SugarCRM (SugarAI) Tips and Tricks: Sugar Bitesize Webinars
If you use SugarAI, formerly SugarCRM, there are probably everyday tasks which take longer than they need to. The enable.services Sugar Bitesize webinar series shares practical tips for users and administrators from finding records faster to understanding team access and restoring Studio layouts, all in short, 15-minute episodes.
The idea of the series is simple. Take a specific area of Sugar, look at the features which are available, and explain how they can help with the tasks which users and administrators carry out regularly. Sometimes this means introducing something you haven’t used before. At other times, it’s a reminder of a useful feature which has been sitting there all along.
If you use Sugar every day, there are probably certain tasks which you can do almost without thinking. Converting a Lead, updating an Opportunity, scheduling a Meeting, or checking an Account becomes part of your normal routine. However, familiarity doesn’t guarantee efficiency, and we often stick to our first habits even when faster alternatives exist.
When people ask for help with SugarAI, the starting point is usually a task they want to complete or a frustration they want to resolve.
“How do I find a record in SugarCRM when I only know part of the name?”
“Why can one user see an Account in SugarAI when another user can’t?”
“Can I update information in Sugar without opening every record?”
These are exactly the sorts of questions which Sugar Bitesize explores.
By looking at familiar situations and working through the relevant functionality, we show how a feature works and where it fits into your day.
The series covers topics for day-to-day users as well as SugarAI administrators, all in non-technical terminology so you don’t have to be a developer or tech geek to understand. For users, this might mean fewer clicks and easier access to customer information. For administrators, it might mean understanding a setting which explains unexpected behaviour or finding a simpler way to manage a configuration change.
So, what sort of things did we cover in the first six episodes?
How can I personalise SugarCRM to suit the way I work?
Whilst your administrators configure Sugar for your organisation, there are plenty of settings which individual users can change to make their own experience more comfortable.
In Episode 1: Personalising the User Interface we looked at SugarAI user preferences and some of the smaller adjustments which can make everyday tasks that bit easier.
For example, if you’re regularly scrolling past several subpanels to reach the information you need, you can rearrange their order. Putting Contacts, Meetings or Opportunities nearer the top of the relevant record view means that the information you use most often is easier to find. Sugar remembers your preferred subpanel order for that record type, allowing you to organise the subpanel order in an Account record view differently from those in Contacts or Leads.
The same principle applies to the navigation bar. By changing the module order and choosing how many modules remain pinned in view, you can keep the areas you use regularly within easy reach.
The session also explored personal settings for Meeting and Call reminders. Setting your preferred defaults saves you making the same adjustments each time you create an appointment, whilst still allowing you to change them for individual records where they need to be different to what would normally be set. It’s also useful to understand who receives those reminders, and how they appear.
Other SugarAI personalisation options covered include light and dark mode, field label positioning, date and time formats, name display preferences and the first day of the calendar week.
Individually, these are small changes. However, when you’re working within Sugar throughout the day, having information displayed in a familiar format with your most frequently used areas close to hand can make the system feel far more intuitive.
How do I find records in SugarCRM more quickly?
Finding information should be one of the most straightforward parts of using a CRM. However, if you’re searching in the wrong place, or using a search which is too broad, you can spend longer looking for the record than dealing with the information within it.
Episode 2: Searching Tips explored the different ways to locate records in Sugar, starting with Global Search.
Whilst searching across multiple modules can be useful, you may only regularly need results from a few of them.
A salesperson, for example, may be mainly interested in Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities. Selecting the relevant modules the Global Search will include helps to make the results more useful for the task in hand.
If the initial suggestions don’t contain the record you need, opening the full results gives you further options for narrowing the list. From there, previewing a record can help you check that it’s the right one before navigating away.
The same principle applies when searching within a module. Understanding what a search is looking for makes it much easier to understand the results it returns.
