Guides for small and mid-sized businesses
One practical question per article, answered in plain words.
Practical guides for owners and managers of small and mid-sized companies. Each one answers a single question — how to stop losing leads from ads, how to count the margin of a freight order, how to keep used tires in stock — first as general practice that works in any tool, then showing how it is done in OrgLines.
Guides
Duplicate contacts in a CRM: why they appear and how to merge them
Duplicates appear when the same person reaches you through several channels, is typed in with a different spelling or phone format, or arrives again in an import. Find them by matching phone numbers and emails written in one format, then similar names. Merge by choosing one main record, moving notes, tags, addresses and orders into it and removing the rest, and prevent new ones with one entry point and a search before creating a card.
Preparing a tire shop for the autumn changeover rush
Start four to six weeks before the first expected frost. Estimate how many cars your bays can really handle per day, contact seasonal storage clients before walk-ins arrive, stock up on popular winter sizes and consumables, make sure every stored set can be found by its location, and collect all requests in one queue that your team schedules. The rush is predictable, so most of the work can be done before it starts.
ABC analysis of inventory: which items deserve the most attention
ABC analysis sorts inventory items by their share of annual consumption value, usually units used or sold times unit cost. Class A is the small group that makes up roughly 70–80% of the value, B the next 15–25%, and C the long tail of many items with the remaining few percent. Each class then gets its own rules for counting, reordering and review.
How to handle freight claims and deduct them from the carrier payment
Agree a loss norm, a valuation price and a right of set-off in the carrier contract; weigh the cargo at loading and unloading; calculate only the shortage above the norm; send the carrier the claim with evidence; then deduct the agreed amount as a separate minus line in the final payment and pay the rest on time instead of holding the whole invoice.
How to send Facebook and Instagram leads to your CRM automatically
Why downloading leads from Ads Manager loses clients, what an automatic connection gives you and how to set it up in OrgLines in a few minutes.
How to keep inventory of used tires: tread depth, age and condition of every tire
Why used tires cannot be counted like new ones, which attributes to record for each tire and how to set up per-tire inventory in OrgLines.
How to calculate the margin of every freight order
What makes up the margin of a freight order, why monthly totals hide losing routes and how to see margin per order in OrgLines.
How to connect Claude to your CRM with MCP
What the Model Context Protocol is, what an AI agent can do with your CRM and ERP, how to keep control over changes and how to connect Claude to OrgLines.
How to calculate the real cost per lead — not per click
The difference between cost per lead in the ad account and cost per qualified lead, why agencies should report the second one and how OrgLines combines spend with lead outcomes.
Warehouse bin locations: how to organise storage so everything can be found
What bin-location storage is, how to name zones, racks and bins, and how to keep stock by location, batch and unit in OrgLines.
Short answers
- When should you change to winter tires?Change to winter tires when temperatures stay at around 7 °C or lower, and before the first frost or snow, not after it. In much of Central and Eastern Europe that usually means from mid-October to early November. Local law can add its own rules: Germany requires winter tires in wintry road conditions, and Austria requires them from 1 November to 15 April whenever conditions are wintry.
- What is a planogram?A planogram is a diagram that shows exactly where each product goes on a shelf or display: which shelf, in which position, how many facings and next to which other products. Retailers and suppliers use it so that every store in a chain presents the range the same way, the space goes to the products that earn it and staff can refill shelves without guessing.
- What is the difference between a lead, a contact and a deal?A lead is a request or sign of interest that nobody has checked yet. A contact is a real person you know and keep a lasting record of, usually linked to a company. A deal is one specific sales opportunity with a value, a stage and an owner. A lead is either converted or closed; a contact stays; a deal is won or lost, and one contact can have many deals over time.
- What is a SKU and how should you name them?A SKU, or stock keeping unit, is your own internal code for one specific variant of a product that you stock and sell, for example one colour and size of a shirt, so that stock, orders and sales can be counted per variant. Good SKUs are short, unique, built from a few fixed segments in a fixed order, and never reused.
- What is chargeable (volumetric) weight?Chargeable weight is the weight a carrier bills you for: the greater of the shipment's actual gross weight and its volumetric weight. Volumetric weight turns the space a shipment takes into kilograms using a conversion factor from the carrier's tariff, so light but bulky goods are charged by volume and heavy, dense goods by their real weight.
- What is a tire hotel?A tire hotel is a paid service in which a tire shop or service station stores a customer's off-season tires or complete wheels until the next change. The shop inspects the set at intake, records its condition, keeps it at a known storage place and returns it, usually fitted to the car, when the season changes.
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