A large number of things in Impel are configurable. And the process of configuration can range from something you can do as a User, with just a few clicks, to writing complex logic using JavaScript or Perl (something our Partners or our own Engineers do - for a price, of course!). Here's a list of all the things that can be configured, with some detail about how it can be done.
| Function | Description | Skills Needed |
| Ad Hoc Reports | Build your own reports with data from anywhere in Impel. Build charts on them. Build pivots on them. Build charts on your pivots (yes, we're not kidding). And, set up your reports to come to you as email, every night or week or month. |
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| Alerts | Send SMSs and/or Emails at any point in your process, to Users and to Contacts. For example, you can configure Impel to send an SMS to a Contact when an Invoice has been added for that Contact. Or to a User reminding him/her of a meeting 15 minutes. |
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Convert anything |
With some advanced configuration, you can set up a mechanism to convert any Impel Object to any other Object, be it Base or Custom. For example, let's say you configure a Custom Object to track the cars that your customers (as Contacts) own. And, when a customer's car comes in for tyre rotation, you want to create an Invoice from a specific car, carrying its details into a line of the Invoice with one click. Yes, you can do that, with some tech skills. It will need two things: a JSON "map" of the from and to fields and some FERs (Front-End Rules) in Javascript. |
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| Custom Fields and Objects | You can add hundreds of fields to any Base Object in Impel. And you can create your own Custom Objects and add fields to them. And all of this is available for Workflows, Reports, etc. You can create Custom Objects and Custom Fields (on Custom Objects and on Base Objects) on your own, with no tech skills needed. |
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| Dashboards | You can build your own Dashboards, with lists or charts or pivot tables. And you can use data from any - or many - of your Objects, be it Base or Custom. |
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| Data Views | Pull data from various Objects into your own lists. Make multiple "views" of these lists. Make some of these views the default views that some users see. Use Data Views to track stages in a specific process. Basically, look at your data the way it makes sense to your business. |
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| Email-to-Object | You can set up email formats that automatically get inserted into Impel as just about anything. Simple use-cases include the conversion of an email from your website creating a Lead in Impel. Or an email to your Support ID creating a Ticket in Impel. More complex configurations could get data from pretty much any kind of system into Impel, all automatically. |
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| Email-to-Ticket | If you have an email ID that your customers send Support requests to, you can make sure every such request is tracked by simply forwarding emails from that ID to an Impel-managed email ID. Presto! Every email then becomes a Ticket, available for Workflow and escalations just list any other Object in Impel. |
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| End-of-Day Alerts | Make Impel work for you, even when you;re not working. Set up reports that get delivered to your inbox automatically every day. |
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| Field Change History | Track every chance on important fields - figure out who made the change, from what value to what value, when. Build turnaround-time reports based on those fields. This audit trail will even include changes made by your users in the field, on Impel Touch. |
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| Front-End Business Rules | Sometimes, it just makes sense to build "custom" pages for certain users. Maybe you want Agents to have just a few buttons on a Ticket instead of a combo of Statuses. Maybe you want complex validations on certain pages, so data doesn't get messed up. You can build all that and more using FERs in Impel to kick in on specific pages, under specific conditions. |
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| Picklists and SmartSelects |
You'll have seen the double-asterisk mechanism in Impel, where you can sub-select data in any lookup field. Now, you can configure what data shows up in the selected list. For example, on an Invoice page, you may want to show the current inventory of each product. When selecting an Account on an Order, you may want to see the outstanding AR from that customer. The data will show up in the drop-down (called a SmartSuggest) and on the picklist pop-up. |
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| Page layouts
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Pretty much any of the Add/Edit and View pages in Impel can be configured to show you the exact data that you want to see, in the order that you want to see it in. You can create sections and line-breaks as you see fit. And you can have different layout for different users or groups of users. You can do all this via a simple drag-and-drop mechanism. |
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| Push Notifications | Web apps are notoriously silent: they tell you data has changed only when you refresh a page. With Push notifications, though, you can configure Impel to tell users when something happens. Typically, you could raise a "badge" on the relevant tab when a user is assigned a new Ticket. Or when a salesperson is assigned a new Lead. And you configure exactly when such a push notification should be sent and to which user. |
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| SMS Commands | Impel supports SMS as a core mechanism, not just to send out text messages but to receive them and process them as commands. For example, out of the box, Impel supports the ability for users to add Leads, Activities, Contacts and Accounts via simple, well-formatted text messages. But you can build your own command formats, too, and get those commands to update any Object in Impel, be it a Base Object or a Custom Object. |
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| User Groups | User Groups in Impel control the menu-items that a given user sees and the fields that s/he sees on a given page. You can build your own User Groups and configure them in one of two ways: where a user can change his/her own preferences without affecting others or where an Administrator controls all such changes, as a Group level (as it typical in large organizations). |
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| Web-to-Lead | You can send a Lead into Impel from any of your website pages and make sure it appears in the Stage that makes sense for your organization. You can include Custom fields in the fields that you send from your website and Impel will map them as needed. |
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| Web-to-Ticket | You can send a Ticket into Impel from your website, so customers can submit Tickets using the branding that you see fit. |
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| Workflows | Impel's workflow is one of the most powerful aspects of the product. You can do a whole lot of things using Workflows - alert people to changes in data, escalate Leads, Ticket and other Objects, change some data based changes to other data and so on. Here's a more detailed description of all that can be done using Workflow. |
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