This week we have returned our development focus to Shockey Monkey Reporting. You may remember from earlier last month we released our first revised report: Employee – Billable Ticket Summary
Since then we have added several new reports to this engine and are very pleased with the results. We have also made sure that every single report is printable; we know this has always been a huge feature request. Employee – Billable Time
Clients – Active Summary
Clients – Billable Time
Internal – Inventory
Since this re-write of our report engine began several months back, we talked about a dynamic report engine. This engine would allow you to customize and build a report of the current information inside of your portal. We have finished the first section: Tickets and have added it into the reporting engine. *BETA* – Report Templates This section allows you to manage your report templates. You can add/edit a template or select the desired template and generated a new report, which will be saved for viewing at a later time. Clicking on the Last Generated date, will open the currently generated report.
*BETA* – New Report This section is where you will create a new report template or edit and existing one. You will notice at the top of the page, you can enter information about the report template. Then below that section you assign filters and decide which columns should be visible in the generated report.
*BETA* – Generated Report Upon viewing a generated report you will see something like this, depending on the columns you marked as visible and the report filters that were configured. As mentioned before, this report is printable along with every other report in this new system. Upon clicking the print button, it will open a new window with the printable information.
While the FREE version of Shockey Monkey will work for the majority of companies, I personally believe that PRO is the way to go! With both versions of the Shockey Monkey platform, you are still going to get the simplest and most effective IT Management Platform and Customer Relationship Management System that unifies support, services, management, reporting, accounting, and sales activity. However, with Shockey Monkey Pro, you get a whole lot more, including:
If you don’t see value in the PRO version of Shockey Monkey by now, I can’t help you… I just listed six features that value way more than $49.99 a month. You can see by the price, we are not trying to get rich from the product. We are trying to offer you a way to productively track your business and customers at a very reasonable price. So if you are currently a Shockey Monkey FREE subscriber looking to upgrade to PRO; click onSettings and then click Subscriptions while inside your portal. Follow the directions and start enjoying the benefits of Shockey Monkey Pro!!!
Over the years reporting has always been a highly requested feature inside of Shockey Monkey. The biggest issue that we have faced with reporting has been trying to please everyone. While one user may absolutely love everything about the pre-defined reports, other users consider them useless. Well we believe that we have come up with a solution to fix that issue. Dynamic Reporting; we let you pick the information that is critical to you and your company, and then generate a report based on top of that template. Unfortunately this feature is not quite ready yet, we are hoping in a few weeks. However, let’s go over the basics of how this works.
We also understand that this Dynamic Engine will not be able to produce every single (detailed) report that may exceed outside of the scope of dynamic generation. So we will also have (revamped) pre-defined reports, that may be executed on the fly. Employee – Billable Ticket Summary is the first report that we’ve added to the system and is CURRENTLY AVAILABLE. This report generates an overview of your Employees billable time inside and across all tickets within the provided date range. You can see from the screenshot below how this looks, across several employees.
We see the orders come in daily and thank each and every one of you for allowing us to help assist in managing your business. Because of you, Shockey Monkey has become one of the fastest growing IT Management Platform and Customer Relationship Management System in the industry. While perfection is never attainable, our entire Shockey Monkey Team knows that without our partners this would not have been as successful as it has been. With the ever changing landscape of the IT industry, Shockey Monkey will never be a completed platform. We will strive to keep innovating new features that will not only help run your business more smoothly, but hopefully put some additional income in your pockets.
Over the course of the last few months we have published a significant amount of new features into Shockey Monkey. However, these last few weeks we have been focused on fixing some outstanding bugs within our software. With the introduction of our guided setup coming soon, we are trying to assure that we eliminate all of the bugs that have a huge impact on your ability to run your business.
Here are some of the bugs that were addressed over the last few weeks:
Next week, we should have a very exciting addition to Shockey Monkey! Make sure to check back next week, you don’t want to miss this new feature. I will say that it is something that has been requested for quite some time now.
Shockey Monkey has been our major (development) focus over the course of Q1. We have found this experience to be very challenge, while also being very rewarding. The biggest challenge has been standardizing code throughout the portal. Some of these standardizations include areas of focus such as: (structure, formats, error handling, and security). Why is this important? This is important as we move forward, to help achieve a rapid development environment. We’ve actually been doing this gradually over the last few years and the process is becoming easier and easier. We have already seen the benefits of this design method, as you will see from the content and enhancements that have been produced in only a couple of months. This will also play a huge role when we push further towards internationalization of Shockey Monkey.
So what’s new? Ticket Dispatch This feature allows you to schedule technicians to a service ticket. You can have one or multiple employees assigned to a ticket and it will appear on their calendar. Schedule Control Every employee has a personal calendar that they can: (use, modify and share) and link into service tickets, to help keep them on track of their daily assignments. The schedule component is also HTML5 compatible, so it can be accessed directly from any HTML5 compatible smartphone. Vendor Management This allows you to keep track of your 3rd party companies. You can manage things like (documents, address information, primary contacts, sensitive information, etc.). It centralizes all of this information for easy access and management. Career Management This allows you to keep track of your employees (achievements, goals and reprimands). Service Boards This is by far one of the best features in my opinion. It allows you to configure (private & public) service boards for use within your portal. Public boards are presented to users when they open a ticket, things such as (support, billing, and sales). While private boards give your employees a way to sort & manage all the internal workings of the company. Theme-able! Yes, Shockey Monkey is once again theme-able. Taking advantage of Jquery UI theme packs and standardizing all of our (tables, divs, controls, elements), themes are now easily applied and have a consistent look between browsing platforms. Experimental Features This section has been expanded to allows up to give you immediate access to feature requests that you may want, however don’t really fit anywhere inside of the portal quite yet. Check it out periodically; we have already added 5 options to this section.
Service Boards were created to greatly assist in organizing your portal by placing tickets in their correct “boards”. While Shockey Monkey always had the ability to assign ticket to specific people, adding service boards give you an added level of organization not previously found within Shockey Monkey portals. What are Service Boards Service boards are nothing more than organizational units. In their simplest definition, think of service boards as file folders. How do service boards work? Service boards work by grouping like tickets into their respective boards. Service boards can be either internal (visible only to employee of your company) or client-accessible. If the board is client-accessible, then when they log into your support portal to enter a ticket, that board will be visible as a category option, e.g. Billing, Support, Sales, etc.
Service boards that are internal can be used for in-house projects, inside department not visible to clients, etc. How do you create new service boards? Clicking on the Settings tab and selecting Service Boards from the list of options available is the first step to creating Service boards
My newly created service board is not showing when I click on Service Boards inside my portal. Although you created a new service board under Settings > Service Boards, this newly created board will not display under your Service Board tab until it populated—meaning, a ticket has to be assigned to that service board in order for it to be visible. If no tickets are assigned to a board, that board will not be visible under the Service Boards tab. How do I delete a Service Board? Deletion is a strong command in the IT and business world. There are times when you can recover from a deletion and other times when you can’t. This is why we rarely use deletion as an option. With that said, you cannot delete a service board after it has been created. The risk is too high that tickets within that service board could be deleted as well. This is why we opted to use the functions of making a service board active or inactive. You can modify a service board’s accessibility by clicking on the service board in question and altering its status. How can I manually assign a ticket to a Service Board? You can manually assign a ticket to any service board you wish. To do so:
Click Update Ticket Management.
Recently, we pushed a major update through to all Shockey Monkey portals. The update included a mix of bug fixes and new features that you, our partners, have asked for. One of the most requested features you said you wanted to see inside Shockey Monkey was Vendor Management. Well, ask and you shall receive! Within the v.3 update is the Vendor Management module. There is nothing you need to download or install. We pushed this update out to all portals automatically on March 7th, 2013. To access the Vendor Management module:
You can also access your Corporate Dashboard by clicking on Corporate under your Business Navigation Menu located on the left side of your portal (if your option is set to show this menu). Once you click on the Vendor tab, your screen should appear as shown below.
