fmSMS Now Supports 75 SMS Gateways Internationally

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We’ve just added another SMS Gateway (Zipwhip) to the list of supported SMS Gateways for fmSMS, our award winning solution that lets you send and receive SMS messages using the FileMaker platform. This brings the total number of supported SMS Gateways to 75!

Zipwhip was a bit different to most SMS Gateways that fmSMS supports – they allow you to enable text messaging for your existing business phone number (Landline or Toll-Free Phone Number). This allows you to have one number for customers to call you and text you – normally you would need to get a dedicated virtual mobile number to handle the incoming text/SMS messages.

SMS is still an extremely effective form a communication – 80% of consumers prefer to be contacted by a business via SMS/texting over a phone call. 98% of consumer text messages are read – only 10% of emails are even opened.

You can download a trial version of fmSMS and setup a trial account with one of the SMS Gateways to see how you can use FileMaker to send SMS Messages to your customers, employees, prospects etc.

FileMaker and Xero Integration Webinar Recording

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fmSMS and Emoji Support ?

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At the recent FileMaker Developer Conference I was doing one of my fmSMS demonstrations to an attendee which involved me sending a message from fmSMS to their mobile phone (showing how you can use FileMaker to send SMS messages) and then having them send a reply back to demonstrate how you can use fmSMS to receive incoming messages directly into FileMaker. Normally the reply is a simple text reply of a few words, but this one was a bit different as you can see here:

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I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Emoji reply had made it all the way back from their phone to fmSMS via the SMS Gateway and the PHP page that is used to convert the incoming reply into a FileMaker record without me having to do anything to handle the Unicode characters – it just worked! I decided to do a bit more research into this to see how different SMS Gateways handled Emoji characters as a way of testing their Unicode support (there are now hundreds of Emoji characters encoded in the Unicode standards).

It’s important here to understand the history of SMS – back when the GSM standard was being adopted the mobile phone industry decided on a standard set of characters called GSM 03.38. Support for this character set became mandatory for all GSM handsets and network elements (carriers etc). The GSM character set includes the English alphabet ( A-Z ), numbers (0 – 9) and some special characters, and the size of a single SMS was limited to 160 characters. The 160 character maximum actually comes from the fact that you can encode 160 7-bit characters into 140 bytes – 140 bytes being the limit for the size of a message.

Unicode characters use several GSM characters to describe each Unicode character which means that you won’t be able to send as many characters in your SMS when include Unicode characters. Depending on which special characters you’re sending, you may only be able to send between 35 and 70 characters. To send a message that is longer than the 160 characters/140 bytes limit the message needs to use Concatenation, which involves breaking up the message over multiple SMS messages.

Thankfully most SMS Gateways and mobile phone handsets support concatenation where multiple messages are joined together to form a single message on the handset, even though that single message is greater than 160 characters (or 140 bytes). As each message needs to broken up into individual 140 byte messages the SMS Gateways will charge you for each individual message, even though they appear as a single message to the recipient.

Here’s an example of such a message using the GSM character set which is 312 characters but appears as a single received message on the phone:

long-message

SMS Gateways that handle the encoding of Unicode characters make life easy for us developers – we don’t have to do anything when sending or receiving messages from FileMaker. One such SMS Gateway is Twilio which I used in my tests and was able to handle the Emoji characters with ease – they have a number of articles on their website that go into the details of their support for Unicode. I created an outgoing message in fmSMS with some Emoji characters (FileMaker Pro 7 and later being a fully Unicode aware application):

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and sent the message using a number of different SMS Gateways. Where the SMS Gateway supported Unicode the message appeared exactly as it was sent:

emoji-received

 

 

I tried with some SMS Gateways that don’t have native support for Unicode characters and on the handset here’s what the same message looked like:

no-emoji

I then sent some replies containing Emoji characters back to fmSMS which has a “chat view” that shows all the sent/received messages to an individual contact – here’s our Emoji conversation:

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-10-33-36-pm

As you can see the incoming message containing Emoji characters was received successfully using the Twilio SMS Gateway once again.

Unicode support isn’t only important for Emojis – if you need to send accented characters or messages in Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc then you will be thankful for Unicode support as well. Just remember that when sending messages containing Unicode characters the standard 160 character test doesn’t apply – I’m yet to find a way to have a Unicode character check that converts back to the GSM character set in FileMaker so I can accurately count the number of credits required for each message, regardless of whether it contains GMS or Unicode characters). If anyone knows of a way please let me know in the comments below. ?

