Navigating the Workspace

The workspace has a fixed shape: a menu down the left, a bar across the top, and the page itself in the middle. Once you know those three, every section works the same way.

The menu

The menu is grouped by section. You see a group for each CRM section you hold, then two groups everybody gets:

• Workspace - Customers, At-risk Accounts, Calendar and TODOs.
• Settings - CRM Setup and Account Security.

Only the group you are working in stays expanded, so the menu never becomes a wall of links.

Queue badges

A number beside a menu item is the count of things waiting for you there, and only actionable counts are badged. A few are worth knowing because they are not simply “everything in the list”:

• Cases counts cases awaiting a reply or breaching an SLA target, within the same Team or Mine scope as the tab it opens.
• Complaints counts complaints at the six-week ADR line, not open complaints.
• Payments counts failed Direct Debit and card collections in the last 30 days.
• Payment Methods counts mandates stuck pending for more than seven days and cards expiring within 60 days.
• Email Queue counts held emails, not everything queued.

Badges use cached counts, so a change can take a moment to show. A permission change applies straight away.

Hidden and padlocked items

Two different things can remove an item from your menu, and the difference matters when somebody asks why they cannot find a page.

Hidden means you have no permission to see anything on that page. The item is not listed at all, because offering it would only lead to a refusal. If a colleague can see a page you cannot, compare your CRM permissions first.

Padlocked means the page exists and you are permitted to use it, but your CRM package does not include it. The item stays in the menu with a padlock, and opening it explains which tier or add-on it belongs to. See Packages and tiers.

The top bar

• Search finds a customer by name, account number, postcode, email address or phone number. It also finds a case by its quotable reference, in any spelling: “CS-ABC-123”, “cs abc123” and “csabc123” all work.
• Full screen hides the menu and filters so a list or a board fills the window. Press Escape to come back, or move the pointer to the left edge to peek at the menu. The choice is remembered in your browser.
• Theme switches between Light, Dark and System. Dark is the default. The choice is per device, not per account, so your laptop and your desktop can differ.
• Switch interface moves you between the CRM and the billing backend. It has two parts: the record link, which keeps your place - open a customer in the CRM, switch, and you land on the same customer in the backend - and a home button beside it, which opens the other interface’s landing page and works even on a page with no counterpart record.
• Your initials open Account Security.

On a test, development or demo platform, a coloured mode badge sits in the top bar so nobody mistakes it for the live system.

A Billing Platform link is also pinned beneath the CRM menu, and in the billing backend CRM Workspace sits in the sidebar’s Main Menu list. Both appear only for operators who can sign in to both interfaces.

Dashboards

Each section opens on a dashboard: a row of headline cards, then short queues of work with a link to the full list behind each one. Cards and queues appear only where you hold the permission for the records behind them, so two people in the same section can see different dashboards.

Where you hold CRM Team Queues for the section, a Showing picker at the top right switches the whole dashboard between Team and Mine. Without that permission the picker does not appear and everything is quietly limited to your own work.

The Today strip

Below the dashboard header sits a strip of what is due today: your TODOs (turning red once the time has passed), your case follow-ups, an overdue pill and a pill for any cases breaching their SLA targets. It is the same on all four dashboards.

Record views

Customers, invoices, payments, charges, numbers, services, features, emails, notes, contacts, complaints and credit requests all open natively in the workspace rather than throwing you back to the backend. Each opens with an Overview tab of the things you usually want and a Details tab with the full field list, plus any tabs that record type needs.

Every record view keeps a back link to wherever you came from, so working a chase case and opening one of its invoices returns you to the case, not to a list.

Presenting and printing

Full screen doubles as a presentation mode for showing figures on a screen. The dashboards, the Credit Control Results page and the analytics pages also carry print styles, so printing gives a clean page rather than a screenshot.