Don’t be concerned if you do not see anything listed in your Vendor Dashboard. This simply means that you have not yet added any vendors. To add vendors:
Once you create your new vendor, you will be redirected to that vendor’s page within your portal. Now that you created a vendor, it is time to associate information to it. For any vendor that you create, you will have the ability to associate resources, notes, and documents to them – as well as the ability to add/modify a contact for a particular vendor.
To add a contact for this newly created vendor, click the Contacts tab. Fill out all relevant information about the contact and click Create. Resources, such as websites, usernames, and passwords associated with a vendor can also be documented. To add these attributes, click on the Resources tab. To create a new resource:
Notes can also be added to any vendor you create. Notes can be used to document any number of items that may be desirable or necessary to recall about a vendor at any particular time. To add a note, simply click Add Note. From there, you need to give your note a title and description. After you are satisfied with both entries, click Create. Your note will show up under the Notes tab for that particular vendor. As with Companies and Clients, you can also add associated documents to Vendors as well. To add a new document for a vendor, click on the Documents tab and click the Add Document button. Once you see the New Document windows:
As you can see, managing your vendors and associated information has never been easier. Anytime you wish to view or edit your existing vendors, you can do so by accessing your Corporate Dashboard and selecting the Vendors tab. Your Vendors Dashboard will list all the vendors you entered within your Shockey Monkey portal. To edit or view any particular vendor, simply click on the vendors name and you will have access to all of your entered information. If you have a recommendation or a change for Shockey Monkey that you would like us to consider, you can always tell us about your ideas through the support portal. Simply click on Resources then Features and enter your ideas there. Granted we cannot accommodate all your requests and ideas, but we do try to implement the most asked for features to help run your business smoothly and successfully.
Shockey Monkey is getting an upgrade next week, this update includes the new business management section, upgraded support area with private boards, new calendar / scheduling / dispatch center and an upgraded UI that is a few times faster than it was in the past. We are thrilled about this product and hope you consider joining over 100 partners that are currently selling Shockey Monkey to their small businesses clients. Stay Tuned!!!
In the first Corporate Dashboard Deep Dive Guide, we discussed how to set up and view the Corporate Dashboard for Administrators. While the Corporate Dashboard is visible from an employee’s view, there is not much they can access or change. However, every employee does have his or hers own little space in Shockey Monkey v.3, and that place is called: My Profile. My Profile In addition to the newly created My Profile, we also added My Projects, My Schedule, and My Tasks into Shockey Monkey v.3. These links are unique virtual workplaces for each employee. Here, employees can submit their time sheets, submit time off, add experience that they have accumulated, add documents, etc. Let’s take a look at the My Profile Dashboard and go through some of the links in detail.
Punching the Clock As an employee, one of the very first things you want to do when you sign into the portal is to punch the time clock. When your supervisor created your profile within Shockey Monkey, they also documented your work schedule. Therefore, Shockey Monkey knows when you are supposed to be at work and when you are not. If you never punch the time clock when you start working, Shockey Monkey thinks that you did not make it into work. This is reflected on your time sheet as well. In most business environments, no time recorded means no pay! So remember to punch the time clock.
Clicking the link will take you to the time clock interface.
Under Status, you can select whether you are in the office, out of the office, in a meeting, out to lunch, at client meeting, etc. and whether you are working or not working. Furthermore, your supervisor may ask you to enter what exactly you are working on that day—or everyday you check in for work. If so, provide a brief description of what you will be working on. After words, click the Punch Time Clock button. You will repeat this process when you go to lunch or check out for the day. By doing so, you and your employer have a detailed time and account of the items and tasks that you were working on any given day. |
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With update 3.3 successfully pushed out to all the portals about a month ago, we have turned our attention to the bug report. Over the past two weeks, the Shockey Monkey team has been working on debugging the entire portal. We have reviewed your bug reports, re-examined code, re-written code, and patched the majority of bugs that were concerning our partners. We are also in the process of updating the 