For example, entering part of a name may look for that text at the beginning of the searchable field. The percent sign (%) wildcard, demonstrated in the session, can help when you need to find text elsewhere within a value or allow for uncertainty about a name’s spelling. Searching for ‘J%son’, therefore, will return results including ‘Johnson’, ‘Johnston’, ‘Jameson’ and ‘Johannsson’ without the need to type every iteration to find matches. Multiple wildcards in the same search narrow things even further, with ‘J%n%son’ excluding ‘Jameson’ from the results but still including the others.
It’s a small detail, but a useful one if you’ve ever been certain that a Contact exists and struggled to find them.
Save your SugarAI filters instead of rebuilding them
Searching is often about finding the same group of records repeatedly, so creating your own filters makes your life easier.
You may need to check your open Opportunities, work through a particular set of Contacts, or return to records which meet the same conditions each week. If you’re recreating those conditions every time, you’re repeating work which Sugar can remember for you.
Saved filters allow users to give a filter a meaningful name and select it again when needed. These are personal to the user, so saving your own filter doesn’t change a colleague’s working view.
The search session also looks at finding related information within subpanels, helping users narrow down records connected to the Account or Contact already in view.
There’s also Sugar’s Sweet Spot, which brings another approach to navigation. Rather than repeatedly working through menus, users can search for records and access actions from one place. User-configurable hotkeys also provide shortcuts to frequently used areas.
When used together, these search tips help with more than just locating data. They make moving around the system easier, particularly when you’re switching between different tasks throughout the day.
Why can't a user see a record in SugarCRM?
For administrators, questions about record visibility can take up a surprising amount of time.
A record exists, one person can open it, and another person can’t find it in a search. Before assuming that something has gone wrong, it’s worth understanding how SugarAI teams contribute to record access.
Episode 3: Admin Tips & Tricks – Understanding Teams was primarily directed at Sugar admins and looked at the difference between team memberships and default teams and how, although the names sound similar, they serve different purposes.
Team membership helps determine which team-controlled records a user can access. Default teams provide the starting team values when that user creates a new record.
For example, making someone a member of a team and setting that team as their default are separate configuration decisions. One concerns access to records; the other concerns which teams are initially added to records they create.
Understanding that distinction makes it easier to investigate visibility questions and set users up appropriately. Teams also need to be considered alongside the other permissions which apply within your Sugar environment.
The session explored the Global team, private teams and the management hierarchy defined through the Reports To field. It also explained the “Member (Reports to)” relationship, through which managers can inherit team membership because of the users who report to them.
That inherited membership can change when the underlying reporting or team arrangements change. If someone needs continuing membership independently of those arrangements, administrators need to account for that.
These are useful considerations when reviewing SugarAI team settings, moving staff between departments or investigating why access has changed.
SugarCRM Record View, Preview and Focus Dashboards explained
Once you’ve found a record, the next question is how much information you need to see.
Opening the full Record View is familiar to most users. It gives you the record’s fields, arranged within its layout, along with access to related information through subpanels. However, opening every record in full can become time-consuming, particularly if you’re working through a list and only need to check a few details.
Episode 4: Viewing Data in a Different Way highlighted three ways of working with information in SugarAI: Record View, Preview and Focus Dashboards.
Preview allows you to inspect a record alongside your list without leaving the page. This is particularly useful when you’re checking whether you’ve found the right Contact or comparing records before deciding which one to open. Where permissions allow, it also provides an opportunity to edit information within the preview pane.
A Focus Dashboard takes this further by bringing selected information into a Focus Drawer over the screen you’re already using. Depending on how it has been configured, this can include the record itself, information from a related Account and a Timeline showing relevant activity.
For a salesperson preparing to contact a customer, or a support user checking the background to a Case, having that information together can make a considerable difference.
The useful question is how much information you need for the task. Sometimes a quick Preview is enough. Sometimes you need the wider picture provided by a Focus Dashboard. At other times, opening the full Record View is the most appropriate option.
