Reminders for renewals

I have to add reminders set for a year from now to remind us about renewals. An example would be anti-virus subscription renewals. These licenses have to be renewed every year. I need to set RangerMSP up to make sure we are notified a month prior (To give us time to order the renewals.) for our customers. What is the best way to accomplish this?

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You can manage expiration date in a few ways – you can add a Software Asset to the Account per product you wish to track, and set it with an expiration date. When the Asset's "Expiration Date" expires it is displayed in red whenever you look at the Asset details, indicating that it needs to be renewed. This is noticeable when viewing the Assets in the Assets window, and in any other window which displays the Asset. It also warns you that license has expired when you try to select this Asset for a new service Ticket.

To view which Assets are about to expire, you can either sort the Assets list in the Assets window by the expiration date or generate an Assets report periodically, for example Assets List by Warranty/License Expiration which can be filtered by expiration dates.

As for reminders - you can add Tasks with pop-up reminders from the Pending tab of each Asset. For example, you can add a Task for the Asset with a reminder for 4 weeks prior to the expiration date and another reminder for two weeks in advance. You can also set up a general periodic Task (weekly or monthly) which will pop-up a reminder to generate the expiration report.

Neta

Re-visiting this post, I have a feature request. Basically it's a system calendar that is linked to all Assets' warranty expirations. Whenever a date is entered into the warranty expiration field, the system calendar would be automatically updated with the event and information. Global reminders could be set for anything in the calendar. Possibly categories could be implemented to separate (By color?) the different types of warranty/license/contract expirations. This calendar can be selectively sync'd to any Outlook account. In my case, i'd like to sync this with our office manager's calendar.

I understand something similar could be accomplished easily by simply running a report, but this would actually show you more graphically the upcoming opportunities.

Thanks russtebo.

This is an interesting idea that can save generating the Assets warranty expiration report.
I will log this into our system.

Doron

i second this, excellent idea!

Why not make an automated email, that is sent to the account 14-30 days before expiration, stating that the license is expiring and that it will be renewed unless they actively decides to cancel subscribtion? Perhaps with a renew and cancel button that links back to CommitCRM thus automatically renewing and generating the charge?

Hi Ic-net,

Thanks for posting this.
This is great feedback; the RangerMSP Web Interface already adds automated links to any system generated alert, as well as selected email templates; however, these links would not allow the customer to eventually renew a contract or even notify the company of intent to renew (unless a ticket is created).

I've marked this as a feature request to be reviewed by the product management team, as well as adding your vote, and comments to this file.

Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
Neta

Having just had 3 clients for whom I hadn't flagged an AV reminder and they spent a month with no protection, I second this feature too. I'm just using my Outlook calendar now to put the reminders in but that doesnt scale well.

Please add my vote. At the moment I use an email autoresponder (MailChimp) to send the client an email one month before antivirus expires with a link to my shopping cart. This works well and I don't know if I'd change it, but would love to have alerts on hardware warranties expiring etc.

Hi guys,

Thanks for your comments; I've added them to the existing file along with your votes.
Thanks for your feedback.

Regards,
Sherry

On August 20th, 2009, 05:14 PM
russtebo wrote .....
Re-visiting this post, I have a feature request. Basically it's a system calendar that is linked to all Assets' warranty expirations. ........ This calendar can be selectively sync'd to any Outlook account. .....

Anyway ... I agree - great idea add my vote ... We track yearly sw/hw support contracts for customers; AV, SSL Certs, Domain Name Renewals .... plus many others ...

This would be a great feature!

Darlene

Hi Darlene,

Thanks for the feedback; vote added.

Regards,
Sherry

I thought of another way this could be done. You can run a report that shows assets due to expire, for example, in the next month.

If we could schedule this report to run, then we could batch process all the expiries that are coming up. There's another feature request for that - here.

I'd go a step further and say we should be able to schedule a report ONLY if it returns data. So if there are three renewals next month, I get an email. If there are none, I don't get an email, not even an email with blank data.

Regards,
Daniel Mundy

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for posting this tip.
I've asked the Product Management Team to review this thread along with your comments.

Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
Neta

I searched the forums, but didn't see this discussed. When you exceed the contract hours block of time the account manager gets a warning, but I see no way to get a proactive alert that the contract is, say, 5 contract hours away from running out, so we can get a payment from customers to prevent gaps in coverage.

Can I add this as a feature request - a field for remaining contract hours that controls when an alert is sent to email of account manager?

I was also just looking for a way to notify me (or the client) of a contract approaching or exceeding a block of time. I agree, we need something to help with this.

I also second the feature requests above with expiration dates!

Thanks for your feedback. We will look at enhancing the existing options - Currently when logging Charges under a Block of Time Contract (or any Block Contract) the user always sees how many hours are left in the block. In case of an overage a message is popped alerting the user as well as contract details are displayed in red.

In addition there's a special report that shows expiring Contracts. Not just time blocks but other as well (grouped though).
To generate it open the main Reports Window, navigate to the Contracts category and generate the 'Contract List by Type and Expiration' report.

Hope this helps and thanks for your feedback.

As we are using your system and becoming more vested, this e-mail reminder system is really necessary and lacking from your current product. It would be great to have this feature to notify customers of contracts that are going to automatically renew and to expect an invoice in a short period. If the system could pull up the data from their contracts, this would be even better. This way we can be completely transparent with our clients.

This wonderful idea was opened in 2008 and last discussed in 2013. This needs to be an enhancement to the system. This system needs to be a "true" CRM.

Thank you for your feedback. In our next release we are planning to introduce new module that will automatically send reports to customers and, among others, it will support notifying customers about ending contracts, assets and warranties that are about to expire and more...