From enquiry to booked job

Catching the enquiry

You get a public enquiry form you can link to or embed on your website. Submissions arrive under Pipeline → Leads and notify you, rather than sitting in an inbox competing with everything else.

Choose which questions it asks, add your own, and pick a look — Classic, Sharp, Minimal or Soft — plus the button colour and one or two columns. The shoot-type question lists your own session types. Copy the embed code into your website and the form takes the width it's given, stacking neatly in a narrow sidebar. You can also send people somewhere of your own once they've submitted, such as a thank-you page on your site.

The pipeline

Converting an enquiry creates a job — the record that carries one piece of work from first contact to delivery. Jobs sit on a board in stages — Lead, Inquiry, Booked, Editing, Delivered — and you drag them across, or use Move to on the card, as things progress. The board's value is that anything stalled is visible: a column that's stopped moving is a column you need to work on.

• Each column runs from the closest shoot date to the furthest, so what's coming up next is at the top. Jobs with no date yet sit at the bottom.
• A card shows the shoot's date, start and finish time, and location, so you can read the week off the board.
• On a phone the board shows one column at a time — tap a stage along the top to switch, and use Move to on a card to move it on.

What hangs off a job

• The booking and its date, feeding your calendar
• Quotes and invoices
• Contracts and questionnaires
• The delivered gallery

Because they're linked, the client's profile shows the whole history in one place — every shoot, every document, every dollar — instead of you reconstructing it from email.

Notes

Clients and shoots each have Notes — a running list of dated entries rather than one box you keep overwriting. Use a client's notes for what's true about them (“prefers text”, “dog called Moose”) and a shoot's notes for that job (“ceremony moved to 3pm”). Deleting a note deletes it for good; there's no trash for notes.

Bookings and your calendar

Bookings show on the calendar, and you can publish a private iCal feed so they appear in whatever calendar app you already live in. Set your working hours and session types under Availability and Session types so clients can only book times that actually suit you.

When the date falls through

If a client needs to postpone and doesn't have a new date yet, open the shoot and choose Date not confirmed yet? under Shoot date. The date comes off, the calendar entry goes to the trash (and off Google Calendar), and any reminder still waiting to go out is called off — but the shoot stays booked, with its invoices and payments untouched, so a deposit you've taken stays recorded against it. The shoot reads Date to be confirmed on the board until you pick a new date, which puts it back on the calendar.

When the job is off

Archive a job that didn't go ahead and it leaves the board but stays on the client's history. Deleting it is for mistakes and duplicates: the confirmation lists exactly what goes with it, and one Undo brings everything back. See getting back something you deleted.