Are you still processing credit card payments manually?

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Do you process credit card transactions manually and wonder if there is a better way? The good news is that there is a better more automated way that can integrate with your custom FileMaker solution and save your staff time and your business money.

Chances are if you’re a small business that sells goods or services your customers are going to want to pay by credit card, and having options and making it easy for customers to pay your invoices is a good thing for your business. Once you start accepting credit card payments however you need to comply with the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) to help protect card data and prevent payment data theft. Small businesses are increasingly at risk for payment data theft – nearly half of cyberattacks worldwide in 2015 were against businesses with less than 250 workers according to cybersecurity firm Symantec.

The easiest way to protect against data breaches is to not store card data at all, however that isn’t always practical, especially if you’re selling an ongoing service that requires ongoing payments (e.g. a monthly subscription service). Whilst you definitely should not be storing unencrypted credit card data in your FileMaker solution that any employee can access, you can take advantage of encryption and tokenisation technologies that allow you to store an “alias” or token in your FileMaker solution and use that to processes future charges. Here’s how it works:

  1. customer provides credit card details to pay an Invoice
  2. you send an encrypted HTTPS request to a PCI DSS compliant credit card gateway who store the credit card details (as they are PCI DSS compliant) and send you back a token and a masked version of the credit card number (e.g. 512345…346)
  3. you store this token in your FileMaker transaction record. As this is a token and not a real credit card number it’s completely useless if stolen. You can also store the masked version of the card number in case you need to confirm with the customer which card number you are charging
  4. when you need to process a payment in the future you make another HTTPS request to the credit card gateway requesting a payment and referencing the token
  5. the credit card gateway returns a response indicating whether the transaction was processed successfully or if there was an error (e.g. declined, insufficient funds etc)

This can all be automated in a FileMaker solution allowing staff to process a payment or tokenise a card at the click of a button. We’ve worked with many PCI DSS compliant credit card gateways such as Stripe, eWay, BPOINT and Authorize.Net to help customers automate the process of processing credit card payments securely in their FileMaker solutions. If you’re currently storing credit card numbers in your FileMaker solution and would like to tokenise these we can also help you batch process these.

If you would like to discuss implementing a secure credit card processing system for your FileMaker solution plesae get in touch for a free initial consultation. For more information on how you can protect card data the Payment Card Industry has a number of guides for small businesses, including:

Update: we’ve published a short video demonstrating how you can use FileMaker to tokenise a credit card and then process a transaction by referencing that token.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

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In Part 1 of our series on FileMaker and eCommerce Integration we outlined the challenges many small businesses face when they go live with an online store and the new workflow challenges that can create, leading to the prospect of having to do double data entry in multiple places. In Part 2 we showed how you eliminate any double data entry by making your online store visible to your FileMaker solution by using the ESS (External SQL Data Sources) feature of FileMaker Pro/Server, allowing users to see online orders on a normal FileMaker layout.

Not all FileMaker Pro solutions will be able to take advantage of the ESS feature however for a variety of reasons, including:

  • your online store doesn’t use a supported ESS data source
  • your online store hosting provider doesn’t allow remote SQL access
  • your company firewall won’t allow ESS access to the hosting provider
  • you wish to avoid the expense of purchasing ODBC drivers

There are a number of alternatives to having a “live” view of your online orders using ESS which can be broadly defined as either a push or pull approach, whereby data is either pushed from the online store to your FileMaker solution or pulled/downloaded from your online store by your FileMaker solution. Like all solutions there are pros and cons to each approach and the particulars of how your FileMaker solution is hosted will determine which options are available to you.

In the following examples we’re going to be using the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress as it offers both a push and pull API and is a popular eCommerce store, powering over 37% of all online stores at the time of writing.

Push Online Orders to FileMaker – the push approach is usually considered the most optimal solution as it is only invoked when there is new data to transfer, thus reducing the number of unnecessary requests to the online store to check for new orders. In WooCommerce you implement a push solution through the use of Webhooks – Webhooks are are very common form of server event notifications which trigger an action by sending a request to a URL that you specify. WooCommerce has a number of Webhooks that you can activate, for example each time a new order is created.

