This is an extensive step-by-step guide for customers to successfully install & setup the customization package. We have recently improved structure of our documentation by separating documenation of information such as release notes, README, and documentation guides. The README will serve as an introduction and table of content hyper-linked to easily navigate the information the reader needs at any particular time.
The changes will enhance the readibility and utility of the documentation itself.
Step One: Download the customization package (AcumaticaSurveyPkg.zip) appropriate for your version of Acumatica. Curently, we support the following versions:
Acumatica 2019R2 (Build 19.208.0051 onward)
Acumatica 2020R1 (Build 20.100.0095 onward)
To download the customization package for 2019R2, click here. For 2020R1, click here.
Step Two: Go to your Project Customization Screen. You may just do a quick searach by typing "Customization" then selecting it as follows.
Step Three: Upload & import the package you downloaded to your Acumatica 2019R2 instance by clicking on the Customization menu which you will now find in the upper-righthand of the Acumatica application. Then select Manage Customizations from the drop down list as illustrated below.
Next, click on the Import tab and select "Import New Project" from the dropdown list as shown below.
Then click on Choose File to open up the File Manager to select the Acumatic Surveys package.
Step Four: After the package is uploaded, you will need to publish it. Select the package you just uploaded by clicking on its associated checkbox to the left and then click on the Publish tab to publish your package. Once it's published, you are ready to create your fist Survey!
Once the package is installed, you should see a new workspace called “Surveys” as shown here below.
Click on the Survey Preferences menu option.
Survey preferences - Surveys require a numbering sequence. Therefore, please set up a new number sequence called “Survey ID” and an auto generating number, such as: SV10001
Select the numbering sequence you created in the Survey Preferences “Survey Numbering ID:” Surveys utilizes common attributes to create questions and answers. Therefore, please setup any new questions/answers as attributes.
After you have setup required attributes, you are now ready to create your first survey!
Click on Surveys in the workspace and click Survey under Transactions.
The survey primary list screen (SV2010PL) loads with empty records. Click on the + to create a new survey which opens the new screen SV201000
Specify the survey name and click save to generates a new auto sequence number. From the details tab, click + and add the new attributes as questions to this survey
Next, specify the sort order sequence, if a question is required or mandatory for recipients to answer.
From the Recipients tab click on the “Add Recipients” and select the employees who will participate in the survey.
Note: You need to ensure all employees are linked to the User profile and their user accounts are Sync’d with their mobile phones and that they are able to use the Acumatica Mobile application
A new feature we added recently (September 2020) will allow you to create a "Demo Survey" or sample which you can modify as necessary. This new feature provides you a starting point, rather than starting from scratch.
Under Survey Preferences, you will now see a Create Demo Suvey Tab.
Clicking on the Tab will create a sample wellness survey, called "COVID-19 Wellness Survey" as shown below:
The sample questions are reflected in the attributes you can see here:
From the “Surveys” workspace, click “Send Survey” to process and activate the survey and send Push Notifications to mobile phones.
Next, click on the magnifying glass icon to search for your survey and select it.
Then Send your Survey and wait for your responses.
Please note: you have to sync your device by connecting before sending surveys. Only registered mobile phones will receive the push notification, others will error out.
Those records will be activated for survey responses with status as “New” and those who receive the push notification will have records with a status of “Sent.”
Users can select specific recipients from the list or click SEND ALL. Selected records could be also be sent with the “SEND” option.
Now that you have created a survey and sent it out, you have additional functionality to manage & maintain your surveys. This new functionality provides more options which we added in phase 2 our our community development efforts. You will find these new options in the Actions dropdown box under the Processing Survey page ( including *Send New, Remind Un-Answered, Expire Un-Answered, and ALL (New, Remind, Expire).
The new actions are defined as follows:
Send New: Process the selected Survey as a "new" survey for your recipients - even if it has been sent out previously or has been expired.
Remind Un-Answered: Send out a reminder to all the recipients who have not responded to a selected survey.
Expired Un-Answered: Expire all the "unswered" or unresponsive surveys that recipients have failed to complete for a particular survey.
All (New, Remind, Expire): This action will first check to see if any surveys in the collector have been set in the future to be expired and expire/cancel them. Next, it will then will check to see if there are any active collectors/Surveys. If so, it will send a reminder to the recipients. Lastly, after processing the former two actions, if none of the condtions exist, it will send a new survey to recipients.
It is important to understand the concept of Collectors vs Surveys: A Survey defines the questions that are going to be asked. A Collector is the entity that answers are attached or instances of survey answers.
Note: You may expire a given survey automatically at a specific time by setting the Expire After option which you will find below the Actions option. You can do this down to the minute.
The ability to schedule surveys are an important feature to automate when surveys are sent out and the frequency that occur. You can easily levarage the built-in Acumatica Automation Schedule engine.
To create a scheudule for a survey, enter Schedule in the Search field and select Automation Schedules as depicted in the screenshot below.
Then enter the text for the description field for the new schedule and choose the start date.
Afterwards, click on the Schedule tab and choose the time you would like the survey to be sent as shown below.
