Sweet Causes’ Issues
When Sweet Causes approached us, they were using spreadsheets to plan the routes for each collector and log refills and takings daily. This was fine while the company was still very small but as the business grew, it became obvious that this method had many flaws:
- Although daily logs were saved every day, the ability to search and sort the data as a whole, was non-existent.
- Data duplication from paper (produced by canvassers and collectors) to Excel (entered by office staff), took a lot of time to administrate and was prone to error.
- A delay between collection and Excel recording was evident and could be lengthened by poor staff cooperation.
- Reporting consisted of copying and pasting from one spreadsheet to another, this was long-winded and error prone.
- Accounting staff had great difficulty in collating data to calculate wages, bonuses and mileage.
- Monitoring and tracking miscellaneous task, such as overdue BACS payments, new customer verifications and required re-routes, was hard to manage and these tasks could easily get overlooked.
- Missed collections were not easy to identify, as this task involved searching through many different spreadsheets.
- Planning routes was complicated and re-routes often caused a new rewrite of the plan.
Our Solutions
To solve the problems the office staff were experiencing we suggested a desktop application, that could easily be downloaded and installed from a given link. As customers will not need access to the system, this was the optimal solution.
For collectors and canvassers, we proposed a mobile application that could be ported to both Android and iOS thus covering the two most popular mobile phone platforms. These mobile applications can be downloaded by new collectors and canvassers, to devices they already own through the usual channels, the ‘Google Play Store’ or the ‘Apple App Store’.
Cloud-based, central database storage was accessible by all 3 platforms, meaning data could be shared by all users with the correct permissions and valid login credentials. Real-time updates between collectors/canvassers and the office was also achieved (Issue 3).
Desktop Applications for Office Staff
One of the tasks that office staff found particularly difficult to achieve was route planning, as they had no visual view of the route and the customers on it (Issue 8). We integrated with Bing maps to create views that would show the individual routes with customers plotted on the map in a specified order. Alternatively, they could also view all routes plotted within a given region.
Basic and advanced filtering was added to the main customer view, solving many of the issues with sorting and searching data as a whole (Issues 1, 4 and 7). To aid in migrating the original data, we provided the ability to import from Excel spreadsheets in a set format.
So, office staff would know when action was required, we added alert bubbles to menu items that showed the number of outstanding tasks for that section (Issue 6). For example, the alert bubble would show on the customer menu item, when a new customer had been added and was awaiting verification.
Android and iOS App for Collectors and Canvassers
Although the mobile application is used by the collectors and canvassers, the main boost for Sweet Causes in terms of maximizing business efficiency, was within the office. Much of the office staff’s time had been spent in entering the data from paperwork produced by the collectors and canvassers and with this gone office staff had more time to concentrate on other areas of the business (Issue 2).
The mobile applications allowed both collectors and canvassers to record their start and end time and mileage, as well as add new customers with photos.
However, the majority of the mobile applications features were geared towards the collectors allowing them to record each visit, add BACS payment and indicate re-routes. To make collector’s job easier each route was laid out in the optimal order planned by the office. Once clicked into a visit, collectors could instantly access directions and record all the relevant details of the visit, such as cash collected, and quantities consumed etc.
Categorised in: Charity