Tracking Prospective Clients

Last night's update provided an additional client list to keep track of your "Prospective Clients". You can add/edit/delete prospective clients from your list and easily convert them to regular clients. Keeping your clients and prospective clients separate will keep your client list from getting disorganized.

Separating prospective clients from clients will also come in handy when preparing marketing campaigns in the upcoming CRM. That way you can easily target your marketing specifically to potential customers.

StudioCloud, It's Just That Easy!

Print Your Schedule

Last night's update brought another commonly requested feature, printing your schedule. If you go to the Calendar section of the Basic/Professional Suite and go to the tab labeled Agenda there is a button near the bottom that is labeled "Print Agenda". When you click this button it will show you a popup where you can select a start and end date for your printout. By default the start date is the current date and the end date is 30 days from the start date. Once you have selected your start date and end date click the "Print Agenda" button and a PDF of your Agenda will be created an opened up.

StudioCloud, It's Just That Easy!

Export Your Calendar to iCal and Outlook

The latest addition to the Basic/Professional Suite is the ability to export your calendar to Outlook and iCal. To do this go to the Calendar section of the Basic/Professional Suite and select the tab labeled Calendar Settings. On the right side of this section there is a heading labeled "Calendar Export Settings". Click the checkbox underneath this heading that is labeled "Export my studio's calendar to Outlook and iCal" When you do this you will get a popup that tells you that your settings have been saved. After that you can download your calendar using the web address in the box below the checkbox.

To view your calendar in Outlook 2007 follow the proceeding steps:

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. Click on the menu option labeled "Tools"
3. Select the option labeled "Account Settings"
4. In the "Account Settings" window select the tab named "Internet Calendars"
5. On the "Internet Calendars" tab click the button labeled "New"
6. Copy and paste the web address from the Basic/Professional Suite into the "New Internet Calendar Subscription" popup
7. Change the "Folder Name" from ICSFeed to "StudioCloud" or something similar
8. Click the button labeled "OK"
9. Click the "Close" button on the "Account Settings" popup window
10. Go to the Calendars section of Outlook
11. You should see your calendar either under "My Calendars" or "Other Calendars"

To view your Calendar in iCal follow the proceeding steps:

1. Open iCal
2. At the top of the screen select Calendar and Subscribe
   
3. Copy and paste the webaddress from the Basic/Professional Suite into the window that pops up and click the button labeled Subscribe
4. Change the name of the calendar from Untitled to something like StudioCloud or StudioCloud Calendar
5. Change any of the other settings that you desire
6. Click the OK button
7. You should now see your calendar under "Subscriptions"
   

We will post video tutorials on how to export your StudioCloud calendar to Outlook and iCal soon. When we do we will announce it here on the blog.

StudioCloud, It's Just That Easy!

Embedded Workflow

Last nights update made some important changes to the Basic and Professional Suites. One of those changes is the inclusion of workflow functionality. As you all know, by default a workflow order is made whenever you create an invoice. This allows you to keep track of where the order is in your studio's processes. Until now you have had to track the workflow processes in the Workflow Manager. However, with last nights update you can now update and view the status of your orders in the Basic and Professional Suite.

To view/update the workflow order in the Basic/Professional Suite you go to the Point of Sale section of the Basic/Professional Suite and click on the Workflow Manager icon. A sample of the Workflow Manager is provided below.

Update to the Address Book

After our recent change to the address book that removed notes from the clients section we received feedback from some of you that you really needed the notes field for sorting and finding specific information. So the developers put their heads together and came up with a solution that they believe will work for everyone.

The first change is that the notes field has been added back into the clients section of the Basic/Professional Suite. However, rather than showing you the entire notes section, which was very long for some studios and made the clients table unusable, it only shows you approximately the first 50 characters. This allows you to see some of the information, sort the table by the notes field, and view the full notes field by clicking on the magnifying glass.

The second addition is an update to the search functionality in the clients section. Previously when you typed anything into the search field below the table it would search a variety of the client information. But it wasn't clear what part of a clients information was matching your search. As a result, the developers updated the search section. They have added in a drop-down box that has various options in it including All Fields, First Name, Last Name, Business, Email, and Notes. When you select one of these options you are specifically searching through that field of your clients information. We hope this will help all of you get more out of the clients section and to be able to use it more efficiently.

StudioCloud, It's Just That Easy!

Customize Your Suite

Many of you know that you can customize many aspects of StudioCloud. Well the developers just released an update to StudioCloud that allows you to customize your Basic/Professional Suite even more. You can now upload your own image to use as the background of your Suite. If you login to the Basic/Professional Suite and go to the Settings section. There is a new button on the tab labeled "Select Background". The button is labeled "Select Custom Background" and it will have you select an image to upload and use.

There are some restrictions on what you can upload. The image must be smaller than 1 MB (1024 KB). In addition, the size of the image that you can upload is also dependant on your internet speed.

StudioCloud, It's Just That Easy!

Small Changes to Address Book

It has been brought to our attention that many StudioCloud users are storing large amounts of information in the notes section for their clients. This can result in each row in the client list taking up a lot of space and making it difficult to find the client they are looking for. As a result, the developers have moved the notes section into a popup. Now in the third column from the left there is a little magnifying class. When you click that magnifying glass it will popup the notes for that customer.