We’ve helped many customers over the years implement a Webhook solution that works as follows:

  • a new order is created on the customer’s online store
  • a Webhook is triggered which sends the details of the new order as JSON encoded data to a URL (a PHP page) on the customer’s FileMaker Server
  • the PHP file uses the FileMaker PHP API to convert the JSON encoded data into a new customer record, order record and order line items

The customer also receives an email for each new order, which prompts them to open their FileMaker database and review the order details and ship any required products then push the invoice to their accounting software (Xero, MYOB etc). The customer hasn’t had to do any double data entry or query the online store for new orders – everything is pushed through as it happens. It does require the customer to have FileMaker Server with Custom Web Publishing enabled and allow external access to the PHP file hosted on their server.

Pull Online Orders to FileMaker – if the push approach is not a viable option WooCommerce also offers a REST API that you can also use with FileMaker Pro. The WooCommerce REST API allows you to query your WooCommerce online store and retrieve details about customers, orders, products etc, as well as being able to push data from FileMaker to WooCommerce if necessary. A typical solution using the WooCommerce REST API works as follows:

  • customer receives an email notification from the WooCommerce store about a new order
  • customer then clicks a button in their FileMaker solution to query the online store for any new orders since a timestamp (typically the last time they checked for new orders)
  • FileMaker sends a REST API request for any new order details and receives a JSON encoded response from the WooCommerce REST API with details about each order
  • the response is parsed out to create new customer, order and order item records

Once again the customer has been able to eliminate any double data entry and simply has to click a button in FileMaker to get all the new order details.

As we have illustrated in this series there are typically a number of options available when it comes to integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM, whether that’s a direct live view using ESS or having new orders pushed or pulled into your FileMaker solution. With an integration into your accounting software such as Xero, MYOB AccountRight or MYOB Essentials you can completely eliminate any double data entry for the entire order and sit back and watch as the data flows from your online store to FileMaker and then to your accounting software.

If you would like to discuss integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM please get in touch for a free initial consultation.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) Update

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Over the past few months we’ve been busy adding new examples and features to our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution based on customer requests and our own list of features we’d like to see. We now have new examples for the following Xero API endpoints:

  • Purchase Orders
  • Receipts
  • Expense Claims
  • Users
  • Currencies
  • Branding Themes
  • Credit Notes

We’ve also added the ability to download the Xero Invoice PDF as well as the Invoice Online URL – this allows you to include these in emails that you send to your customers (e.g. a ‘pay now’ link). We’re currently working on Overpayments and then will tackle Prepayments. If there’s any examples that we don’t currently have that you would like to see please get in touch and let  us know.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

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In Part 1 of our series on FileMaker and eCommerce integration we outlined the challenges many small businesses face when they go live with an online store and the new workflow challenges that can create, leading to the prospect of having to do double data entry in multiple places.

As a small business ourselves we also experienced this pain when we went live with our own online stores. Our first online store was for our oldest product fmSMS which allows you to send/receive SMS messages from the FileMaker platform – this has always had it’s own dedicated website/domain so it made sense for the store to live on the same site:

http://www.fmsms.com/shop/

A few years ago we also started selling the first of our fmAccounting Link products for the Xero accounting platform and it made sense to sell this via a store on our main Databuzz website:

http://www.databuzz.com.au/shop

So we now currently have 2 online stores located at different domains, but we will eventually merge these together to simplify things. As both stores were built using the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress and hosted with the same web hosting provider, we knew that any integration solution for one of the stores would work for both stores.

For each order that came through the store we need to perform the following actions:

  • check for an existing customer in our company FileMaker CRM and if no match is found create a new Contact record
  • create a new Invoice and associated Invoice Items
  • create a Payment record against the Invoice
  • push a copy of the Invoice to our accounting software (Xero in our case)
  • add the purchaser to a mailing list in MailChimp for future email newsletters/updates

The process starts with an email from the online store letting us know a new order has arrived:

New Customer Order

We would then have to copy and paste all the details into our FileMaker CRM, push the Invoice to Xero using our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) integration, then add the customer to the appropriate mailing list in in our MailChimp account. When you’re only dealing with a couple of orders a month you can probably cope with doing things manually, but once you start to get several orders a day you are then impacted by the time it takes to do all of these takes which are also prone to data entry errors. Like us you probably start wondering if there is a better way and can this process be automated.

