Follow-on Activities

Commonly when working with Activities you’ll want to close the Activity you’re working on and immediately create your next one – perhaps the outcome of your call was that you have planned a meeting. Workbooks can do this for you, not only creating the next activity for you, but pulling across the Description from previous Activities, including the date and time that the previous Activity was completed, so you can easily see the history of when you’ve made (or tried to make) contact.

There are 2 simple ways of using this functionality:

Option 1:

To create a Follow-on Activity simply click the dropdown next to the Complete button and choose the relevant follow-on Activity Type.

This will change the Status of your original Activity to ‘Complete’ (setting the Completed Date to today) and will automatically open a new Activity record.

Workbooks automatically relates the original Activity to the new one and you can navigate from one to the other within the Related Items tab.

When you’re happy with the details on the new Activity click Save or Save & Close.

Option 2:

Activities can also be customised to include two fields for ‘Outcome’ and ‘Next Steps’. Populating only ‘Outcome’ will Complete your Activity, but also populating the latter will trigger the follow-on functionality. Populating ‘Next Steps’ will enable another field, to add the ‘Next Due’ date, on which you can also add an optional time as well if desired. This will complete the original Activity and auto-populate the Subject and Due Date/Time on the new Activity. Unlike Option 1, the new Activity created does not open automatically. 

These fields are not shown by default; you will need to go to your Form Layouts and Show them. It is advised to put these fields together, with ‘Next Steps’ below ‘Outcome’.

These fields use unrestricted picklists, meaning you can choose a picklist value or free-type. To amend the available picklist values, or to make them restricted, you will need to amend the ‘Activity Outcomes’ and ‘Activity Next Steps’ picklists.  

Copying Custom Fields across to Follow-on Activities

Out of the box, only the standard fields like Subject and Description will be copied across to your Follow-on Activity. If you have custom fields that should also be copied across to the new Activity, you will need to configure the field to do this. You can do this using the ‘Copy on follow-on’ checkbox in the configuration window of the relevant fields.

A good example of when you might want to do this is with Meetings, especially those that you are synchronising using the WESS. Any notes that you have in the Description field will be synchronised as the Meeting Description in Outlook, and therefore will be shared with the Invitees. You should therefore use a separate text field for internal notes, and leave the Description field as the public Agenda field. This separate Internal notes field should have the ‘Copy on follow-on’ checkbox ticked to allow the Internal Notes to copy across in the same way the Description field does.