Frequently Asked Questions

The grey bands represent questions. Click with your mouse on any question to see the answer.

You need to register first so that we can set up your company on the hosted servers. Select the Sign Up link on the Home Page and then follow the instructions.

Once you have registered you can download the client software. Follow the Download link on the Home Page and follow the instructions.

When you have installed the client software, follow the instructions to log into your company and you can begin working straight away.

Cocentric starts at £40 per month. The amount you pay depends on the number of people in your business who need to use Cocentric.

Cocentric Small Business is made up of single user licenses at £40 each per month. There is an additional one-off charge of £50 if you want to make use of the integrated online store.

Cocentric Standard gives you up to 10 user licenses for £200 per month and the online store is free.

Cocentric dedicated allows for unlimited users and a free online store for £500 per month.

See the pricing page for full details.

There is no minimum contract for Cocentric Small Business or Cocentric Standard. You only pay while you are using the service and if you want to stop using Cocentric just let us know and there's nothing more to pay.

For Cocentric Dedicated we set up a separate dedicated server just for your company, so there is a minimum 12 month contract for this service.

See pricing for full details.

The short answer is yes. But it's so much more. Some CRMs stop at monitoring the sales process, some will stop at the Sales Order process. We believe you need a complete view of all your activity in one place so Cocentric helps you manage all this and more.

With Cocentric you can keep track of your activity with Customers, Suppliers, Leads, and other contacts, and this is all linked into every process in your business. And with all your business information in one place, management reporting is easier than ever.

Yes. Cocentric will manage your Sales Orders for you, but it will link this into all your pre-sales activity and your stock and purchasing if necessary. It will also automatically create invoices at the right time for you. Automation and linking of these processes is completely under your control.

You can use the "Out-of-the-box" workflows or create your own to suit your business. And if you sell a service or are a manufacturing organisation, Cocentric will link the Sales into your job management.

Because it takes in so many aspects of your business, Cocentric can sometimes be a bit daunting when you first start using it. The best advice is to start slowly and use the parts that will give you the most benefit. Then gradually begin customising to make the software work for you. All the help can be accessed either directly from links on the Home Page, or by navigating to the Support Page.

Help is available through these frequently asked questions. We're constantly updating theses so keep an eye open for useful tips here.

You can also look at the user forum and post questions here. You'll find questions and solutions with contributions from other users, Cocentric Partners, and of course our own experts. Once you get more familiar and confident using Cocentric you can even get involved in advising other people.

The subject specific User Guides provide you with detailed instructions on a number of tasks in Cocentric. This is a growing library designed to guide you through both simple and complex procedures.

As the number of Cocentric Partners grows, more and more of them are offering a premium support service direct to end users. These will sometimes only be available to their own client base, but more often than not their service is open to anyone. Premium support charges vary depending on the individual Cocentric Partner. This is a third party service provided by the Partner, however we will provide them with support wherever possible.

As a hosted service, Cocentric requires you to be connected to the internet. Please check that your internet connection is working correctly.

Your user ID may not have been set up yet in Cocentric. Your company's Cocentric administrator should be able to help you with this.

You may be entering your User ID or Password incorrectly. Remember that if you set up your User ID with any spaces, these will have been replaced with a full stop or period. So Fred Smith will have become Fred.Smith.

If you have forgotten your Cocentric password your company's Cocentric administrator will be able to reset this for you.

Cocentric is constantly evolving. Because Cocentric is a hosted service, new and improved features will be available at no additional charge to all users.

You can check what features are coming and when you can expect to see them.

Click here for the Release Schedule.

If you don't see the feature you are looking for you can request it using the Forum.

Contacts come in 2 forms; Individual and Company contacts. Additionally, individuals are often linked with a company.

The quickest way to find a contact is to use the Search Contacts function which is a tab found on the main Cocentric Ribbon. Simply begin typing any part of the contact and the list will quickly filter down so that you can see the person you're looking for.

You can also drill into a company through the Customers and Sales button, or the Suppliers and Purchases button and then select contacts from within the company to see all individuals associated with that company.

It may be that you have not added the contact yet, or that you are looking in the wrong place; customers instead of suppliers for example.

You may also have typed the company name slightly differently on the individual contact so Cocentric cannot match them. Try looking for the individual using the Search Contacts function and then select the correct company before saving the contact.

Cocentric has many options for grouping, sorting, filtering and adding columns to lists.

Sometimes when you make several changes to a list and then remove a filter, the list may not look quite how you expected.

To rectify this, simply select Reset Layout from the Layout section of the ribbon.

