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InterAction® Administrator Answer Center

What You Can Do with Application Collaboration

  • Updated

The following scenarios provide suggestions of how you might use Application Collaboration.

Keeping Up-to-Date Client Information in InterAction

Bringing client information from your accounting or time and billing system can provide your organization with many benefits. Professionals can use the data in InterAction to answer questions such as the following:

  • Which clients brought in the most revenue last year?
  • Which clients brought in the least revenue - should they perhaps receive additional attention?
  • When planning a seminar, which key clients were billed more than $250,000 in the last year?
  • Can someone at one of our clients introduce me to someone on the board of directors for a new prospect?
  • Which clients have outstanding accounts receivable?

To answer these types of questions, configure Application Collaboration as follows:

  • Configure a Company data set to bring in clients from your accounting or time and billing system. When a new client is added to the accounting or time and billing system, a contact representing that client is created in InterAction. If a matching contact already exists, it can be mapped by Application Collaboration.
  • Configure an Additional Field data set to populate the revenue fields in the Client Financial Information folder.
  • Configure an Activity data set to create billing activities such as Bill Sent and Past Due Notice Sent.

You could then schedule the harvesting and transformation to take place on a regular basis, such as once or twice a week. This ensures that new clients get added to the database in a timely manner, and the more volatile fields always contain fresh data.

Finally, if you can acquire a source for board membership data, you can configure a Related Contact data set to create board member relationships between people and companies in InterAction. This setup would be independent of your accounting or time and billing system integration.

For details about these concepts, see the following:

Adding Human Resources Data to InterAction

Bringing firm personnel from your human resources system can provide your organization with many benefits. Professionals can use this information to find others at your organization with specific types of skills or experience. Application Collaboration can also automate processes such as when a person joins or leaves your organization.

To leverage your human resources system, configure Application Collaboration as follows:

  • Configure a Person data set to bring in people from the HR system. When a new person is added to the HR system (that is, when someone joins the organization), a contact representing that person is created in InterAction. If a matching contact already exists, it can be mapped by Application Collaboration.

    You must also bring in the associated company through Application Collaboration.

  • Configure an Additional Field data set to populate the fields in the Personnel Information folder.
  • If you have information about educational history for your employees, configure a Related Contact data set to create relationships representing the schools the employees attended.

You could then schedule the harvesting and transformation to take place on a regular basis, such as once or twice a week. This ensures that new employees get added to the database in a timely manner, and the more volatile fields always contain fresh data.

Updating Contacts with Information from Third-Party Content Providers

A powerful feature of InterAction is the ability to profile your important clients, prospects, and other contacts with detailed information such as industry or annual revenue. Professionals can view these Profiles in the Web Client, and your marketing group can build searches around the data for targeted marketing campaigns.

One way to get this information in InterAction is to purchase data from third-party content providers, then use Application Collaboration to update your contacts with the data. Because Application Collaboration lets you update existing contacts, you can periodically refresh the data in InterAction with updated information. Using Application Collaboration to get this information into InterAction is much more cost effective than manual data entry, and generally results in higher-quality data.

Possible third-party data sources include Dun and Bradstreet and BoardMember.com. To leverage this information, configure Application Collaboration as follows:

  • Configure an Additional Field data set to populate the fields in the Company/Person Information folder. In most cases, you select the option to map by an additional field value. For example, store a DUNS number for each important company in InterAction, then use this field as an identifier to update the system with information.
  • If you have board member data, configure a Related Contact data set to create board member relationships.
  • If you have information about educational history for people in your database, configure a Related Contact data set to create relationships representing the schools the people attended.

For details about these concepts, see the following: