VTiger has built-in email templates, which can be used in workflows as well as sending emails from the CRM. For most businesses standard vtiger email templates are sufficient as they provide ability to quickly send templated emails. We received multiple requests regarding the permissions/sharing as well as workflow capabilities that related to email templates. In standard VTiger you can not share or restrict a user/group/role from accessing certain email templates, which makes it difficult to use them for business with multiple departments. To overcome that, we customized email templates to support sharing/permissions where you can select users/groups/profiles/roles and assign them to the email templates. This layer of permissions really helps to separate the departments and restrict visibility in certain cases. Next, since templates can be used in workflows, and some of the templates are created for workflows only – it wouldn’t make sense to see them when sending regular
VTiger has a “Quick Create” option for most of the modules, however the more complicated ones such as quotes, invoices, sales & purchase orders does not have that option. One of our customers goes through a lot of quotes daily and found themselves spending too much time creating quotes and requested for a solution. Usually it takes about 1-2 minutes to create new quote by filling out all fields, searching and selecting products/services and so on. To make this process a little easier, we created a new Custom Quote Form, which only contains 7 key fields (specific to their business) and the item details section was customized to show the head or each ‘item family’ with ability to select items from the dropdown as well as add new rows, set qty and price. In addition, as the quick quote gets saved, it runs multiple back-end processes to preset all the other
Calendar Activities (Tasks & Events) is considered a special module due to it’s custom design. That makes it harder to integrate with all the other extensions, add related modules and most importantly – customize. Events/Tasks in VTiger are used differently by many business, some use for scheduling jobs, reminders and others for actual to-dos, tasks and checklists. One the key features VTiger Calendar module is missing – is ability to attach documents/files to it. One of our customers requested to add such ability and we designed in a way where you can attach multiple documents/files to the activity as well as include those into the emails generated by workflow. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done – please give us a call if you need such solution or anything else related to VTiger.
VTiger has a built in “Export to PDF” function which allows to export Invoice into PDF, however it is limited to just one invoice a the time. In some cases that sufficient, however most businesses require a monthly/quarterly/yearly invoice statement or summary and that’s where VTiger is lacking the functionality. Based on one of our customer’s requirements, we built a custom invoice summary/statement page, where the user can access it from the organization and see all the invoices there. In addition, we added a date filter, so the invoice can be filtered to specific date range. We also added totals at the bottom, so you can clearly see the received, balance for individual invoices as well as the total. To make the process more efficient, we added an “Export to PDF” button, which create a statement/summary for all the invoice shown as well as the totals, company information
VTiger has a built-in Sales Order module which supports products, services and has a lot of features such as taxes, discounts and so on. It works fine for a standard order processing, however when it comes to custom orders with requires item qty depletion, bundles and 3rd party integration – it does not do that out of the box. One of our customers is running a clinic and requested for a simple, easy to use custom order module to track their services (individual or bundles) as well as the qty and the depletion. We designed one that allows them to quickly add new orders by just filling out few mandatory fields such as selecting the bundle, payment method and adding few notes. Each bundle/item has a qty preset and allows the user to ‘use up’ or deplete certain items, for example, the client purchases a bundle of 5 SPA
Every business has it’s own unique workflow and it is very likely that after the transaction has been made, there are steps to be taken to process the order. One of our customers is selling software with different types of licenses e.g locked, floating, annual, lifetime and requested to build an extension to VTiger Sales Orders which would allow to generate licenses for purchased products. To accommodate that, we added a button “Create License(s)”, which triggers a popup where the user can see the products on the sales order, specify expiration date and see additional information the the product. Once the user clicks to create licenses, it creates new license records (custom vtiger module) and connects to their licensing server via API to generate unique license key. This VTiger customization significantly improves the efficiency. Similar customizations can be added to invoices, quotes or any other module as each business
Mail Manager for VTiger 7 has improved significantly compared to the previous versions. It’s more responsible, modern and a lot easier to navigate and manage emails. As in previous versions, Mail Manager has a feature (action) that allows users to create new records from the email e.g contact, organization, lead, tickets and activities. The only thing it is missing is an action to add new opportunities. To accommodate that, we added an action to “Add Opportunity” right from the Mail Manager. It opens a quick create modal popup and creates the opportunity + links the email message. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done, if you are looking for a similar customization e.g adding other modules to Mail Manager or customizing it in any different way – please shoot us an email at help@vtexperts.com
VTiger 7 has new neat feature, which allows the Opportunity to be converted into a Project. In addition, it has an area where you can map the fields from Opportunity to Project (similar to Lead to Opportunity/Contact/Organization mapping). Opportunities are widely used in almost every business and each has it’s own way of handling them. One of our customers had a request to add an option to convert Opportunity to an Organization and Invoice. To accommodate that, we added a button “Convert to Organization” on the opportunity view. Once the button is clicked – it opens up a popup to fill out/verify mandatory fields before create new organization and invoice. We also added mapping area where the user can configure how the fields will map from one module to another, so no data has to be reentered. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done – please give
Support for VTigers multiple fields types such as text, currency, picklist, multi-select, date and many more. These fields have to be created in administration panel, which we would expect to, however picklist/dropdown and multi-select fields also require administrator privileges to add selections. We came up with a solution, where you no longer need to go into “Picklist Editor” (which requires admin access) to create picklist/dropdown options, but instead – it can be done as you are editing or creating record in VTiger. We added a “Add New” as one of the picklist values and once selected, it will prompt the user to enter new value, which will be saved as a picklist option and will be available for everyone to be used going forward. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done – please give us a call if you need such solution or anything else related to VTiger.
