As a Charity, it's likely that you'll have casework - maybe for tracking funding or grants, or for tracking volunteer progress. Utilising our cases functionality allows you to track the progress of Cases, easily viewing them in a 'Pipeline' view and updating as necessary. If you're regularly applying for funding or grants, or have people applying to you, whether for funding or to be volunteers, then utilising Cases is likely to save you a lot of time!
The Cases record type
Check on your left hand side menu to see if you have 'Cases' here. If not, you'll need to go into your settings, and then to 'Sidebar' - it'll be in 'Hidden Record Types', but if you click the eye symbol (as pictured below), the record type will be added to your sidebar.
Warning: You'll only be able to do this part if you're an admin. If you aren't one, then you'll need to ask an admin to help!
Creating your Cases
Click into the 'Case' Record type that should now be on your sidebar, and Add a New Case. You'll see straightaway that there are quite a few fields on this record type already, that the clever team at Beacon have figured should give you some guidance as to how best to use the Case functionality. I'll talk you through them here!
Case Number This is an autonumber field, so as you add Cases, Beacon will automatically set them a case number
Owner This is the member of your team who is responsible for the Case. They'll need to have a Beacon account in order for the case to be assigned to them.
Type This dropdown allows you to set the 'Type' of Case this is. We've put a few in this list for you to choose from, but you'll likely want to add some more so! To do so, click on this dropdown whilst in 'Customisation Mode', and you'll be able to add more options.
Status As above, this is a dropdown which we've added a few options to choose from, but you may want to add more in order to match the language your organisation uses
Priority Another dropdown! Here you can set the priority of the case and, as above, you can edit the options in here if needed.
Notes Fairly self explanatory - you can add notes in here as required
Attachments Documents relating to this case can be uploaded here
Referred By will allow you to select the person who referred this case to you. Start typing their name in the Box - if they're already in Beacon, their name will come up, and if not, you'll be prompted to add them.
Reason and Channel are dropdowns that you can utilise if required - as before, feel free to add your own options in here!
Date Opened and Date Closed allow you to set the specific timeline of the case
Time to Close (Days) is a smart field that will determine how long a case was open, using the dates you've entered above.
Managing your Cases
By their very nature, the statuses of your cases are likely to change over time. Now, you could obviously go into each case and update the status from the dropdown menu, but this is going to be time consuming if you've got a number of statuses that you need to change at any one time. So, it's time to introduce (drumroll please...)
The Pipeline View!
The Pipeline View
The Pipeline View will help you manage your cases in a wonderfully efficient fashion - it enables you to drag the cases from one status to another, and gives you a clear view of the positions that all of your cases are in.
We go into more detail on how to create the Pipeline View here
You'll likely want to set the Dropdown field that the Pipeline View is based on, to Status and you can then move the cases between status as required.
So - that's the basics on Cases covered - you'll likely want to customise them to suit your specific needs, but hopefully this article has helped you to see how to do that. If there's anything you're still wandering - reach out to us through support and we'll be more than happy to help! For now though:
