Using Activities
Activities may be used in many ways, so let’s take a minute to describe their use in some common situations and also the rules Simple Accounting uses for displaying them on the Calendar and in the Contacts Browse. Once you understand these examples, you can best decide which methods to use to create activities to best fit the way you work.
ACTIVITY MENU TASK
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All Screens When you use the Dialer from the Contacts browse, you have the option of timing the call. When the call is ended, press the [Stopwatch] button, to stop the timer and, optionally, create an activity for that call. The Activity type is automatically set to ‘PHONE’ for Phone Call, and the CONTACT DATE is set to todays date. The CONTACT TIME as the start time of the call and the AMOUNT field is set as a fraction of hours according to when you stopped the timer.
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Appointments: |
Any Browse Box To create a note to follow up with a contact on a given date, simply create an activity and enter the date to follow up in the FOLLOW UP DATE field. The activity will then appear in the Daily Notes & Activities window under the { Follow Up} tab. If you enter a time in the FOLLOW UP TIME field, the activity will appear in the follow up calendar at that time. Otherwise, it will appear in the UNSCHEDULED ACTIVITIES window of the Daily Calendar for the follow up date.
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Calendar When you view an activity in the calendar, you’re looking at an activity with a follow up date on the day in the calendar that you are viewing. Pressing the [Clone] button creates a new activity using the follow up date ofthe viewed record as the contact date of the new record. You can then add a next follow up date to the new activity. This is very useful for sales where several calls are needed to conclude a deal; each call leading to the next. Use this feature to always know when to make the next call.
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Faxes: |
FILES|Contacts When you create an activity assigned to a contact, you can elect to automatically fax the contents of the Note Taker to the contact by pressing the [Fax] button.
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Letters: |
Mailing Lists When you print a mail-merged letter to a contact, you can elect to automatically create a record of that letter as an activity. The content of the letter is saved in the NoteTaker field for the activity. The contact date and time is saved as the date you printed the letter, and the activity type is entered as ‘L’ for Letter. You can then enter a follow up date to make sure you get the sale! This applies in both One Letter and Batch Print modes Creating an activityfor a large number of records with Batch Print can take up a lot of disk space; at minimum 600 bytes per record. Be careful using this feature if you are short on disk space.
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