Overview of the Táve Studio Manager workflow

Táve Studio Manager is rather versatile, allowing you to use it in whatever way you find best for your needs.  This tutorial is meant to highlight the workflow that we design around.

We’ll review some of the basic terminology used in Táve Studio Manager and then proceed through the process of entering a lead, adding events and quotes, booking the job, and then working through completion of the job.

Táve Studio Manager is rather
versatile, allowing you to use it in whatever way you find best for
your needs.

This tutorial is meant to highlight the workflow that we
design around.

Before we begin

Let’s review our terminology and core features of Táve Studio Manager:

• Contacts: Contacts are essentially address book entries.  You’ll
  never see them referred to as contacts in the application, but instead
  by the different types of contacts you can have.  Each type of contact
  has a different role to play in your business, they are:
  • Clients: The most important contact you have, these contacts have jobs associated with them and therefore account balances, revenue, and other information.  When we refer to a “lead”, we’re saying the client has an unbooked job (the real “lead”).
  • Subjects: You can add as many subjects to a job as you wish.  These subjects can be actual “subjects” or just important people that you’d like to keep track of for future reference.
  • Vendor Contacts: You can keep a list of contacts for a vendor.  The owner of a florist or the principal of a school are perfect examples of vendor contacts.
  • Employees: The final contact type is an employee of your studio, each employee has their own login and can be managed by administrators in the Settings section.
• Jobs: Like jobs themselves, the Job Editor, is the centerpiece of the Táve Studio Manager workflow.  A job holds its own set of photo sessions, meetings, calls, conversation logs, tasks, quotes, orders, credits, payments, and other details.   A job encompasses anything you’re doing to acquire or complete a job.
• Events: Events are best thought of as calendar entries, something that will take time on your calendar and can have a location or any number of attendees.  A job doesn’t take up any time on the calendar, but the events (such as a photo session or meeting) for that job do.  Like contacts, there are a few different types of events:
  • Photography Session / Coverage: A session is any calendar event where there’s a camera involved.  For a portrait session there will likely only be one photo session attached to a job, but if you need to re-shoot, go ahead and add that session to the same job so you can track just how much time the completed job takes.  For a wedding or other event, you may well create a few sessions such as getting ready, ceremony, reception sessions or even sessions on different days such as an engagement shoot or bridal session.
  • Meetings & Calls: These events are self explanitory.  Schedule them in advance or create them as they happen with the Job Editor’s “Start Unscheduled Conversation” link.
  • Unavailable Time: Useful to block out time on your calendar before you know the exact schedule, blacking out workshop or tradeshow dates, or simply to prevent over-booking near a big job.
• Quotes: You can add products, discounts, taxes, payment terms, and notes to a quote.  When a client accepts a quote, the job becomes “Booked”.  Any default work or tasks added to a product will now appear in the job, deliverables are created, and you become free to change the job phase at will.
• Sales Order: The booked quote becomes a sales order once accepted.  You can no longer modify it, though you can copy it to a new quote and void the order if need be.
• Invoice: Once a quote is booked, the job then has an outstanding balance for which you can accept payments or redeem credit toward.  An invoice is a request or notice for the client to pay a portion of the outstanding balance.  Once “Client Access” is enabled, you’ll be able to ask your clients to pay these invoices online.
• Assets: Items you upload to a client or job, such as price lists, contracts, or mugshots.
• Vendors & Venues: Vendors are companies or people you work with, while venues (a type of vendor) represents a place you work.   You can quickly add them to any job to keep track of who you’ve worked with and where, useful for future outreach to the vendor.
• Products: These are the items you sell.  Another versatile part of Táve Studio Manager, you can approach products in many ways.  You can start by simply creating “manual entry line items” on your quotes and selecting to turn them into products, quickly add some high-level one-liner products, and then expand them with configurable options, default work and tasks, and various pricing as you go.    Or, to make the most of it, take the time to fully configure your products from the start.  It’s up to you, both approaches work.

If you just read through this list of important terminology above, you already have a strong grasp of the system.  But lets walk through the process of working a lead from start to finish.

The Workflow

A lead is a prospective job, created either by the client themselves by completing your integrated contact form or by completing the yellow Quick Lead form on your Táve Studio Manager homepage.   If the lead was created with your contact form, a “New Lead” module will appear on your homepage until you view the job.