Marc's Minute - User Options, The Home Tab

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In the first installment I focused on the first tab in your user options that dealt with some system defaults for when you get into FE.  The next tab deals with shortcuts that can save you time maneuvering within the software.  Just a reminder, these options we are focusing on are user specific; they do not affect FE as a whole, only the person who sets them and logs in.

Once logged into FE, up in the toolbar at the top, choose Tools and Options and the following window appears:

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Make sure you are on the Home tab.  Here you will see two windows.  We will be dealing with setting up favorites (or shortcuts if you wish) and showing action reminders.  With Show Favorites highlighted you will see all of the options listed in the right hand box.  Most of your options are divided between ways to open items and ways to create new items.  If you expand either folder you will see subfolders based on the different modules in FE.  Remember, you will only see the folders that your user security allows.  So with the folder expanded, select the items that you commonly use.  The shortcuts I have are open an account, open vendor, new vendor, new invoice…because those are my common tasks.  Yours are obviously going to be different.

Now we get to organize them.  There are three places each individual shortcut can appear; and they can be in any or all of these locations.  The default is that the shortcut appears on the homepage of the module it relates to.  So Open Vendor will appear on the AP home page.  You can have the shortcut show up on all of your homepages.  And finally you can have the shortcut show up in your tool bar under Favorites.  Personally my preference is the latter since you can access this list from any module and any page in FENo extra clicks required.  And that is what we are trying to accomplish.

Click on the Organize Favorites button on the right and you will see something like this:

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At the very least you will see a folder for favorites menu and one for each module’s home page.  Any favorites that you chose will be listed under the module, just expand the folder.  Now you can use the copy function to add one of your favorites to the Common folder or to the favorites.  Or you can just drag and drop the favorite to the different location.

Experiment with this, but by putting them in the favorites menu, you have negated the most potential clicks.

One final note, you will see in the example above a folder called FE-Reports.  This is because you can identify a report as a favorite in order to create a shortcut as well.  Suppose you have your regular income statement that you are constantly running.  How many clicks does it take to get there?  If you are in a different module you may need up to 5 clicks.

Open the report and choose Favorites, Add to Favorites in the tool bar.  Another window will open and you will be given the opportunity to organize where you wish the report shortcut to appear:

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You can also use this functionality on any record in the system for a specific gl account, grant, project, vendor, fixed asset.....
Now, back to our User, Options to address Actions.  This will make any action reminders that you have created in the system show up on your Home Page.  That functionality is for a different discussion but it is discussed here:

https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/40628

Hopefully the use of these shortcuts will save you clicks, saving you time.  Happy clicking!
 
News ARCHIVED | Financial Edge® Tips and Tricks 02/04/2016 7:50am EST

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