Making a Saved Search

Welcome back. In the last video, we did an overview on saved searches. In this lesson, I'd like to go into some of the key parameters for saved searches and give you an example of an actual use case for one. So let's take a look at this.

Okay. So here we're on the homepage. Let's go to reports and then we're going to go down to new search. And like I mentioned in the last video, the bread and butter of saved searches really is transactions. So let's just go down to transactions and let's make this type of search, a transaction search.

So let's just break down what you see here. We've got criteria on the left and we've got results on the right. So those are definitely the two most important parameters. And the concept is criteria is really the filter. It's adjudicating what are the things that we're searching for. The example I gave in the last lesson is all sales orders over $500. So in that case, you would be searching criteria, all sales orders over the value of $500. Now, on the flip side, you've got results. So that's saying, okay, now that we've located all sales orders over $500, what information do we want? What do we want to see from that? We want to see in that example, it was the type of customer where that customer lives and also the type of items that are composing those sales orders.

So those would all be things that we would list in the results section. So we would be gathering from the criteria and we'd have the output on the results side. So if we look down here, you can specify, you can add in criteria and then you can add in results. Now, because we did a transaction kind of preset, it actually gives us all of these kind of it guesses what you would probably want in results for a transaction. But honestly, I don't need all this information, so I'm just going to say remove all and we're going to do a specific search here.

So I mean, remove that. So we're starting at square zero. And so let's mark something up here in this search. Let's say you ran an e-commerce business and you wanted to know, all right, you've got sales orders going. But there's a certain point where the sale sort of goes over to fulfillment, which is composed of picking the items, packing them for shipment and then actually shipping them out. But you've noticed that there's some issues or problems resulting from shipments not going out. So you want to do a saved search that's giving you a bit of information about what items are actually on that fulfillment line and have either been picked or packed but not yet shipped.

So you can do a saved search that would show all of those things specifically. So I'm going to run you through how you would build this save search for this particular scenario. So first off, we would go to filter and there's a number of parameters we're going to enter to fit this scenario. First off, we're going to add main line. Now, main line is a very common parameter that you set for, I'm not going to say, all saved searches, but it's very, very common. And the reason for that is that you're basically specifying with main line, you're saying whether you want that type of thing to be almost like a header level concept. So, for example, if we're talking about sales orders, main line would be the sales order itself. Right?

So sales order 259 that is a main line item. Now, if that sales order has, let's say a washing machine, a blender and a microwave, those little items are all called line level items, right? The microwave, it's the washing machine. So main line would be the sales order. Line level would be all the items that compose that sales order. So in this case, we're not we don't really care about all the things that are involved in the sales order. We just want to know which ones are shipping or not shipping. So we want main line. So I'm going to select main line. Yes. We don't want all the items. We just want that summation of them in the fact of the sales order itself. If we didn't want that and we did want to see all the things being composed of these sales and we didn't want to see the summary, which is the sales order, is the full amount, then we would click no, and we would just get all those individual items that make up every sales order you have. So we've decided on. Yes. So let's click set.

Okay. Next up, I'm going to put in type. Now again, very common parameter. You're going to set for a lot of saved searches. And that's simply saying, well, what kind of thing are we even talking about? We know we want main line, but what are we talking about? Are we talking about customers or are we talking about sales orders in this case? Now, while it is sales orders, we're a little more specific here. We're going to be looking for item fulfillments. So we have item fulfillment here. And I'm going to hit set. Okay, good. So we have item fulfillment, but it's not just any item fulfillment. We want to know specifically. It's at a point where it hasn't necessarily been shipped yet. So let's do status. So let's go down to and it says any of right? So anything that fits and you can select multiple lines here.

So we're going to go down to item. Okay. So we want anything that's picked or packed, but we're not going to click shipped. So let's say set. And when I'm clicking that, I'm holding control. So it's selecting multiple items at once. Okay. So we have main line, we have type, we have status. Okay. So next we're going to specify a certain time period. Let's say you just want to know everything that hasn't shipped in the last month. So you would put in date and it's going to give you all these options. You can go up here and I'll get all these different kind of parameters within date. We're just gonna say within so within that time period. And then you can specify kind of calendar from here to here. But we've got these presets over here, so why don't we just go to a month and specify that we want it this month? So really just in this past 30 day time period. So let's set that. And now we've got all of our criteria.

