Activity Types
Use Activity Types to classify Activities. Each Activity Type should represent a specific job or task (e.g. sales call, sales appointment or internal meeting). You should give the same Activity Type to every Activity recording the same task. You can use the Activity Type as a search criterion in many
reports.
In defining your Activity Types, you should define some that can be used for Results, allowing the classification of the outcomes of Activities. This is particularly important if you are using Activity Consequences.
You should try to keep the number of Activity Types as small as possible, while taking great care to make them mutually exclusive. You can group Activity Types of a broadly similar nature (e.g. all those to do with sales, or all those to do with administration) together by assigning each one to the same Activity Class.
On double-clicking 'Activity Types' in the 'Settings' list in the Contact module, the 'Activity Types: Browse' window opens, listing the available Activity Types: to enter a new item, click the [New] button in the Button Bar. The 'Activity Type: New' window appears: enter the details as appropriate and click [Save] to save the new record.
- Code
- The unique code that identifies each Activity Type. It can consist of up to five alphanumeric characters.
- It is recommended that the Codes of all Activity Types of the same Class begin with the same character, so that they appear together in the 'Paste Special' list, making selection of the correct one easy.
- Once you have saved an Activity Type, you cannot change the Code simply by typing into the field. If you need to change an Activity Type Code, use the Conversions - Master and Conversions - Activity Types settings in the System module. These settings will change the Activity Type Code both here and in all other registers where the Activity Type has been used.
- Class
- Paste Special
Activity Classes setting, Contact module
- You can group Activity Types of a broadly similar nature (e.g. all those to do with sales, or all those to do with administration) together by assigning each one to the same Activity Class.
- All Activities with Activity Types belonging to the same Activity Class will appear in the same colour in the Calendar. You can also force a Customer, Result and/or Cost (Time) to be entered for Activities of the same Class.
- Comment
- Assign a descriptive name to the Activity Type. This is shown in the 'Activity Types: Browse' window and the 'Paste Special' list: it should therefore be descriptive enough to make the selection of the correct Activity Type easy for all users.
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