How to make an account active or inactive?

I am looking at possible ways to define an account as 'active' or 'inactive'. A simple checkbox will do the trick to identify this however I am stuck on how to define it as a process (looking to automate). Initially I thought about defining it as: 


Accounts>Date Modified - 3 weeks 

However that poses an issue because an account does not necessarily get updated when a related record is added/modified.

Has anyone done this before and/or have some insight how I could go about it? 

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  • Hi Braedon,

    Basing automation off date modified could also result in false positives since there are times the account record is updated (e.g. changing assigned user, an integration pushing some data into the record, etc.) that don't signify meaningful activity. 

    Can you elaborate more on your use case? What is the purpose of the active/inactive designation and are there specific correlating events that trigger a status change or ensure an account remains in either status?

  • Hi Chris,

    Thanks for the feedback.

    The purpose would be to notify an account manager that there has been no activity on said record for 'x' amount of time. So no activity I would probably specify as no action to the account or any related records (new or update). 

    If there is a better/alternative way of doing this I am definitely open to suggestions

  • Thanks for the additional detail. My first though on how this could be achieved would be to create custom date or datetime field in the Accounts module. Once that field is created, you would then create separate processes to achieve the following use cases in SugarBPM:

    1. Analyze the date field when it is updated and set the account to an inactive status if it remains unchanged for X days/weeks.
    2. Update the date field in the account record and set the status to active for any qualifying update to the direct account record. (e.g. phone number is updated, account type value changed, etc.)
    3. For each related module you classify as meaningful activity, a process that updates the parent account's date and sets the status to active based on the qualifying update in the child record. (e.g. opportunity sales stage changes, call record created, etc.)

    If you have a lot of related modules or a lot of related records within certain modules, I recommend this solution over using Sugar Logic formulas. Sugar Logic can create performance bottlenecks if a large number of calculations have to be performed against related modules.

  • Ok this actually sounds like a good solution. I guess I have one more question here; is that custom date/datetime field going to have the 'calculated' box checked in studio? Or is this what you were talking about avoiding and SugarBPM will be doing all of the updating and calculating?

    Edit 1: Also, where would I create these processes? I took a quick look at process definitions and process business rules however it doesn't seem that I can create a process to trigger and update the date field. 

    Should this be run on a scheduler?

  • The date field should not be set as a calculated value as the only updates to that field should be done by the running processes. When designing the process definition, the action should set the date/datetime field to a value of 'Run Time' by clicking the 'Run Time' button immediately below the field:

    The only scheduler dependency will be the stock SugarBPM scheduler as that will need to evaluate accounts that are potentially inactive.

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