The good new is that it can and having helped tens of customers in the past overcome similar FileMaker/eCommerce integration challenges so we knew where to start – ESS. ESS is the External SQL Data Sources feature that was first introduced way back with FileMaker Pro v9 and allows you to establish a live two-way connection between FileMaker Pro and the top SQL data sources. ESS originally supported these SQL data sources:

  • Microsoft  SQL Server
  • MySQL
  • Oracle

FileMaker Pro v15 introduced 2 new data sources:

  • IBM DB2
  • PostgreSQL

Most of the popular eCommerce stores are using one of the following backend databases to drive the store:

  • MySQL (used by WordPress/WooCommerce)
  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL

These are also supported ESS data sources so you can use the ESS feature to  get your FileMaker CRM talking to your online store. ESS allows you to view your SQL data from within FileMaker – it appears just like normal FileMaker tables. You can create new layouts to view the data, create relationships from your FileMaker tables to your ESS tables, access the SQL data from FileMaker scripts and more (there are some limitations and it does require setting up ODBC drivers – see the Accessing External SQL Data Sources (ESS) Overview and Troubleshooting for more details.

Once you have installed the appropriate ODBC driver and setup the System DSN you can then add an ESS table occurrence to your FileMaker relationships graph, just like you would for your normal FileMaker tables:

ESS Table Occurrences

You will need to have a basic understanding of your external SQL data source structure so you know which tables to add to your FileMaker graph and how they relate – details about WooCommerce can be found here. Once you’ve added your ESS table occurrences you can create new layouts based on each of these and start to view your online store data live in your FileMaker CRM. Here’s some examples showing some of the WooCommerce/WordPress tables that store online order details:

ESS Orders

ESS Orders Meta

ESS Order Items

ESS Order Item Meta

The above screenshots are showing data from 4 of the main tables that are used by WooCommerce to store order details:

  1. posts: this creates a record for each online order. This table is also used to store Product details
  2. postmeta: this stores a number of records related to each order, such as the billing/shipping and currency/tax details
  3. woocommerce_order_items: this stores line item details for each order
  4. woocommerce_order_itemmeta: this stores meta data about each order line item

As you can see by looking at these ESS tables in FileMaker we can see all the data about each order but it is located in at least 4 different tables, making aggregating the details each order so we can easily view the complete order challenging. We could create a number of FileMaker calculation fields to extra details about each order based on the meta_key for Orders and Order Line Items, but that would end up adding a lot of table occurrences and relationships to the graph and create another layout of unnecessary complexity.

There is a better way however that avoids all that unnecessary clutter on the graph – we can use SQL Views to create a more structured view of the SQL data we require. ESS fortunately also supports SQL Views which allow us to create a predefined SQL query that we then add to the relationship graph. We created 2 SQL views for Orders and Order Line Items to gather all the related meta data about each order and order item. When we add these to the graph and view them from a FileMaker layout here’s what we see for Orders:

ESS Orders View

and this for Order Items:

ESS Order Items View

Much better! For each Order we now get 1 record showing all the Order/Customer details, and for each Order Line Item we now get 1 record showing all the details about the Order Line Item, including the Product Price and SKU (the SKU is the same one used in Xero so it’s important that we can pass that through to Xero). We can then create a relationship between these 2 ESS table occurrences to relate an Order to its Order Items by the order_id value:

ESS Relationship

and be able to view a complete WooCommerce online order in FileMaker:

WC ESS Order

We now have a FileMaker layout showing all the details for a single WooCommerce/online order, including Customer Details, Line Item Details and related Product Details. From here’s a simple case of FileMaker scripting to move the data from the ESS tables to the native FileMaker tables (first checking for any existing Customers with the same name) and from there into Xero. We add a button to the Online Order layout to push the online order into out FileMaker CRM which handles all of these tasks, saving us around 15 minutes per online order (we have customers that are getting tens of orders every day so they time savings really start to add up).

If you’re not familiar with ESS it’s important to be aware of the following:

  • you will need to install ODBC drivers
  • if you’re hosting your file with FileMaker Server you can install the ODBC driver once on the FileMaker Server machine for all FileMaker Pro clients to use, which makes deployment a breeze
  • depending on your ESS data source and whether you are on Mac or Windows you may need to purchase the ODBC driver. There’s a full list of compatible ODBC drivers in the FileMaker Knowledge Base
  • you will need to get some documentation that explains how your SQL data source tables are structured so you know which tables to add to the relationship graph
  • when working with ESS tables it’s best to use a “read only” account that won’t let you edit any of the SQL data in case you accidentally edit/delete any of the online order records
  • your company firewall will need to allow access to the ODBC data source port
  • if you’re accessing a MySQL data source you will typically have to setup Remote Access to the MySQL database via your web hosting company (e.g. via cPanel).

