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TWO-MINUTE TUTORIAL
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THINGS TO DO
THIS QUARTER
Spring is an ideal
time to think about how you work. The year-end close is
behind you and the fall crunch is a whole summer away.
Rethinking some of your processes now will make you better
organized for the inevitable rush:
• Take a fresh
look at your trial balance Financial statements are a
snapshot of the shop’s performance. But without
a meaningful set of income, cost, and expense accounts
you’re not getting the inside look you need to make
the best business decisions. Since the trial balance shows
all accounts, it’s a great place to start. Accounts
can sprout like weeds over the years; some accounts that
reflected the business in 2000 might not be meaningful
to anyone now. On the other hand, there may be accounts
such as “office expenses” that catch too many
expenses that shouldn’t go so unnoticed. In this
case, breaking out new kinds of expense accounts would
give you a better idea of where the money goes.
• Prune the
task table It is easy for the task table to bloat as your
agency evolves. It’s common for different kinds
of jobs to go in and out of favor, leaving a trail of
tasks that may never be used again. Over time these tasks
can confuse AEs who are adding new jobs and see ten different
tasks for printing. The key is to make tasks inactive
when they’re no longer an important part of your
shop’s production process.
• Fine-tune
your production and billing status codes Many agencies
set up their status codes when they first install Clients
& Profits, then never change them. As your agency
expands, your production and billing statuses need to
evolve to better track the growing volume of work. Using
a more diverse and descriptive set of status codes helps
you organize jobs into workable groups that are easier
to print in traffic, work in progress, and management
reports.
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Over the last 20 years,
Clients & Profits has completely refined how to manage new jobs.
Whether you’re new to C&P or a power user, using job types,
creative briefs, and job templates makes adding new jobs faster
and much more organized.
The most important tool for organizing your shop’s work
is a job type. Job types set an organizational structure for work
your shop does on a regular basis (e.g., brochures, logos, web sites,
events, etc.) An important feature of a job type is its job template.
A job template lists job tasks that are needed to complete all work
for this type of job. You may have 100 tasks on your task table,
but only 15 of those are needed for a particular job type.
“Job types certainly save loads of time for AEs adding new
jobs,” says Kelley Anderson, HR/Accounting Manager at The
Vimarc Group. “There’s nothing like picking a job type
and it filling in every task that could possibly be associated with
a job. And for those of us in the accounting department adding invoices,
there are no extra steps needed; the right tasks are always there!”
Proposals are associated with job types for work you do on a regular
basis. A key part of any job type is its creative brief. The creative
brief’s questions (e.g., What are we
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trying to accomplish? Who
are we speaking to? What do we want them to think?) get both client
or hot prospect and your creative team focused on a job’s
objectives and results.
Proposals can be added, edited, killed, or turned into real job
tickets. Killed proposals aren’t lost, either, providing a
complete list of ideas that don’t make it (so you don’t
try reinventing a square wheel).
If you need to track time or begin work on an estimate, go ahead
and approve a proposal. That generates a job ticket automatically.
“When employees start adding their time, tasks associated
with that job type are already on a job and an employee has no time
wasted when adding their time sheet,” says Kelley. The creative
brief is also added to a new job ticket with all the work you’ve
done on it.
You can add more detailed specifications like estimated amounts,
estimate hours, and scheduling lead times to tasks in job templates
later. Duration-based job types provide a realistic base for adding
estimated hours, estimated amounts, and scheduling lead times. Together,
they’re the right tools to keep your shop organized.
Mindy
Williams is a senior member of the Clients & Profits Helpdesk
and teaches the New User Training Class.
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