So now we're going to jump over and take a look at our results and we're going to skip this top part for now. And we're just going to go to field. We're going to take a look at transaction number. And really that's simply the number that when the sales order gets to the fulfillment stage, it's actually given its own number to make it unique to that fulfillment stage. And the transaction number is going to be that number. So we want to see what is that fulfillment item that is locked up in, in the fulfillment process but not yet shipped. So we want to search transaction number. So we're going to add that. We're also going to add what we want to know what's the name of the customer that this is fitting, right? Who are the customers that are being affected by items not being shipped? So if we put a name that will give us our customer name. We also want to put in created from and what that's going to tell us is, okay, so you have this item fulfillment number, but what sales order is that coming from and created from will give us that.

So it's put in created from those. I want to know the date. At what point has that sales order been created so we can see how close is it to being, you know, in that 30 day window? And lastly, we're going to take a look at status. So just like in our criteria, we want to get items that are just at the fulfillment stage, either picked or packed but not shipped. But we do want to see are they picked or are they packed, which of the two so we can add status which will give us that information.

So now that we have all of this set out, we know what we want for the criteria. We know we want for results. We're going to hit submit, which will run this search. Okay. So here we have the results. We see three items came up and we can see, again, that transaction number that we set. So what was that item fulfillment number? And then we can see the customer or the client name that was resulting from that. And we can see the sales order that was associated with that item fulfillment. We can see the date of that sales order and the stage or status that it's at. So we have a pact and we have two that are picked so great. We have this saved search that we made. It's got three items that came up, but it's not actually yet a saved search.

So let's actually go up to here and we can hit save this search. So that's going to bring us to this other kind of page here. And as you'll see, it's really a little bit more of an advanced version of what we had before. Right. We still have criteria over here. We still have results, but now we have all of these other items in the subtab. We also have this information up above. So I'm not going to get into the other subtab items until the next videos, but I'm in a cover, a couple of these items up here.

So first off, really what these buttons are specifying is you're going to make this saved search. Now how are you going to access it or how are other people going to access it? So, for example, do you want it available on the dashboard, which I'm going to show you in another video, how you would add it to your dashboard. But let's say we want that as an option. So we're going to click that. We also want it available in the Reminders portrait in the Home Dashboard module, I covered the Reminders portlet and how you would add things on there. So I want that as an option there. So I'd click reminders and shown in menu. That means that when we go to this menu here and we go down to saved searches, we want it to be one of these automatically included saved searches. So I do want that. So I'm going to say show in menu.

And then lastly, I'm going to click on public and that's going to make it available to others. It's not just going to be to me. And there's another there's kind of other parameters you can set in terms of who can see it, but this is just giving that blanket. You know, others are able to see that. So let's click on that. And we also want to make sure we get an appropriate title. So let's say item fulfillment pending but not shipped. So that is the category of this saved search. And we go to the bottom and we're going to hit, save and run.

Now, you can also go over here and click preview that will show you the saved search without actually saving it. That can be a little dangerous, though, because if you click on it and it's perfect and you're like, this is great, and then you move on from there, it's easy to forget that you didn't actually save that search. And then everything you've just done is lost. So you do want to make sure that if you click on preview and you like it, you go back and actually save the search. So in this case, we're fine with it. We're going to just hit, save and run.

All right. So we now have this as a saved search. Again, it's that same search we saw before, but it is now available. And if we go back to our home page here. All right. So here we are in the home dashboard. So if we go back to reports, saved searches, we can actually see it right here in item fulfillment pending, but not shipped. So it's available in the menu. It's also available on the dashboard. And we can add it to the reminders.

So that's it. On how to do a saved search. In the next videos we're going to be covering more detail on saved searches and some of the additional customization features for them. So I'll see there.

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