VTiger has a great accounting suite built-in, however it’s lacking a reconciliation piece. One of our customers receives donations and deposits which have to be reconciled at the end of the month. To accommodate that, we built Deposit and Reconciliation VTiger modules, which allows them to record all the donations/deposits, by doing so – they input the amount for each. Next, reconciliation process starts – the user knows exactly how much they should have received for both deposits and donations and they start reconciling by inputting total amount and lookup all the donations/deposits that have not yet been reconciled. At the end of the day, the user will have reconciliation record with all the deposits linked as well as amounts matched. In case where totals don’t add up – we builtin an alert system, which will not allow to close reconciliation record unless the amounts match up to the
VTiger and Asterisk/PBX integration can be challenging and requires a lot of resources (direct asterisk integration, extensions, server changes, etc..)  to get it right. We  have come up with a more simpler solution that converts phone number field into softphone compatible hyperlink also known as “Click to Call”. The phone call is triggered by “tel: xxxx” hyperlink and each phone field in all the VTiger views (list, detail and edit) has an icon can can be clicked to trigger the call on your softphone. It’s a very elegant and cost efficient solution to quickly place calls from VTiger using your own softphone or skype. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done – please give us a call if you need such solution or anything else related to VTiger.
Inventory management is a crucial part of every business. VTiger already has it built in and allows you to “in” and “out” inventory as the invoices, orders and purchase orders get created. Standard VTiger functionality warns you when the product you are adding is Out of Stock, however it does not prevent the user from adding it to the invoice or sales order – you can see where that might become a problem. We customized Invoice and Sales Order section to prevent out of stock products to be saved on the record. The way it works is – the user can still select the product and see that it’s out of stock, however once record is being saved – it will show a notification and will not allow the record to be saved until the product has been removed or quantity adjusted. In addition, the user can override
In the latest VTiger 7.0 release a feature was introduced which allows the comments to be set to Internal (private), meaning that only the users (vtiger) will be able to see the comment, while the portal users (contacts) will not. This feature is really helpful to restrict the visibility for the portal user and keep sensitive or technical details from the customer. One of our customers requested to enhance this feature where they would be able to slip the switch and set the comment to be internal (private) or external (public). In the standard VTiger, if the comment is set to internal or external – it can no longer be changed, however – we added the switch which allows that – see #1. Next, we added a “Post to Resolution” field, which basically creates a comment as well as updates “Solution” and “Status” fields on the ticket. This eliminates the
Standard Support for VTigers custom relationship fields for contacts, organizations and all the other modules. The standard functionality only allows to include ONE record in the field, meaning if you have a “Contacts” lookup field – you can only select one contact. We designed new custom UITYPES (field types) to address this issue. Using our new field types – you can now select multiple contacts or organizations into one relationship field. It is very convenient to add additional people (contacts or organization) that are potentially related to the record e.g project, opportunity, ticket and so on. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done – please give us a call if you need such solution or anything else related to VTiger.
