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Highrise

Owned by Gvido
Last updated: Aug 31, 2022
6 min read

Highrise is a simple CRM application for managing customer contacts, potential deals, cases, tasks, e-mails and other information. flex.bi provides easy and fast Highrise deals, cases and contacts reporting. You can import your Highrise account data into flex.bi just with couple clicks and start analysis right away.

Imported data

flex.bi imports the following Highrise data (measures) and dimensions:

  • Deals imported and calculated measures
    • Deals created, Deals updated, Deals pending, Deals won, Deals lost
    • Deal created date, Deal updated date, Deal closing date (extracted from deal name, see below)
    • Created days ago, Updated days ago (can be used as filters in reports to show recent deals)
    • Deal price, Deal price type
    • Deal value, Deal revenue (for monthly and yearly price types revenue is distributed by months)
    • Deal EUR value, Deal EUR revenue, Deal USD value, Deal USD revenue (converted from original currency, see below)
    • Forecast EUR value, Forecast EUR revenue, Forecast USD value, Forecast USD revenue (calculated from deal value / revenue multiplied by stage probability)
    • Tasks created (for deals), Tasks due, Tasks completed
    • Notes created (for deals), Emails created, Comments created
    • Party tags
  • Deals dimensions
    • Parties (with Company and Person hierarchy levels)
    • Deals
    • Created by (user), Responsible (user, for deals and tasks)
    • Deal Categories, Task Categories
    • Deal Status (pending, won, lost)
    • Currencies
    • Visible to (group)
    • Stage (extracted from deal name, see below)
    • Deal Tags (extracted from deal name, see below)
    • Time (year / quarter / month / day hierarchy and year / week / day hierarchy)
  • Cases imported and calculated measures
    • Cases created, Cases updated, Cases closed, Cases open
    • Case created date, Case updated date, Case closed date
    • Created days ago, Updated days ago (can be used as filters in reports to show recent cases)
    • Tasks created (for cases), Tasks due, Tasks completed
    • Notes created (for cases), Emails created, Comments created
  • Cases dimensions
    • Parties (with Company and Person hierarchy levels)
    • Cases
    • Created by (user), Responsible (user, for tasks)
    • Task Categories
    • Case Status (open, closed)
    • Visible to (group)
    • Case Stage (extracted from case name, see below)
    • Case Tags (extracted from case name, see below)
    • Time (year / quarter / month / day hierarchy and year / week / day hierarchy)
  • Contacts imported measures
    • Contacts created
    • Tasks created (just for contacts not related to deals and cases), Tasks due, Tasks completed
    • Notes created (just for contacts without related deal or case), Emails created, Comments created
    • Recordings created (total of notes, emails and comments created)
    • Last note date, Last email date, Last comment date, Last recording date (latest from notes, emails and comments)
    • Last note days ago, Last email days ago, Last comment days ago, Last recording days ago (can be used as filter to show contacts with recent notes, emails or comments)
    • Tags, Company tags (for persons)
  • Contacts dimensions
    • Parties (with Company and Person hierarchy levels)
    • Created by (user), Responsible (user, for tasks)
    • Task Categories
    • Tags
    • Time (year / quarter / month / day hierarchy and year / week / day hierarchy)

Custom fields

Highrise contacts custom fields import is available only for accounts with STANDARD or higher subscription plan.

After selecting Highrise account you can show available custom fields. Select only those custom fields that you need for reporting purposes (it is recommended to select not more than 10 custom fields) as otherwise initial report opening time can slow down. In addition you can change Data type for custom field from string to integer, decimal or data and then flex.bi will try to convert custom field values to specified data type.

Each imported custom field will be available in Contacts and Deals cubes in Measures / Calculated members list with CF prefix.

Visibility of tasks

In Highrise it is possible to create tasks either as private (visible only to assignee and creator) or public (by selecting “Let everyone see this task”). When task count is imported in flex.bi then only public tasks and private tasks which are visible to user who authorized eazyBI access to Highrise are imported. Highrise API does not provide access to all tasks even to Highrise account administrators.

Deal closing date

Highrise does not have separate fields for forecasted deal closing date as well as for deal stage (or probability). Therefore most common recommendation is to enter closing date and stage at the end of deal name. If you specify expected closing date on open deals then in flex.bi deal forecast reports you will see deal value in specified month.

