The Support Group Blog

Premier Financial Services (PFS) is one of the nation's leading finance firms for vintage and exotic cars. They've been offering finance options for auto enthusiasts for over 25 years. 1st Financial Bank, an FDIC-backed institution, acquired Premier in 2021. 

Premier has relied on the FileMaker Platform to help them manage their operations for almost as long as they have serviced customers. We usually find FileMaker in educational institutions and non-profit organizations. So, that a financial service provider like Premier trusts this low-code platform speaks volumes about its efficacy, reliability, and usability.

Issuing lease agreements is a rather involved process. First, applicants must complete the necessary paperwork that delves into their personal and sensitive areas. Then, the lessor has to evaluate all the information provided to determine eligibility and how much money to offer. The work includes a lot of number crunching and critical thinking, basically technical and human tasks. That is an ideal combination for custom software.

One remarkable thing about working in a supportive and dynamic collective like the FileMaker developer community is that we can share our experiences and techniques. With Claris FileMaker, there are often many solutions to any given problem, and over time our community has come up with some innovative and creative ways to use FileMaker. Unfortunately, these things are usually not found in the standard documentation, but developers share them among themselves. Here are three compelling tips and techniques that we discovered recently. 

As we discussed in our previous blog post, FileMaker has released a new feature set involving transactions. The new scripts allow us to send the changes we make to a record to the server in aggregate. So, we can batch all our changes together in one transaction and send that to the server. 

If you read our blog regularly, you might remember we created a test file to demonstrate a technique on how to create multiple records at one time. We can also use the new transaction scripts to accomplish this task. For example, instead of creating 10,000 records in a loop one at a time, thereby producing 10,000 individual transactions, we should be able to submit those 10,000 new records as a single transaction. 

ChatGPT has dominated the news cycle recently, with articles appearing in just about every media outlet. For those who haven’t heard about it, ChatGPT is a chatbot driven by artificial intelligence (AI) software. OpenAI developed the service and released a beta version of it at the end of 2022. It can generate a chat – an online conversation – in a natural, almost conversational way. It has been “trained” on a large dataset of information – basically, much of the Internet as it existed in 2021. As such, it can respond to questions on a wide variety of subjects in a knowledgeable way. It is surprisingly robust and has already shown the ability to write articles, research papers, and software code, among other things, quite accurately. 

Claris released a new version of FileMaker, and it’s pretty exciting. Of course, the usual list of bug fixes and minor enhancements to the platform accompanied the update. Nonetheless, there's at least one outstanding new feature: Transactions.  

In the database world, a transaction is any operation on an entity. In FileMaker world, it represents any change made to a record. Previously, we made most of our changes to our records, one record and one field at a time. And, when we clicked out of the field in FileMaker, it committed the record, thereby completing an operation for that entity - in other words, performing a transaction. This function helps keep all our data in sync with other users who concurrently access the database. But it can impede the performance of our system, especially in a wide area network (WAN) environment with poor network speed or high latency.  

ChatGPT is dominating online and offline conversations these days. ChatGPT is a chatbot created by a company called OpenAI. But saying it is a chatbot is like saying a Porsche is a car. This particular chatbot has performance and features unlike any other chatbot or AI tool available to the public. As a result, it has generated vast amounts of press, with articles in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and many others. 

One way leaders can spend more time working on their business rather than in their business is by automating repetitive tasks. Manual work negatively impacts productivity and frequently leads to errors. Technology can easily automate mundane tasks, freeing time to focus on product/service enhancements, customer engagement, resource optimization, etc.

Implementing software to automate operational workflows no longer has to be a bureaucratic and expensive undertaking. In addition, graphical user interfaces, cloud capabilities, and multiple platform compatibilities make business applications more accessible and comfortable for users.

There's virtually an app that will accomplish just about any task we can imagine these days. And, if an app only partially fulfills our requirements, other options exist.

In our previous blog posts, we reviewed the following:

• What a CRM is
• The requirements for a basic CRM
• How to create an entity relationship diagram (ERD) for that CRM
• How to create a CRM database in FileMaker

In this final post, we will review how to design a FileMaker CRM to finish up the system.

So, after creating the tables, fields, and relationships, the only thing left is to design the user interface (UI). Again, aiming for the most straightforward route here, our first inclination is to create a master-detail layout for each module – Contacts, Companies, and Interactions. But as we think about it, interactions are always related to a contact record; therefore, those details will live within the Contacts screen.  

In our previous blog post, we reviewed what a customer relationship management (CRM) system is and put together the requirements for a basic CRM. Yet, we’re not quite ready to start writing code. Next, we need to draw up an entity relationship diagram - ERD for short. In database land, this is a map of all the buckets of information that we will track and the connected data among them. As part of this process, we will look for places to normalize the data. Normalizing means we will look for instances where we can avoid entering the same data in two different areas.  

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is essential for any business. A CRM helps us communicate with clients, automates processes, and provides analytical tools to help us understand our operations and customers. That said, there are different kinds of CRMs. Some are as simple as the contacts app on our phones, while others can be full-fledged online applications like Salesforce or HubSpot.  

While many off-the-shelf CRM software solutions are currently on the market, every business is unique. Therefore, invariably the need arises to customize or create a CRM system tailored to a specific workflow or value proposition.