In Part 3 of this series we’ll look into the options when you can’t use ESS and how you can still go about integrating your online shop with your FileMaker CRM. In the meantime if you would like to discuss integrating your online store with your FileMaker CRM please contact us.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

FileMaker DevCon 2016 Recap

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The  2016 FileMaker Developer Conference was held at the same location as last year – Las Vegas, Nevada – and the same hotel – The Cosmopolitan – so everything felt very familiar.  I didn’t spend nearly as much time getting lost as I did in 2015. This was my 13th DevCon (out of 21) and the fourth time that Databuzz has exhibited.

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After leaving Australia in the middle of winter and arriving in Las Vegas in the middle of summer the first thing you notice is the heat:

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Most of the time at DevCon is spent indoors (I didn’t venture outside for a few days) so it’s only when you leave the hotel that it hits you and it got progressively hotter as the week went on. The Cosmopolitan has great views of the Las Vegas strip – here’s the view from my hotel balcony:

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After setting up the booth on the Monday I gave a presentation at the annual Custom Web Publishing User Group meeting – this is the 10th straight year that the CWP group has met and it’s always a must attend session for me. Then it was time for the Opening Keynote presented by FileMaker Inc. staff, where attendees get a glimpse at the future product direction for the FileMaker platform:

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The rest of the week was spent at the Databuzz booth in the exhibitors area, talking to developers from all around the world and doing lots of demos of our products. It’s also a chance to catch up with customers in person and put a face to a name that you’ve been emailing for many months.

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As with past years the most interest from attendees at our booth was in fmSMS and we did lots of demos showing how you can use the FileMaker platform to send and receive SMS/TXT messages. Looking at the message logs I can see we sent a lot of messages to attendees from the USA/Canada, France, Luxembourg, Sweden, Mongolia and Australia.

This year there was definitely more awareness of the Xero small business accounting platform compared to previous years and it was great showing our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution to developers from all around the world. North America is now Xero’s fastest growing market (the other main markets are Australia, New Zealand and the UK) so we will definitely see more interest in Xero in future years.

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The venue for  DevCon 2017 was announced at the closing session – DevCon is returning to Phoenix, Arizona and the JW Marriott Desert Ridge from July 24 – 26. That will also have a familiar feel to it – it will be the fifth time DevCon has been at this venue. The closing session was also used to announce the winners of the FileMaker Developer Challenge. This year Databuzz and our good friends at Goya donated the monitors that we purchased for the conference to some of the charities involved in the Developer Challenge – Foster Kinship and the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth gratefully accepted these.


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See you in Phoenix in 2017!

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 1

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puzzle
Many of our small business customers have both a physical presence and an online presence when it comes to selling their goods and services. They  might have:

  • a physical retail store where customers can come and purchase goods in person
  • a mail order store where they take orders by mail, phone and fax and send the goods to the purchaser once they have paid
  • an online store which takes orders, processes the credit card transactions and notifies the business to fulfil the orders
  • a popup store/market store that runs every month or for short periods of time

When the business is starting up, or when they are adding a new method of selling goods and services, the tendency is for each of these stores to operate as their own silo. This ultimately leads to a lot of data duplication/double entry in multiple systems as the business deals with orders coming in from multiple store presences. Quite often we see the following workflow:

  • physical and mail order/phone orders are processed in the central office FileMaker CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution
  • online/eCommerce orders are processed via the online store attached to the customer’s website. The business is notified of new orders via email and these are then entered into the central office CRM system by customer service staff who then notify the accounts department to create an accounting entry in Xero or MYOB etc.

We wouldn’t generally recommend to customer’s that they use FileMaker to run their online eCommerce store, so there’s no problem with having the physical presence and the online presence separate (and it’s highly advisable from a security standpoint). However this leads to the problem of scattered information and ad hoc processes – wouldn’t it be better if all the information was in one place and you could see all the physical orders and online orders from the central FileMaker CRM? Could you save time and increase productivity by not having to manually re-enter all the online orders in both the main FileMaker CRM as well as your accounting software?

We’ve been helping customers for many years now integrate their online stores with their FileMaker CRM solution so they can view everything in the one place and automate the transfer of online orders into their office CRM, and then push that into their accounting software without having to re-type anything.

