Insights for Running Better Business

It’s a situation that happens way to often businesses now a day. Whether it’s a graphic design draft, a strategy meeting, or you’ve mapped out the specifications for a project. You and your client have finally agreed on what they need, hands have been shook, heads have been nodded and “Sound great!” has been said over the phone.

Then it happens, an email comes in, the subject line that reads, “I was just thinking...” or, “You know what’d be great?”, and that’s when the headaches start. They want to add something, or they ask why isn’t something included?

A question we're often asked is what's the difference between an Internal User and an External User. The simple answer is an Internal User is a member of your company. An External User is a client or customer you want to give access to a special "Intranet" portion of BlueCamroo.

The Opportunities tab allows you to track sales opportunities and create a series of tasks needed to close the deal. For some, it might be a little difficult to understand why you'd use the Opportunity feature instead of just creating some tasks associated with the account.

Your heaviest use of documents will probably involve projects. A project has two ways of uploading and sharing documents. The Attachments button works the same as above. The Documents button, however, gives you powerful source control features. Add a document in a fashion similar to adding an attachment. After uploading the document, BlueCamroo presents you with several new options. You'll note there's no Browse button. You cannot upload a file over top until you click the Checkout button. Clicking that will bring up a standard download box. After downloading, the downloader is presented with two primary options. Click Check In upload the updated file. It's good to leave comments, helping other users understand what changes were made. This dialog also has a Send Notification box, check that to alert users you've modified the file.

BlueCamroo has a Group rights system that allows you to add internal users to your own customized groups. For example, you can create a Sales group and a Support group. Internal users added to these groups then can receive similar access rights. It's a quick and logical way of managing rights. Instead of fiddling with rights for each user, you set them for one group and then add users to the group. We've recently extended the Group concept. The Group has added flexibility, allowing you to assign task while retaining accountability. The gobbly gook out of the way, what does that really mean?

A lot of us plan each work day. We will spend X hours working on Project A. Y hours working on Project B. Z hours on support tasks. How does that plan typically go? Accurate? Or is the hour you devoted to Project A interrupted by Brush Fire Q and Curbside Consultation M? Project plans in some offices are best thought of the "suggested serving" photos that accompany products found in the frozen foods section. They are useful wire frames but the real world can confound the modeling. How do you account for your real day with any accuracy? Or do you just lump it all under your original project plan and mentally write off these intervening tasks as the cost of doing business?

Bidding on a project can be a major expenditure of time and money. The conventional wisdom is you have to spend money to make money, but nothing prevents you from being as efficient in the bidding process as possible. BlueCamroo's Opportunity feature helps you organize bids, manage tasks, track deadlines, collate relevant documents, and automatically generate an accurate sales quote.

Most businesses not only work on a project basis, but most projects are rarely one-off productions. Most projects employ the same stages, tasks, and timelines. Instead of having to recreate a complicated project from scratch, BlueCamroo allows you to create a template. In the template you define stages, tasks, time lines, as well as other aspects of the project like team members and products. When it's time to start a project, you just create the project from a template and BlueCamroo automatically creates the bulk of the project.