To get more details, see our help articles Changing a lead to a contact and Changing a contact to a lead.

“How much revenue did the sales team bring in last quarter?”
“Who are we expecting at next month’s events?”
“What’s in our sales pipeline?”

Many questions need to be asked when running a business, and the right answers will provide actionable insights to help your business grow and thrive. Now, gain a greater understanding of your CRM data with Insightly’s Advanced Reporting—a tool to help you create, share, and schedule custom reports. With our new generation of reporting, you can select and filter your Insightly data in powerful ways to get the answers you need, when you need them.

To move between our legacy reports and the new advanced features, click the Legacy Reports/Advanced Reporting button on the Reports page.

Custom reports based on your needs

Our customers have asked for more flexible reporting to retrieve information for any type of Insightly record based on fields and parameters that they choose. Our new custom reporting lets you do just that. With a drag-and-drop interface, building advanced, tabular reports based on your needs is as easy as selecting fields from a list—even custom fields that you’ve created.

Create new reports quickly with Insightly’s report templates. We’ve included activity report templates to provide a connected view of Insightly activities (tasks, emails, and events) and your selection of opportunities, leads, contacts, organizations, projects, or your Insightly users. Build reports to monitor sales pipelines, staff productivity, potential revenue… If it’s in your CRM, you can create a report for it.

The information you want, organized the way you want it

Keep reports organized with report folders, which can be shared with your team or kept private. Your entire team can benefit from reports you share with them, and even get personalized views of their own progress.

Sort and group your data with a drag or a click, placing your fields where you need them. Sorting and grouping lets you organize report results in a way that makes the best sense for you and your business.

With filters, you can cast a wide net to capture more data or aim for a narrower set of results. Filters can be simple queries or complex searches that use advanced logic, giving you more control over your reports. Create reports that focus on regions, teams, or departments by selecting the appropriate fields and entering parameters that define what you’re looking for.

Add summaries to your report to include sums, counts, averages and other aggregate calculations for numeric fields. Slice and dice your data when you combine summaries with grouping.

Reports delivered to your inbox, on your schedule

With Report Scheduling, monthly, weekly, or daily reports are no longer a chore as they are delivered directly to your email inbox. Use Smart Alerts to stay informed about any saved reports that fall out of a range that you set. You’ll have a report emailed to you when the alert is triggered, once or every time it happens. Report Scheduling and Smart Alerts are available with a paid subscription.

The data you need to monitor your business

We’ve built Advanced Reporting based on customer feedback, and we have more changes planned for the future. We are already designing the next phase of reporting to bring you data visualization: the graphs and dashboards that will take your reporting to the next level. In the meantime, you can export report data to create graphs using programs like Excel or Power BI from Microsoft.

Great business reports for measuring progress and tracking efforts can help you make better decisions and lead you down a greater path for growth. These powerful reports will change the way you look at your Insightly CRM data. And we’ll continue our efforts to make Insightly the best tool for your success.

Ready to get started? For the basics, see our blog posts on CRM Reporting 101, then read the Insightly Reporting Guide for a full list of how-to articles, including an Advanced Reporting video.

Customers of Insightly CRM and customers of Xero accounting software are familiar with the benefits that great cloud-based tools bring to their small businesses. With better collaboration and easily accessible customer information, people are saving time, earning more business, and staying on track.

Our new Xero integration can help you raise your productivity even higher by letting you view Xero information in Insightly, copy data between both applications, and create invoice drafts directly from your CRM.
 

 
By activating the Xero integration, you’ll be able to view invoices, bills, and summaries on the Xero subtab in Insightly under any contact, organization, opportunity, or project.

Your Insightly administrator can set up the integration with Xero through the system settings on your account, and you can even designate which of your Insightly users will have access to this information. We have articles on our support site to help you get started and learn all about these new features, so if you’re a Xero user, set up your integration and bring your CRM and accounting software together.

You’ll love your CRM with beautiful accounting software. You’ll love Insightly + Xero.

We’ve been busy with our iOS and Android apps, adding features to help you get things done faster, right from your phone. Here’s a recap of the improvements we’ve made over the last few months.

Manage your sales leads on the go

With leads on mobile, you can view, add, and edit information for your leads whether you’re on the road or have just wrapped up a meeting. If you’ve qualified a lead, convert it to a new contact and sales opportunity from your phone, just like you do on the web.

View your Insightly calendar

If you’re using Insightly to manage your events and tasks, you’ll find it convenient to have all your upcoming due dates and meetings appear right in the app, in the Insightly mobile calendar. You can navigate the calendar, add and search events, and view the tasks and events for a selected day.

Track your tasks in a widget

Android and iOS widgets let you view important information without opening an app, and our task widgets give you easy access to your Insightly task list. You can view and add tasks on your Android Home screen or iOS Notification Center and quickly open the Insightly app when something needs attention.

Save an audio note

Try audio notes to record and save audio files from your phone’s microphone. By selecting the “Note with recording” option when you add a new note, you can record up to 60 minutes of audio. Use audio notes for meetings, interviews, or any other situation where using your microphone will be handy.

Scan business cards with your phone

Create Insightly contacts or leads in a snap with our business card scanning. When you add a new contact or lead, you can select the option to take a photo of a business card and have Insightly transcribe the contact information for you.

Insightly’s mobile apps will help you accomplish more for your business by placing your CRM right in the palm of your hand.

If you haven’t tried our mobile apps, you haven’t experienced the full power of Insightly.

Insightly’s Android and iOS apps are more popular than ever, so our mobile team is determined to keep up the pace of new features and improvements to benefit our customers who are on the go. Our latest update—version 3.7.0—gives you access to leads, adds the ability to record audio notes, and lets you change the photo on any record.

Accessing your leads

If you’re using leads on your Insightly account, you’ll now see the leads tab when you access your Insightly menu on mobile. You can view, add, and edit open leads from the mobile apps.

And when you add a lead, you’ll be given the option to scan a business card or enter their contact information manually. Having leads at hand will empower your mobile team with more information to close sales when they’re on the road.

Record and save audio notes

This new mobile-exclusive feature lets you create a note in Insightly and attach a recorded audio file by using your mobile device’s microphone. You can record up to 60 minutes of audio by selecting the Related tab on any record, adding a new note, and selecting the “Note with recording” option.

When you start a new audio note, just type in a title and tap the circle to begin. You’ll see the waveform appear when audio is being recorded, and you can even minimize the recording window to continue working in Insightly and return to it later. See our support article on audio notes for all the details.

Changing the image on a record

Since you have a camera and photo album on your phone, it just made sense to let you upload images for your contacts, leads, and other Insightly records. To change the image on a record, tap the image in the circle above the item’s details. You’ll have the choice of taking a new photo, choosing one from your device, or removing an existing image.

Have you been waiting for leads or audio notes to download our mobile apps?
Well, now is your time.

And if you don’t have an Insightly account, take a look at our features and plans on the pricing page
or jump right in and sign up for a free trial by clicking this big orange button.