VTiger standard calendar only supports a ‘vertical’ layout of the calendar. Meaning that you can have your day, week, and month views. However, those views are displayed as columns where all the events for all the users (if using shared calendar feature) are crammed into one spot. Such setup makes it very difficult to maintain calendars for multiple people, or even see a who has what scheduled. Imagine, if you had 10 people on your team and you need to look at standard calendar – you wouldn’t be able to tell who has what booked. We enhanced standard VTiger calendar by adding a ‘horizontal’ view, which is a must-have for organizations that rely on calendar and scheduling. It was designed to show all the users/groups as rows, while the days/hours/weeks remain as columns. This allows users to see events assigned to each user without them overlapping onto other users/hours. In
VTiger has a very sophisticated record activity/history log. On the contact, lead or organization you can see associated comments, activities(calls, meetings, todos), tasks, emails and updates. Each history log is associated with the date, however that date can not be filtered by. Say, if you need to find all the leads which had no email or comment activity within the last 30 days – currently, VTiger does not allow you to filter by activity history dates. We created a workflow that updates record “Last Date Contacted” with the date the last email was/activity or comment added. To take it step further, we also created fields to track individual activity type: Last Email Sent Date Last Email Opened Date (part of email tracking extension) Last Activity Date Last Comment Date Those fields are automatically and are available in filters and reports. That’s just one of the VTiger customizations we’ve done –
If you are  a heavy VTiger user – you are likely familiar with quotes, invoices sales & purchase orders. Within each transaction you can add/select products & services. The current VTiger functionality allows users to select either product or a service and execute a simple search. As this might be enough for a user who has very few records and is comfortable with one search criteria, however for heavy VTiger users, who live and breath quotes/invoices – they need a more sophisticated tool to lookup products. We were asked to customize VTiger product select popup and add the following functionality: Additional Filter by Vendor: In many cases, sales reps are looking products by vendor, and us adding the picklist with all the possible vendors – really speeds up the process. They can simply select the vendor from the list and the list will be automatically filtered. Specify QTY and Price: As
Mail Converter can be a very powerful tool if configured properly. It is capable of creating records such as leads, contacts, organizations and tickets. In addition, it can be configured to automatically link all the correspondence(emails) between the VTiger user and lead/contact/organization. It is also widely used by support department.  Mail Converter can update existing and create new tickets, add comments and trigger notifications. In addition to all the standard VTiger Mail Converter functionality described above – we customized it to make it even more powerful. Here are a few custom rules/actions added to Mail Converter to accommodate custom business processes: Create Quote: The customer wanted to automatically create a quote as the email comes in. There were few special conditions, such as – who the sender/subject was and based on that – we automated quote creation from the email. Don’t Create Document: We added a trigger to allow the system
Filters in VTiger is most likely one most of most commonly used features. It allows you to create lists with different columns, sort and filter records. Current VTiger functionality allows filters to be set as default, listed in metrics and set as public. If you “Set Filler as Public” as public – it will be available for everyone to use it. In some cases not all filters would apply to all users and to accommodate that we customized VTiger filters to be assigned to certain group, role or an user. This allows system/department administrator to create filters and assign them to people who need to access it, without cluttering other users filter list. For any VTiger customization requests – please contact us via email or phone.
Comments is one of the most commonly used modules in VTiger. It allows to create a  note/comment on any record, search and report by it. One of the common requests we get is to allow comments to be shared with just certain people or make them private all together. We customized VTiger Comments section and added ability to set comments as “Public” or “Private”. As part of the customization, we created a separate roles/group of people who can only see the “Private” comments, while all the other users can only see “Public” comments. In addition, we added ability to only show “Public” comments to customer portal users. This helps to keep the internal notes in the comments section and prevent your customers from seeing sensitive/irrelevant information. Each business uses comments slightly differently and this is a great example. Please contact us if you have any VTiger customization requests.
It can be frustrating when you find out that the record has been deleted from VTiger without any reason. That happens more than you would expect – user might delete the record by accident or even worse – a wrong record. To deal with such issue we came up with a solution that forces the user to enter reason as the record is being deleted in VTiger. The record cannot be deleted, unless a valid reason is specified. Such customization really helps to stop and re-think if that’s the right thing to do. This just one of many VTiger customizations that we did. Please send us an email at support@vtexperts.com or call us +1 (818) 495 – 5557 if you need any assistance with VTiger.
VTiger is a CRM, but also has some accounting elements such quotes, invoices & orders. Invoice functionality is as in any other accounting system – collect payments, export to PDF, mail or email it. If you are dealing with few invoices a month per customer – that might just work. However, if you end up with 10+ invoices that need to combined – we might be able to help. Currently, VTiger does not allow to combine multiple invoices into one “Master Invoice”, so we customized it to allow users to search for invoices using filters and select the ones that need to be combined and create one “Master Invoice”. We also added few custom fields to help keep track of the invoices combined. In addition, the “Master Invoice” will include all the items from the single invoices and will have a unique PDF template, which is easy to follow for the
VTiger has the ability to attach and store documents which work very well. However, it is missing an ability to add images/pictures and view them without opening. We’ve developed a section on VTiger record which allows the users to attach unlimited number of images, and those images are displayed in the grid view. Meaning that you can see a thumbnail of the image. We also added the ability to zoom in and out which is extremely helpful for people having to deal with a lot of photos.In addition, the images can be moved around  & deleted. This is just another VTiger customization we’ve done – if you need similar functionality, feel free to contact us. Thanks
VTiger 6 Customization: Customized Email Templates with Sharing/Permissions + Workflows