Contacts who are neither clients nor vendors cannot have a company name. Example: I have a number of prospects at companies. They're not yet clients. They cannot exist in Studiometry, therefore I cannot track them, make to-dos, maintain a history about them, and so forth. They must be handled outside of SM. I can import a not-yet-client person & company as a client, erase their ID number, then reset ID Numbering in Preferences. But it's cumbersome and impractical. Request: make it possible to add contacts and their companies as prospects. Thank you!
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6 comments
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Rob Sherrard - Imageer One way of dealing with Not-Yet-Clients is to go ahead and enter information as you would with Confirmed clients and use the Category field on the Client Info page to identify prospects as Potential Clients.
I have a slightly different situation where many of my Clients are independent real estate agents who work at a brokerage. As independent agents, the work I do for them is not billable to the brokerage, yet it is desireable for addressing purposes to send things in care of the brokerage. My solution for this is to enter each agent as a client - Last Name, First Name so that they show up in the Client navigation pane alphabetically by last name. I then enter the Contact information in Contacts. For linkage to the brokerage, I created in Contacts a Custom Field "CompanyName"
Invoices and reports are addressed: <!--ClientContactName-->, <!--Conact-CompanyName--> … This allows inclusion of the Contact Name in First Name Last Name sequence and the Company Name.
Other clients who are part of a regular business are entered in the normal way, but also get the business name entered in the Custom Field for conformity with the setup for invoices and reports.
All that being said, the best way to handle your request is to use the Client Category field with the Potential Client category for Not-Yet-Clients. If you need to differentiate Potential Clients from Confirmed Clients (or any other kind of Client), the Search feature for Clients can be sorted by Category. If the prospect doesn't work out you can change the Category to Retired, or uncheck the Live Client checkbox.
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Peter Billard Thank you, Rob. Your method works pretty well. I entered 5 contacts as a test and changed their category. Noticed there's a category 'Contact (non-client)' that's useful, too. I still delete their sequentially assigned client number and reset the ID Numbering counter to the last new client. Keep it ready & available for when creating a real client. Fiddled around with the Search function and used the category column to sort the different designations. I appreciate your help very much.
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Rob Sherrard - Imageer Glad to have been of service. Note that you can create your own Categories if the ones preloaded by Oranged don't match your needs.
From my viewpoint you're making it unnecessarily complicated by backing out the prospect Client ID numbers. Unless you never lose a client, there will always be gaps in Client ID's, so why not let the ID numbers assigned to prospects ride? What do you do when a prospect actually becomes a client? Then you have to go back again and do more manual changes to assign a client number and increment the ID number base. Make it easy on yourself and "waste" ID numbers on prospects!
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Peter Billard Hmmm. I'll think it over. There's wisdom in what you say. I decide over the next few days if I'm unnecessarily stiff in my thinking about this number thing. Thanks for pointing out the editable categories.
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Rob Sherrard - Imageer Peter- Also note that you can include Client Category as a filter in Summary reports to include or exclude one or more Category types from a report. This may allow you to differentiate ToDo's or other prospect related activities from real Client activities.
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Peter Billard The Summary reports have extensive abilities. Thank you for mentioning the filtering by category. That will be helpful.
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