Timeline View

Availability: Only for users who have opted for CRM for Everyone

Editions : Enterprise and Ultimate

The Timeline View allows you to visualize your records plotted across a given timeline. You can view the records by days, weeks, months, or quarters. With the new Timeline View, you can:

Achieve a consolidated, visual representation of records plotted across time, from which you can derive important time-centric inferences, such as identifying which tasks are ongoing, completed, or yet to begin.
Gain insight into the duration of a record or task.
Stay organized by providing a clear, chronological layout of your work, making it easier to allocate resources, monitor ongoing tasks, and ensure everything stays on track.

Let us look at a few scenarios to get a clearer understanding of the functions and benefits of the Timeline View.

Scenario I:

Olivia, the Operations Manager at Zylker Properties, manages a variety of projects and tasks, juggling the complexities of planning and execution in her daily workflow. To stay organized and efficient, she uses the Timeline View, a versatile tool that visually arranges records along a timeline, based on their start and end dates.

Let's look into what all she can achieve by using the Timeline View

It allows Olivia to quickly identify the Property Deals that are In Progress (represented by blue bars), making it possible for her to prioritize and direct her team's attention to these active transactions.
Besides, she can also see the Completed Property Deals (marked in green), and Property Deals slated for future execution (that appear in yellow).
This intuitive color-coding system provides a comprehensive snapshot of each Property Deal, allowing Olivia to assess the status of the entire set of deals at a glance.

Additionally, she can also track the lifespan of each property deal, gaining valuable insight into where adjustments or interventions may be required.
She can spot trends, such as which periods experience higher volumes of property deal creation and closing, allowing for more effective resource planning.

To optimize team performance further, she can group property deals by deal owner, providing a clear view of each team member’s workload.
Besides, this feature enables her to assess how many property deals each person is managing, ensuring a balanced distribution of responsibilities and improving overall efficiency across the team.

Scenario II:

Yvonne Riehl, the Sales Onboarding Manager at the organization, oversees the onboarding process for new sign-ups. To manage the workload effectively and ensure an even distribution of responsibilities among the team, Yvonne uses the Timeline View. This tool visually displays each onboarding session along a timeline, allowing Yvonne to group the sessions by team member.

With this view, Yvonne can quickly identify when a team member is overloaded with too many onboarding sessions scheduled at a particular time. She can then make adjustments by resizing or repositioning the sessions on the timeline, balancing the workload and ensuring that no one is overwhelmed. This streamlined approach helps Yvonne optimize scheduling and maintain a smooth and efficient onboarding process for both the team and new customers.

To create a Timeline View in a module

In any module, click on Timeline View.
Choose the Start and End Date fields.
Note
All date and date/time fields will appear in this drop-down. In the Deals module, the Start Date defaults to 'Created Time,' and the End Date defaults to 'Closing Date'.
You can choose to display Date Visibility as either 'All Days' or 'Working Days Only'. If your organization predominantly operates on working days, you can select 'Working Days Only'.

Note
When 'Working Days Only' is selected, the Timeline View excludes non-business days and holidays. Records with start or end dates on non-working days will appear on the nearest working day, with an asterisk (*) in the tooltip to indicate the non-working day. Non-business days are determined based on the Business Hours configuration in Company Settings.
Color the records using the default color coding or based on color-enabled picklist fields. The default color coding represents:

Green: Completed records end before today’s date.
Blue: In-progress records end after today’s date.
Yellow: Future records start after today’s date.

Choose up to four fields to display per record (Record Name is mandatory). The Record Owner will be shown as an image, always appearing last.

Additional Customization Options

You can view the records by days, weeks, months, or quarters.
Navigate the timeline with left and right arrows to view different segments.
Use the Today button to return to the current date.

Records can be grouped by any picklist field or user field in the module.
You can resize a record's Start and End dates by dragging the edges of the bar.
You can also reposition the record to a different date range.

You can view the number of records that were started and endedon a particular day(by hovering over the day). Similarly, this can be achieved for weeks,months, and quarters.
When you opt to filter by color, you can either filter by Default Color or by the picklist field selected for Color By in your Timeline Settings.

Note

Records without a Start Date or with an End Date earlier than the Start Date will not appear in the Timeline View and will still be visible in the List View.

Records that have a Start Date, but do not have an End Date, are represented as in the image below.

Users will need 'Manage Views' profile permissions to create and edit the Timeline View configuration.