Reminders

Reminders serve a very important purpose: they are a to-do list of tasks a user needs to perform. There are a number of pre-built reminders, which can be accessed by clicking on the setup link and selecting them. Examples include Orders to Invoice and Overdue Invoices for accountants, and Items to Fulfill, Items to Receive, and Items to Order for warehouse managers. The reminder will only appear if the task is open, and it includes a hyperlink to the screen where the actual work is performed:

Reminders portlet

The administrator can also create custom reminders to alert users when a standard reminder is not sufficient. We will demonstrate how to do this in Chapter 8, Analytics – Searches, Reports, and the Dashboard.

Reminders span the entire breadth of the system, so you should have the appropriate users turn on those reminders whenever a new feature is implemented; for instance, if you turn on revenue recognition, ask the accountant to set up revenue recognition journal entries to post as a reminder.

As you can see, reminders perform a valuable function, as they alert users that particular work is now required. In a sense, they allow users to communicate without speaking. Each user contributes to a process like an athlete in a relay race. The user is alerted by the reminder that their contribution is needed, and, once completed, that task falls off the user's dashboard and is passed to the next runner in the form of a reminder on his/her dashboard.

Reminders tend to be used by inpidual contributors; however, they can also alert managers to bottlenecks in the process. I recommend that managers turn on all reminders, because a reminder such as 438 Invoices are overdue or 556 orders to fulfill will alert the manager to operational difficulties.