To ad a closing date to pending deals at first put “ - “ (space dash space) at the end of deal name and then specify closing date. Closing date can be in format

  • DD MMM YYYY (e.g. 30 Oct 2011). Day is optional (by default - end of month), month name should be three letter case-insensitive English name (e.g. jan, feb, mar, …), year is also optional (by default nearest month in future will be selected).
  • Nd or Nw or Nm or Ny (e.g. 6m which means six months) - closing date will be calculated as specified offset (specified by number N) with specified unit (days, weeks, months or year) from last deal updated date. In this way you can specify approximate expected closing time each time when you review and update deal.
  • If no closing date is specified then by default one month offset will be used from last deal updated date.
  • Closing date for lost and won deals always will be the actual date when you changed status to Lost or Won. If you want to override closing date of won deals (e.g. you forgot to close it in Highrise on correct date) then you can specify closing date (or just closing month) in deal name and specify deal stage as 100% (e.g. Dec 2011 100%).

Deal stage

Deal stage allows you to classify deals by their approximate probability - you can use any percentage as stage name but it is recommended that you use some predefined stages (e.g. 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%). Deal stage probability is used to calculate Forecast value and Forecast revenue measures (by multiplying original deal value with probability).

You need to specify deal stage in deal name right after closing date. If you do not specify deal stage for pending deals then by default it will be 10%. For lost deals stage always will be set to 0% and for won deals stage always will be 100%.

Here are examples of deal names and how closing date and stage will be extracted from them:

  • flex.bi sales opportunity - 15 Oct 75% 
    Close date will be closest 15th of October (current or next year, depending on deal last updated date), stage will be 75%.
  • Small deal - Nov 
    Close date will be closest 30th of Novemeber (end of month), stage by default will be 10% for pending deal.
  • Big deal - 6m 25% 
    Close date will be 6 months from deal last updated date, stage will be 25%.

If you previously used YouCalc reporting application for deals reporting then you can also use their convention for numeric deal stages (- 1 is 25%, - 2 is 50% and - 3 is 75%). For example:

  • Big deal - Dec 2011 - 2
    Close date will be end of December, 2011, stage will be 25%.

Deal tags

Highrise allows to add tags just to parties (companies and persons) but for deals only one deal category could be assigned. But sometimes you would like to use additional deal tags for deal classification besides one main deal category.

You can use the following deal naming convention to add one or several deal tags that will be available as separate Deal Tags dimension in flex.bi. Similar to closing date and stage at first put “ - “ (space dash space) at the end of deal name and then after specifying deal closing date and stage specify deal tags inside square brackets […] and separate several tags with comma. For example,

  • Big deal - 6m 25% [new business, crm] 
    Will add two deal tags “new business” and “crm” for this deal.
  • New lead - [testing tags] 
    Will add just one tag “testing tags” for this deal (without any closing date and stage).

Case stage

If you want also to track case stages then you can use the same convention and put case stage as percentage in case name using the same convention as in deals. If you will not put any stage percentage in case name then (none) will be assigned as default stage. There is no support for closing dates in case names.

Case tags

Similar to deal tags you can also add case tags which will be available as separate Case Tags dimension in Highrise Cases cube. Just enter case tags inside square brackets […] at the end of case name, for example,

  • New case [urgent, crm] 
    Will add two case tags “urgent” and “crm” for this case.

Deal value and revenue calculation

Deal value measure is calculated as

  • either deal price for fixed bids
  • or deal price multiplied by number of selected units (hour, month, year)

When you use Time dimension in reports then deal value will appear at time period which includes deal closing date.

Deal revenue is the same as deal value for fixed bids and hourly rate bids but for monthly and yearly bids deal price will be reported at multiple time periods:

  • first period will be on closing date
  • next periods (months or years) will be reported as offset from closing date

E.g. deal with price of $1000 for 3 months with closing date on Oct 15 will have

  • deal value of $3000 on Oct 15
  • deal revenue of $1000 on Oct 15, Nov 15, Dec 15

Currency conversion

If you have deals in multiple currencies then for reporting total deal values you need to convert them to one currency. flex.bi downloads currency rates from the European Central Bank (from http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml) and defines calculated measures that convert deal amounts to EUR and USD. If you want to convert all amounts to different currency then define new calculated measures using USD calculated measures as example.

If you want to learn more about calculated measure formulas then read calculated members tutorial.

Duplicate contact, deal or case names

If in your Highrise data the same company has several persons with the same name, or if you have several deals with the same name or several cases with the same name then after import in flex.bi these names will have their ID numbers in parenthesis after their name. It is required by flex.bi that each dimension member has unique name as well as it is easier to distinguish that these dimension members are different.

If you click on company, person, deal or case dimension member then in action list you will see Go to source link - when clicking on it new Highrise application page will be opened with corresponding contact, deal or case. It can be very useful to see summary overview of your contacts, deals and cases in flex.bi and when necessary you can go to detailed Highrise page for selected item.