Being comfortable with all three gives you that choice.
Keeping the CRM Data Clean & Accurate
Keeping customer information accurate is much easier when updating the CRM fits naturally into the working day.
If adding a meeting involves navigating to a Contact, scrolling down the record, finding the relevant subpanel and then opening the creation screen, it’s understandable that users start to see the process as an administration task.
Episode 5: Keeping Your Data Accurate with Quick Create focussed on everyday timesavers and looked at Sugar’s Quick Create function and how it can reduce that work.
When used from an appropriate record, Quick Create can carry relevant information into the new record. In the Contact and Meeting example covered in the session, this helps create the meeting in context without repeatedly finding and selecting the same Contact.
Administrators also have a part to play, as the available Quick Create options are configured within the administration settings.
The benefit is straightforward: make the actions users carry out regularly easier to reach and reduce the amount of information they have to enter again.
How to reschedule SugarCRM meetings while keeping cancellation history
Some SugarAI best practices are about preserving information which could otherwise disappear during an ordinary update.
Take a cancelled meeting which needs to be rearranged. The obvious approach is to open the original meeting and change its date and time.
Whilst that puts the appointment into the new slot, it also removes the original scheduling information from that meeting record’s current details. Looking back at the customer’s activity, you may no longer have an obvious record of the cancellation.
The approach demonstrated in Sugar Bitesize is to mark the original meeting as Cancelled, then use the Copy function to create the replacement appointment, checking its status, date and time before saving.
This leaves a clearer history of what happened and what is planned next. If appointments are repeatedly cancelled, that history can help users understand the pattern when deciding how to approach the next conversation.
It’s a useful example of how a small change in working practice can improve the information available to everyone using the CRM.
Updating SugarCRM Opportunities and Revenue Line Items
Sales records introduce another familiar challenge: keeping related information consistent without updating every item individually.
An Opportunity may contain multiple Revenue Line Items, and those items may progress at different speeds. In that situation, maintaining individual dates and stages is useful because it reflects what is happening.
However, if everything is moving together, repeating the same change across each line item creates unnecessary work.
The timesavers session (episode 5) explored controls for applying relevant changes across related line items. The available fields and behaviour depend on the record type and your Sugar configuration.
The practical point is to understand when individual updates are needed and when a parent-level change can do the work for you. Used appropriately, this helps keep sales information accurate whilst reducing repetitive administration.
How to preview and restore layouts in SugarCRM Studio
The administrator Studio tips session in Episode 6: Admin Tips: Sugar Studio looked at the tools available when configuring the system itself.
In Sugar Studio, changing a layout is usually straightforward. Working out exactly what was removed from a previous version can be less obvious.
The Studio layout session explored View History, including previewing previous layouts and restoring an appropriate version before deploying it to users. It also explained the difference between restoring a historical layout and using Restore Default Layout.
Those options serve different purposes.
If you’re trying to recover a recent configuration, understanding that distinction helps you choose the appropriate starting point.
The session included smaller configuration shortcuts too, such as relabelling fields from within layouts and considering relationship labels during setup.
Again, individually, these may only save a little time. However, if you regularly configure modules, layouts and relationships, those small savings soon add up to a large amount of time saved.
Get more from the Sugar features you already use
The common theme across the Sugar Bitesize episodes is about making everyday work easier through a better understanding of the system.
That might mean finding a record more quickly, checking related information without leaving your screen, understanding a visibility issue, or keeping a clearer history of customer activity.
For administrators, it might mean making changes with a better understanding of the tools available to review and recover layouts.
The features and screens available will depend on your SugarAI version, product, permissions and configuration, but the starting point remains the same. Look at the task you’re trying to complete and understand which options can help.
If you’re looking for practical SugarAI help, user training or administrator tips, sign up for the next Sugar Bitesize webinar. You may find that the feature which makes your next task easier is already in Sugar, waiting to be used.