One of the ways you can configure Cocentric to work the way you work is to change the fields you see on the customisable right-hand side of the screen for most things in the software. For example Customers or Products. You use Edit Fields to manage this.

You also have the ability to change and add values in any drop down fields or pick lists that you see on the fixed left-hand side of these same screens. This is achieved using Edit Lookups.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you will probably want to keep Cocentric and Outlook synchronised. This means that you will only have one set of contacts tasks and appointments no matter where you look. Cocentric has actions which are matched to Tasks in Outlook.

You will need to coordinate your contacts with all the Cocentric users in your company. This is to avoid duplicate contacts being created. First decide which computer will temporarily hold the master list of contacts. On all computers of Cocentric users, you should mark any contacts you do not want to see in Cocentric such as family members, as private. Then ensure that the contacts from any other computers are included on the master list. Finally, delete all the non-private contacts from all computers except the master list computer. The first synchronise should be performed on the computer with the master list. This will update Cocentric with all the public contacts. Then if you synchronise on any other computer you will find that all computers hold the same contacts in Outlook except for Private contacts.

The first time you synchronise on any computer you must select the action Synchronise with Microsoft Outlook from the Tools section of the main menu. This is accessed by clicking on the Cocentric Orb in the top left corner of the application. This synchronises the contacts, tasks and appointments and also sets up a separate small application that runs all the time regardless of whether you have Cocentric open. You will be able to see this running in your Windows system tray.

When your Cocentric Synchroniser runs you may see that it skips Actions, Appointments, and Emails.

The Cocentric Synchroniser will always synchronise Contacts as these are common to all users. For everything else it needs permission to synchronise the individual's Actions, Appointments, and Emails

The way you give the Synchroniser permission is by storing your credentials when you first log in. The login screen asks you for your Login and Password. There is a box immediately below this that you can tick to store your credentials. You should only do this on the computer you normally use and never on a shared or public computer. This has the added benefit that you need not enter these again on this computer.

The first time you do this you should let Cocentric open with the stored credentials and then close it and reboot your PC. This will restart the Synchroniser with the new permissions.

This can also happen if you have changed your password and not restarted the synchroniser.

When Cocentric synchronises with Outlook, it uses the ID and password of the person who logged into that computer when the synchroniser was last started.

To restart the Outlook synchroniser simply reboot your PC.

When you change a workflow a lot of information is saved to the server and changed in the central database. To avoid response time problems, the changes will not be applied for your colleagues until they log in to Cocentric again.

For any users logged in to Cocentric when you make the changes, the old workflow will apply until they restart Cocentric.

If any of these users need to make use of the new workflow changes they should close Cocentric and restart it.

It is good practice to only allow one administrator to change workflows. This avoids the potential problem of a second person overwriting your changes with their version.

Each activity type has its own set of workflows. An activity might be a sales order, a job, a purchase invoice, or any of those listed in the workflow manager. You should make sure that only one workflow is set to be the default workflow for each activity.

A default workflow is the one you use most often for that activity. It will appear each time you create a new activity of that type. You can change the workflow on any activity even though it starts with the default workflow.

If you make your own workflows or add states to existing workflows, you can change the image for that state. It makes sense to give each state a consistent looking icon. This icon will show up on the Ribbon when you have an activity using this workflow.

Cocentric uses a set of icons to keep the user interface in keeping with the rest of the application. Download the Cocentric workflow icons <<here>>.

They are in a zipped format so you will need to unzip the file using a suitable tool and save the files to your shared folders.

The icons include some standard ones that we have used in Cocentric and a whole range of other icons that you can use and rename as you wish.

In using these icons you agree to a third party licensing agreement which is also included with the file.

Cocentric has been designed for ease of use, however sometimes we plan for features in the future and the reason for our choice of data entry method is not always apparent.

For example; when adding an automation step to a workflow, if you automatically trigger another activity you must enter the full name of the new workflow exactly as you created it. This is because we plan to add a feature in future whereby you will be able to import pre-defined workflows but may not have the secondary one on your system.

Don’t worry though, if you happen to get the name wrong the automation will still work except that it will use the default workflow for your new activity. You can always correct this later.

The only way to delete an appointment in the Cocentric calendar is to select the appointment and use the delete key. On a Macintosh there is no Delete key however you can mimic the action using the function+backspace keys together.

When you set up an automated action on a state within a workflow, this action will take place whenever the state is entered. It follows that if you enter a state it creates an action, then when you progress to a future state but then go back to this state it will create the action again.

This behaviour is correct, but if you do not want the second action simply mark the second action as complete.