Here’s a list of online orders from a popular shopping cart as it appears in the web browser admin view:

WooCommerce FM List 2

 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could also view these same orders live in FileMaker:

WooCommerce FM List

and instead of re-entering each order manually, including the line item details:

WooCommerce Order WP

you could see all the online order details live in FileMaker:

WooCommerce FM Details

and with the click of a button you can push the order details from the online eCommerce system into your FileMaker CRM and apply some business rules at the same time, such as:

  • check for an existing customer in the FileMaker CRM and if no match is found create a new Contact record
  • create a new Invoice and associated Invoice Items
  • create a Payment record against the Invoice
  • push a copy of the Invoice to your accounting software such as Xero or MYOB
  • add the purchaser to a mailing list in MailChimp or Campaign Monitor etc
  • send a thank you email to the customer with a discount coupon

Here at Databuzz we recently faced the same challenges that we’ve been helping our customers with for many years – we opened our first online store last year and have been working on integrating this with our internal FileMaker CRM every since. In Part 2 and 3 of this series we’ll cover some approaches to eCommerce and FileMaker integration based on our experiences as a small business that uses FileMaker and Xero to run their business.

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 2

FileMaker and eCommerce Integration – Part 3

FileMaker Launches Small Business Service Business Toolkit

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In July 2010 FileMaker Inc. launched the first version of FileMaker Go for the iPhone and the iPad, beginning the push towards mobility and extending FileMaker’s reach beyond the office and into the field. FileMaker Go was particularly helpful for service businesses that had staff working remotely onsite with customers – for example servicing customer equipment or performing scheduled maintenance. FileMaker Go allowed these service workers to make the move away from paper and to a digital solution that help removed unnecessary paper work and data entry.

Over the past six years we’ve helped implement a number of FileMaker Go based mobility solutions for customers that have helped transform the way they do business. A typical workflow before FileMaker Go would like something like this:

  • office staff would allocate jobs for technicians/service staff via an office based FileMaker solution
  • these would be printed off and collected by the service workers at the start of each day
  • service workers would complete the jobs and record all the information in paper forms
  • at the end of the day the service staff would return to the head office and deliver the completed forms to an office based worker who would then re-enter the same data in the office database

With the introduction of FileMaker Go we can now extend the reach of the office FileMaker system to the remote field workers. An integrated FileMaker Go custom app can transform the old workflow in many ways and eliminate a lot of paper based forms and double data entry. As a result the new workflow looks like this:

  • office staff allocate jobs for the remote field workers
  • using an iPhone or iPad running a FileMaker Go custom app the service staff download any jobs allocated to them each day containing all the details of the job, customer details and equipment details
  • service staff visit each customer (they can view their address using Google Maps direct from FileMaker Go) and record details about each job. This might include time spent on site, parts used, equipment readings, photos and asignature from the customer who approves the job
  • if required an invoice can be generated and sent via email as a PDF onsite to the customer
  • at the end of the day or after each job is completed the data is uploaded back to the office system which in turn triggers a new workflow (e.g. to set the next follow up date, issue an invoice if one was not delivered onsite etc)

With an integrated FileMaker Go solution there is no longer any requirement to re-enter data back in the office, a process that can often take multiple hours each day. This frees up office staff to perform more meaningful and productive work (and can also mean you don’t need to hire as many staff or temp workers to perform this work).

FileMaker Go can help transform any service based business, regardless of whether you’re currently using a FileMaker solution in the office. We’ve implemented FileMaker Go/mobile solutions in many different industries over the past six years, including:

  • Real Estate – allowing property management staff to download a list of properties requiring end of lease inspections and complete the inspections onsite. All completed inspections are then uploaded to a central database back in the office and reports send to the landlord
  • Equipment Inspections – we have a number of customers that need to perform regular scheduled inspections on equipment such as septic tanks, gas tanks and properties. Inspections are allocated to a particular staff or area and then downloaded either daily or monthly as required and uploaded when completed.
  • Electricians – allowing electricians to download daily jobs and record time and parts used onsite for each job and upload back to the office each day

In recognition of how FileMaker Go can help service based businesses FileMaker Inc. has recently released a free Small Business Service Business Toolkit to help small businesses plan, create and deploy a custom app that will enable them to maximize customer satisfaction, drive growth and increase profitability. The Toolkit includes an eBook with case studies showing how small businesses, by replacing pen-and-paper processes with custom apps built using the FileMaker Platform, are experiencing tremendous improvements in overall work performance.

You can download a free copy of the Small Business Service Business Toolkit here. If you would like to discuss implementing a custom app for your service business please get in touch.