In the Schedule tab shown above, you can also set the frequency: hourly, daily, and monthly. You can set other parameters as well, such as whether your schedule expires and when. No need to go into any detail here, since the interface is standard & intuitive.
Once you have set up the schedule for a particular survey and saved it, you can view and montitor your schedules and adjust as necessary.
To view the statuses of any of the automated schedules, type in Automation in the search field and select *Automation Schedule Statuses as shown in the sreenshot.
After clicking on the menu item, you will see all the Automation Schedules. Notice the example schedules at end of the tabulated list above. You can see the surveys that have executed and the one created in our example that is pending to go out on 4/20/2020 at 8am.
Use the scheduling engine as it will save you time and energy in automating sending out schedules that are sent on a periodic basis.
Recipients will receive notifications and can click on a link to login to the Acumatica mobile application on Android. Make sure that user install the latest version of the iOS mobile client as there was a problem wrapping survey question text that has since been resolved. The current version as of 13 May 2020 is 18.200.35 (1266) corrected the problem.
Upon clicking the survey, the user will need to click on View Questions and review all their survey questions and answer them. After answering, will select the back button ←.
For each employee user of the survey that you created, they should have a Surveys icon as shown in the screenshot below.
The user may need to scroll down to find the icon or they can simply click the ellipse [...] - the three dots or the three stacked lines to access the menu option depending on the mobile operating system.
After the user selects the Surveys application icon, they will see a screen similar to this one below.
Each survey has a status, indicating a surveys current status and whether any action is required of the user. When a user has completed a specific survey in thier list, the status will change from “Awaiting Response” to “Responded”. In the screenshot above, you can see the user has responded to all of his surveys, except the one at the bottom of the screen.
For the user to start answering questions, they will need to select the survey with the status, Awaiting Response. Then subsequently select, View Questions.
The survey questions they need to answer & complete in our example are listed as follows.
In the case of selecting the question asking them about temperature, we constrain the choices using radio buttons in our example. Of course, you can choice a drop-down list or allow them to enter the value freely.
After answering all the required questions of the survey, the user will need to send it. Simply completing each of the questions does not send the survey. They complete the process by simply clicking on the "paper airplane" icon as shown below.
Once sent, they are done until the next survey arrives.
What's the point of a survey without metrics to meaure? So yes, we built a beautiful dashboard which you can of course customize yourself to suit you needs.
In Acumatica on the web, we have a default dashboard as shown below.
and in the mobile application it renders as follows.
So yes, some eye-candy for you visual and analytical folks out there.
A business event is a data change or a set of conditions checked for on a schedule.
It may include the following information:
- The general information about the business event (such as its name and type)
- The trigger conditions of the business event
- The schedule of the business event (if the conditions of the business event are checked for on a schedule)
- The generic inquiry parameters (if any parameter values have been specified for the business event)
- The email notification templates (if the business event has email notification templates as subscribers)
For our example scenario, we are interested in creating a Business Event & email Notification that is sent to the survey respondent's manager when they their employee reports symptoms such as a temperature that is not normal.
First, before creating the Business Event, we need to create a Generic Inquiry which returns a Results Grid with the survey data records with the "COVTEMP_Attributes" field/attribute that subsequently is used to "trigger" the business event when the condition we set is met.
To navigate to the Generic Inquiry screen, just type in Generic in Search and click on Generic Inquiry under Customization Profiles as illustrated below.
Next type in the name of your generic inquiry (TempMonitor) and click on the checkbox below the name you just entered to make it visible to the UI.
Then add the SurveyCollector Table. You can search for it by typing "Survey" and then select it to include it in your generic inquiry.
After selecting the table, it will display as follows.
Next save your GI and then select the Results Grid tab to make sure it returns the data you will be needing. As you can see from the screenshot below that the Temperature field we need is present, COVTEMP_Attributes which will be used to trigger our Business Event.
Now it's time to create our Business Event.
To configure the Acumatica to use a business event process to trigger an email notification, navigate to the Business Events form by typing Business Events in the search field.
You can define a business event that relates to this business event process - in our case, Acumtica Surveys related processes - that instructs the system to perform an action or multiple actions in Acumatica itself.
After navigating to the Business Events, form, click the "+" sign to create a new business event.
You can create a business event that is triggered by a change to a specific record change for survey responses as an example. One that notifies the the company that one of thier employees has specific symptoms, such as a high temperature.
We will use our Generic Inquiry we created earlier for our Event ID. Just type in the the first part of the name of the GI in Event ID field search, "Temp" and select it.
You can see that the Screen Name & Screen ID were filled in for you and we are ready to add our trigger that fires our business event.
Now we can build our trigger conditions that fire the event when survey respondent records a temperature is "not normal".
To do this, you simply choose the values for Operation, Table Name, Field Name, Condition as displayed below and save it.
You can now add a notification to the Business Event, such as an eMail Notification, Mobile Push, and Mobile SMS subcribers. This can be done by clicking on the Subscriber tab as shown below.
For more information on Business Events, click on the following links: