We’ll be removing the option from the website on Thursday (March 4th) when we leave for WPPI 2010.

If you’re attending WPPI, you’ll have a few more days as we’ll be offering the lifetime subscriptions in person on the show floor while supplies last.  The lifetime subscription will not be discounted or prorated at the show and we’ll only have a few to offer, so your best bet is to buy online this week.

If you aren’t attending WPPI, then you have just a few days left to take advantage of the unbeatable lifetime subscription option!

As you should know by now Táve is an official sponsor of this year’s Wedding and Portrait Photographers International convention, lovingly referred to by all as WPPI. The first year I went I was so intimidated that I brought a non-photog friend with me. Not everyone has that luxury so if you are striking out on your own (or even with a buddy) I would like to offer some helpful info and ease your first time fears.

1. Everyone was freaked out their first time: And if they say they weren’t they are dirty liars. The advantage to everyone’s having freaked out is that 90% of the people you run into there are willing to give you helpful advice so you don’t feel so alone. The other 10% are hacks.

2. Wear comfy shoes: Everyone there will be wearing comfy shoes. We all know they are ugly, and we are all over it. Merrell’s, Soft, Born, etc. One year I spent 20 minutes in a vendor’s boot chatting about comfortable foot wear. MGM has some very long hallways.

3. If there is any way you can, stay at the MGM: The long walk back to a hotel is not worth the money you save, so unless you get a killer deal or find a room across the street stay in the hotel at which you are convening.

4. Don’t make commitments the first day of the trade show: You will go broke doing this. Grab the flyer, make a note, take some time to sit in your hotel room mulling over your options. I always make my last trade show day “shopping day.” This is unless you know exactly what you are going there for, or unless it’s Táve. Commit to that right now.

5. Take advantage of Platform Classes: They are included in your registration so you should hit as many as you can. If they weren’t what you were needed or expecting you can always slip out the back and hit another one.

6. Save money on food: Bring snack bars and water bottles to carry with you. There is a drugstore right down the strip if you don’t want to fly with them. I also like to find someone to split meals with. Vegas portions are huge and cheap meals are hard to find there.

7. Leave space in your suitcase for the SWAG you’ll be taking home: Catalogs, buttons, pens, magnets, maybe some prizes or trophies. You just never know.

8. Rockstars are people, too: Don’t act silly or giddy around the famous photographers. You will see them everywhere. They are human beings like you and I. Treat them with respect, smile and wave. Don’t whisper and point. Outside of this industry no one knows who they are. They carry around the same crappy point and shoot cameras that we do and their snapshots look just as bad.

9. Bring business cards, lots of them: You will want to give them to vendors and other photographers you meet.

10. Be yourself: Don’t try to be cooler than you are in real life. Dress up if you want to, but only if you will be comfortable. Everyone loves a show, unless they can tell it’s just an act.

See you there! I will be giving out free hugs to anyone who wants one* If you have some AWESOME WPPI tips to share please do, but only AWESOME tips, please.

*Limit one per customer. Certain restrictions may apply.

I have an Android phone and my life is in it. Including Táve!

It may be called Táve iPhone Access, but it works swimmingly in my Android browser, which is awesome when you are running late for a bridal shower and have to access your client list to postpone your location session because the rain is pouring down. The only regret is that I did not discover until recently the awesomeness of the mobile feature, which lets me access my account quickly from anywhere.

Just visit www.tave.com in your iPhone or Android browser and you should be automatically taken to Táve iPhone Access at tave.com/iPhone.

There are a bazillion reasons why I love Táve, and eventually I’ll share them all with you, but one of my favorite things is that it’s helping me “go green.”  A lot of people will sneer at that, but for me being green isn’t a marketing angle.  It’s how I was raised, and it’s how I live my life.  I’ve got solar panels on my house, I recycle or reuse anything I can, and I try not to waste.  Before Táve I swam in paper.  Notes to myself, phone messages, client records were stacked all over my office.  Táve allows me to store most of that in that big beautiful cloud.  My contracts are signed and stored digitally, I can add any kind of note you can imagine to the clients’ files, I can forward email correspondence directly to my client files so I have records of what I told who and when.  The best part is that I can actually FIND the information when I go looking for it.

Not only have I decreased my paper usage, my ink usage, my trash output and my storage space needs, I am also reducing my own and my client’s carbon footprint, by using the client access system.  A new client used to mean a consultation in my home, then after their decision was made, another trip back to my house to sign paperwork and pay the deposit.  Now I send them quotes online before we meet, so they can see the system, meet with them, and explain how they can use the online system.  They go home, log in, pick their package, sign their contract, make their payment and they don’t have to make another trip.  May not sound like a lot of savings, but if each photographer saves one trip per client per year that’s a lot of gas and emissions we are eliminating.  I now email my clients their statement with a link to the client access and all of their payments can be made online.

We’d love to hear from those of you have used Táve to “go green” and what changes it has made for you on that front.

Visit our booth at the WPPI trade show in Las Vegas, March 8th – 10th, to take the new Táve 3.0 for a spin yourself.

Visit tave.com for more info and to sign-up for our Táve 3.0 newsletter.

As a reminder; since Táve is a web-based system, all accounts are always up-to-date with the latest fixes and releases at no additional cost.   So if you subscribe now, your account will be automatically upgraded once Táve 3.0 is released.

We’ve called it a game changer.

We’ve talked about a few of the new features, such as the advanced new quoting system, the unlimited questionnaires, an amazing new address book, a fresh new look, and streamlining everywhere.

But all that is only the beginning of what’s new in the most powerful studio management system, reimagined.

Lifetime Subscriptions now start at $995

Additional user accounts on the lifetime plan are just $200 each.

If you bought a lifetime subscription and have fewer than 5 employees, we’re going to refund the difference.  Yeah, we’re cool like that.

If you have an active monthly or annual subscription and your term isn’t over yet, we’re now prorating any unused pre-paid time you have and applying it to the lifetime subscription, so it’ll actually be cheaper than $995 for you.  Click here to see the rate for your studio.

Limited Time Only

The lifetime option isn’t going to stick around forever, so be sure to upgrade now.

This is a very different type of workshop from your usual photography workshop. “For the Love” is designed as an All-Inclusive retreat with the benefits of photography workshop. If you are longing for a break from the stress and a place for inspiration, then you should consider coming to “For the Love”.  This workshop will renew your mind, refresh your spirit, rejuvenate creativity, and open your eyes to new ways of seeing things.  You will remember why you signed up for this amazing career.  You will remember that it was all for the love…the love of God…the love of life…the love of creativity…the love of photography.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, please make sure you visit the For the Love website and see if this workshop is right for you!

If you’ve pulled up a job profile in the past couple days you may have noticed something new in the conversation module…

Each job now has a dedicated email address that lets you send emails directly to the profile from any email client by adding the email address as a BCC to an email to your client or simply forwarding an email that your client sent you.

Once you send an email to the BCC address, you should be able to pull it up again directly inside your email application based on the job name.

You can also go to settings and click on the “vCard Job BCC Addresses” link (or the combined export) in the yellow box on the right.  As with all vCard imports, we suggest importing the contacts into their own folder/group to make it easier to manage them later. Once imported, you’ll be able to pull up the BCC address directly from your email client without visiting Táve first.

Other Email Features

The email bcc feature is meant as a convenience and is not what we’ve been referring to as “Email Integration”.  Full email integration (with templates, themes, reply and bounce handling, auto replies, parsing, etc) is still coming in a future release.

This feature was created outside of our normal development process so we could get it out there quickly (since we’ve had many requests for it) without having to wait for the next big release…

Our Next Releases are Game Changers

We’ve mentioned that Questionnaires (our top requested feature) is very close to rolling out, but we’re going to hold back for a bit and merge it into the next release.

Why?

Two main reasons.  First, we don’t want to change Client Access that much in the middle of what is a busy holiday season for many of our studios, and second, our Questionnaires go so far beyond anything available today that we expect a huge surge in new users, and that’s not something we want just yet.

Wait, what?!?!

We’re doing some amazing things right now.  Some of the upgrades are so impressive and so massive, that many won’t even recognize the application when they stop by our booth at WPPI in March, that’s how huge the next few months are going to be for us.  We’re improving the way you work, the way things are organized, and the speed at which you can work.  More emphasis is being put on jobs; from the way client access is set up and managed to the way you create and propose quotes.  We’re making the whole application more intuitive, the workflow faster and far more flexible, and a whole lot easier to start using from the get go.  Not to mention, we’re adding the most requested features from our users like Questionnaires, Email Integration, and more.

So even though it’ll remain fairly quiet on the Táve front for a bit longer, know that it’s because of some truly revolutionary improvements coming up.

So, what happens in Táve when a client cancels the job? Let’s take a look at the following booking below.

In this case, the client has ordered coverage for a birthday party and has paid $200 for a retainer. Now they’ve called and said they’d like to cancel while they still have a $224 balance.

Táve tells you that you can’t delete or cancel a job with a non-zero balance.  Simply deleting the order and recording a refund like the popup suggests isn’t appropriate here because you’ve received a retainer and you want it to still show up as revenue. If they had not paid a retainer, you could in fact follow the advice in the popup and stopped there.

So, what do you do? How do you cancel the job while still still showing the retainer revenue?

First, click “New Quote” in the orange Quotes and Sales Orders Section.

On the Quote page, you’ll select to add a Manual Entry item, and add something like what I’ve created below:

When you’re done, click “Save” at the top of the page to return to the Quote.

In the price section, as you can see below, I’ve created a negative amount opposite of the balance that was still due when they canceled. In this case the client owed an additional $224 towards her event coverage so I entered -224.

Now, save your work and click the “Client Accepted; Book it!” button on the top of the page.

Now your orange financials box will look like the one below. It will show the money that you were paid, and the remaining balance will be zeroed out, which means we can now cancel the job.

Then you can go ahead and mark the job as cancelled.

You can add locations to any job, but let’s consider adding locations to a wedding. In this example, we have a rehearsal dinner, ceremony, and a day-after session at different locations.

First, find the “Edit Profile” button at the top of the Job Overview page.

Once you’re in Edit mode, you can do lots of things! You can change the way the “name” of the wedding is displayed, for example: Maya & Sparky’s wedding. You can edit which brand you’re using, change which type of session it is, and also edit the date. And most importantly, you can edit the Venues, Vendors, and Source. Venues are the locations you’re shooting at for the job you’ve booked. Vendors are the other companies that you’ll be working with – such as Florists, Caterers, Entertainment, Makeup, Hair, etc. The Source is how the client found you, and the sources listed in the drop down menu can be customized in the Settings section.

In this case, we’re adding Venues. If you’ve already added some venues, the ones you’ve added will show up as soon as you start to type their names. If you’re adding one that you’ve never added before, our system will prompt you to add them. You can always go back and fill in the information later by visiting the Vendors section if you’re working quickly with a client on the phone or in front of you in your studio.

Now that we’ve added additional Venues as shown above, it’s time to add them to our sessions as Locations.

In this case, I’ve added a Session for the rehearsal dinner for this wedding. I can see all of the possible locations that I’ve added to the job when I click on the Location drop down menu, and I’m able to select the correct location for this particular session. The other locations I’ve added are for the wedding itself and for the day-after session.

Hope this mini-tutorial helps when setting up multiple-day and multiple-location jobs!

When you use the New Lead box, it will automatically create both the client and job entries (Note: If you’re simply adding previous clients, and do NOT wish to add jobs, just use the “New Client” button inside the Clients section).

In order to add a new lead, all you need to enter is the person’s name and the Job Type (e.g. Wedding, Portrait, etc). From there, you can continue to edit the details of the job or jump right into a quote. Other information such as the lead’s contact information, event location, additional subjects, and more, can be collected later inside the Job profile as you chat with your prospective client.

Aside from being a quick way to get started with a client, it’s also quite useful.  Once you enter a date, a mini-agenda for the date will appear in the right half of the New Lead box, quickly telling you if you already have something on your schedule for the date, so you never run the risk of double-booking yourself.

It’s a good idea to select the Source as soon as possible, as it can be easy for your client to forget, but is huge for you, especially with our reports that break down your revenue and leads by source.

Product-based automation

The first step in setting up your workflow is to create a product. Let’s assume that you’re creating an album. For your album, you have 4 steps – to design the album, send the client a proof, order from your vendor, and deliver the album once it arrives. This is easily set up in the brown box labeled “work to create when ordered.”

You can set which job phase you want the tasks to start in – Booked, Processing, Presentation, Fulfillment, or Completed. In this case, I chose for some tasks to start in the Presentation phase and one in the Fulfillment phase. When editing each task, you can also set more precise due dates if you prefer. It just depends on what you are comfortable with in your workflow!

Quickly creating similar products

When creating similar products that have the same tasks, I’ve found a really great tip. On the Products page, we include a “duplicate” button for each product. It’s the one that you see below that looks like two boxes, a blue one on top of a white one.

If you click this button, it will duplicate the product and all information inside of it, including your workflow tasks. This will save you some time for items that are similar, as you’ll simply need to click on the copied item and edit it to be a separate product.

Not only is this helpful for your workflow tasks, but if the items are very similar but just differ in price, then adding all of the options or add-ons is one less thing you’ll have to do to set up the next item on your product sheet!

Job-specific tasks with Deliverables

The next time a client books a quote with this product, a Deliverable will be created for the product inside the Job’s task module.  As you progress through the job phases, the tasks will automatically appear.

As clients request special work for the album, just click on the New Task link to create a new task for the deliverable to keep it all organized.

I hope this little tutorial helps as you set up your products and workflow a bit faster!

Custom Domain Names for Contact Forms and Client Access

We don’t think your client interaction is a time for your studio management software to be advertising itself.  That’s why our contact forms are hosted on studiocontact.net and our client access system is hosted on studioreservations.net instead of tave.com.

We’re taking that even further now as you can set up any domain you want for each of your pages.

Setting up your custom domain

By default, our system suggests contact.yourstudio.com for contact forms and book.yourstudio.com for Client Access.  You’re free to use any domain you want, it doesn’t even need to be a subdomain.  All you need to do is tell us about it and point the domain to us.

To tell us what domain you’re going to use, visit Settings and click on the link to edit your Pages.  From there, go on to edit your contact forms or client access pages.  Both editors now include the “Custom domain” field and have some info about how it works.  Enter in your domain (without http://) and save your changes.

To point your domain to us, you’ll have to access your domain name manager or DNS system.  Every registrar and setup is different, so if you’re not familiar with this process you’ll want to ask your system administrator or webmaster.  You’ll want to create a CNAME record pointing to clientpages.tave.com.   Once you save the DNS and your DNS cache updates, your custom domain should be live!

To check out a real world example, visit Karen’s actual contact form at contact.karenlisa.com.

Special considerations for Client Access

In order to provide a secure environment, Client Access pages are encrypted.  This means Client Access custom domains must forward to your standard URL unless you’ve purchased Custom SSL service from us.  The way the internet works requires every secure website to have its own reserved IP address and a commercial certificates signed by a known authority (like Network Solutions or VeriSign).  Our $99/year Custom SSL service uses one of our reserved IP addresses and takes care of purchasing, installing, and renewing your certificate each year.

Cost of Goods Sold

Tracking and managing your expenses is a huge part of running a successful business, so we’re adding a suite of tools to help you do just that, becoming the first online studio management system to include “Cost of goods sold” and ad-hoc expense tracking so you can get a clear idea of how your business is performing.

We’re known for our small frequent feature updates, constantly improving Táve, rather than publishing large major versions here and there like most applications.  The great part of this “agile” philosophy is that we get to release the most important features early, and fill in the blanks later, which is exactly what we’re doing with our series of financial updates.

Since configuring your products can be a time consuming process, and one we’d rather you not have to revisit later, we’ve added a “Cost of Goods” field to the Product editor so you can get a head start as we add these exciting new tools.  Already you’ll get a sense of things as we show you the base profit for any product configuration, and soon we’ll use this to help you build more profitable packages and quotes.

Just around the corner in this financial update series is a streamlined quote builder where you’ll be able to visualize your costs and profits as you configure each item in the quote, live without leaving the quote editor.   In the tough economic environment we face today, knowing exactly how you can cut down a quote to meet your client’s needs is an extremely valuable asset.

Email updates

We’ve changed the name of Themes to Brands and added a few more settings.    Accordingly, we’ve added a brand dropdown to the Client and Job profile editors.

If you visit the brand editor, you’ll find we added some email settings.   You can now set your own Reply-To address and an email address to BCC any emails our system sends on your behalf.   The advanced design section also has a new email template to use for the brand.    If you have Authorize.net or PayPal as your payment method, you can have us use these settings to send an email confirmation by editing your Client Access page settings and checking the box for this (it’s currently the last option at the bottom of the editor).

Our new name.  We’re now simply Táve and no longer Táve Studio Manager.  Sure, the old name was descriptive, but there’s no other Táve and with such a unique name, who needs to be descriptive?

New Client And Job profiles and editors. We completely reworked the way you view and edit clients and jobs.  Instead of going right into big bulky editors, you view a concise profile with just the relevant facts.  This also let us add useful links, for instance you can click on an address to view it in Google Maps, or click on the directions link to get directions from your studio’s address (configurable in Settings), telephone numbers will open Skype or any other voice chat software you have installed and set to use the links, and you can just click the “export vCard” link in the title bar to quickly add the contact to Address Book or Outlook and later sync to your phone if desired.

You might notice we also added a filter control to the Clients home page.  The new Job editor also includes some miniature subject editors and a new control for attaching vendors and venues without leaving the page, even creating new ones!  You’ll be seeing more of this cool new control in the future.   If you’ve attached a vendor or venue to a job, they’ll show up in the event editor’s list of possible attendees.  Speaking of vendors, you can now upload attachments to vendors.

Custom Fields. You’ve long asked to be able to create your own fields for the various profiles, and now you can.   This is extremely flexible and you can add all sorts of fields to the client, subject, job, vendor, and vendor rep profiles.  Even better, you can include these fields on your contact forms, which now also supports drag-and-drop reordering, and include the client editable fields inside Client Access, as we’ve added client profile editing in Client Access.  If your client access settings previously had the option enabled to allow clients to edit their contact information (an option that was marked as coming soon previously), the new profile editor will show up automatically.  Speaking of Client Access…

Client Access Preview. Users frequently wanted to see what their clients were seeing on their client access pages, doing so required setting a password for them and remembering to reset everything afterwards.  That was particularly ineffective if you wanted to see something like the payment page.  No more!  Head on over to the client profile page and you’ll see that the orange Client Access box now has a preview link.   Click the link and you’ll get a new window with their session.  The bar at the top includes a menu of the key pages inside their Client Access portal, so you can use it to jump directly from page to page without affecting the client at all.

Job Printouts. The new job profile viewer includes a Print button.  Click it and you can fine-tune the information you want included depending on if you’re printing it for your physical record keeping or to keep with you on the day of the job.  This printout is meant to contain all the critical aspects of the job, including attendee contact info, event locations, call notes, internal notes, financial transactions, and custom fields.    That’s just the start, as we plan to offer other types of printouts in the future, as requested in Idea Bank.

Calendar improvements include an improved Heads Up Display system which allow the HUDs to stay open when your mouse is over them, so you can now click on events or jobs and even create new events or unavailable time directly from the HUDs. You’ll notice that you can also click on a day in the availability calendar to go directly to creating a new event. We also add tentative events to the availability calendar, which you can hide or show by clicking the link in above the calendar.

Helpful but smaller improvements include your browser’s history now showing the page title, instead of the application name for every page so you can easily go back without having to guess which page was where. We’ve added a passive anti-spam system to the contact forms to help limit lead spam, if you host your own contact form please see the release notes.

Release Notes

We updated much more than the major changes above, so here’s the full list:

• New name and website addresses.
• New public website.  Note that the login link is the right-most item in the navigation and takes you to a dedicated login page now.  We’re going to be adding testimonials to the homepage soon, so if you’d like to rave about Táve, send us a testimonial, logo, and photo.
• Changed the appearance of the main search field to make it more apparent and improving compatibility with Safari.
• Added additional details about the items needing attention on the home page.
• Added tentative events to the availability calendar with a hide/show toggle in the legend.
• Made days in the availability calendar clickable to create new events.
• Added links to the events and jobs as well as to quickly create a new event or unavailable time to the availability calendar HUDs.
• Added a filter menu to the Clients home.
• Added an icon to show the user has CA (Client Access) enabled.
• Added a client profile viewer.
• Added a vCard export link.
• Added a “Mark as lost” button to match the existing one for jobs, but applying to the client, cascading to all jobs.
• Previewing the amount a client can pay in CA and explaining why it may not be the full balance.
• Linking addresses to Google Maps and adding a directions link too.
• Linking telephone numbers to phone applications like Skype with the tel:// scheme.
• Added link to the previous and next events for the client.
• Showing the first and most recent job source for a client.
• Showing the last time the client accessed their CA profile, if ever, and how many pages they loaded.
• Added a “Allow profile editing?” per-client override.
• Added a preview link which opens a new window with the CA preview for the client.
• CA preview let’s you jump between pages inside the client’s portal.
• Notes are created inline more intuitively.
• Cleaned up the client editor.
• Allowing client profile editing in Client Access if enabled in the page’s settings.
• Added job profile viewer.
• All changes on both profile viewers happen live.
• Emails and phone numbers in the client/subject HUDs are now clickable.
• Added a Print button, which allows you to configure a new all-in-one job printout, optionally showing financial details, internal notes, conversation logs, and call/event descriptions.
• Created a new “Token editor”, which lets you search, add, and create new items live.
• Created a new “live editor”, used by the token editor to quickly edit items without leaving the current page.  Expect much more use of this in the future.
• Using the token editor to create and/or attach vendors and venues to the job.
• Added quick entry forms for subjects so you no longer have to leave the editor to add subjects.
• Including any vendors attached to the job as possible attendees in the event editor.
• Updated the Product Option editor to behave similar to other editors in the application.
• Corrected currency symbol use in the Products section.
• Improved the logic used to hide/show tasks based on the status of the deliverable or job.
• Added attachments to the vendor editor.
• Added vCard export links to vendors and vendor reps.
• Fixed issue with the Helpdesk link reloading the application if your last login was a while ago.
• Added an address book vCard export to Settings (not all third-party applications support multi-contact vCards).  Use this link to export all your contacts to Address Book on Mac and sync to your phone to have your client’s info appear when they call you.
• Added a credit card authorization form in case you’d rather not use PayPal to pay for Táve.
• Added Custom Profile Fields, which can be configured as various different types of fields (date, dropdown, text field, text box), apply to different items inside Táve (clients, subjects, jobs, vendors, vendor reps), and customize the appearance and permissions for Client Access.
• Added drag and drop reordering to the Custom Profile Fields list so you can change tho order they appear throughout the application.
• Added the new Custom Profile Fields to the contact form editor when they apply to clients, defaulting them to hidden.
• Added drag and drop reordering of all contact form fields.
• Removing Táve branding and links from the new lead email and adding a reply-to so you can more easily reply directly to new leads.
• Added a passive anti-spam system to contact forms (if you host your contact form on your own site and post to us, let us know so we can disable this for your studio, as your users will receive a session error and will be told to try again).
• Added a few dynamic fields to contracts in case you wish to have items like the client’s name or job date in your contract text.
• Improved the birthday field behavior and international date handling.
• Preventing double form submit.
• Improved the display of errors in a form on submit.
• Increased overall database performance.
• Added support for Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 8 native-mode support (if you use IE7, we strongly encourage you to apply the IE8 windows update).

You’ll find the episode in iTunes or on the TWiP episode notes page, which includes a summarized transcript.  Now you’ll all have first hand knowledge of just how big of a nerd I am, if I sound a bit too upbeat, it’s probably due to all the diet Mt Dew I’ve been downing in the lead up to this weekend’s long anticipated software update.

I ended up talking a lot about all of you and completely forgot to mention how much more affordable we are than the competition and all the other cool things we do!  So please, help us spread the word!

A quick correction: I briefly mentioned the history of Táve and said that the name Táve is derived from a foreign phrase.  To be precise, Táve is a completely original mark and term both in the spelling (with the accent) and pronunciation (tah-vay).

This will be our first maintenance downtime of 2009 and should last under an hour, starting at midnight (Eastern) on Thursday, June 18th.

Update: Maintenance completed and things should be even faster than before.  Next up is the big software release over the weekend, which we can’t wait to share!

Digital Wedding Forum members, you can use your members-only DWF Credit Card Processing solution, as it includes an Authorize.net account. 

To set it up, just head on over to Settings and look for the payments link.  Once you enable Authorize.net, it’ll ask for a few pieces of information from your Authorize.net account.  As always with new Client Access features, we suggest creating a test client and booking it online (perhaps with a $1 payment) to get a feel for what your clients will see.  You’ll be able to preview client access behavior in our next release.

Recently Released

While most of our work is going into our big mid-April release, with some huge new features and great usability improvements, we’ve managed to release a few other little bits since last week’s post:

• Email Reminders. Just set a date and time and we’ll send you a reminder by email.
• Get rid of your sample data. There’s always the “Delete Sample Data” link on the left, but if you’re ready to get started and you want a clean slate, including all the stuff you created during the trial, you can use the “purge account” tool in Settings, with the new “Re-create sample data” option unchecked. This tool is like formatting your hard drive; once you do it the data will never come back even if you’re browsing deleted data.
• Extend your trial. If you have less than a week left on your trial, or it’s already expired, and you’re not quite sold yet, just head on over to the “purge account” tool. Whenever it runs, we now make sure you have at least a week left on your trial, extending it if needed. And then why don’t you give us a call at 800-560-TAVE or Skype-to-Skype user TaveStudio and we’ll walk you through the system and answer any questions you have.
• An updated look! Okay, it’s not that big of deal, but we think that it makes the application a lot less drab and easier to follow.

You joined the revolution and told us you wanted integration with Intuit QuickBooks® in the photography industry’s only Idea Bank:

So without further ado, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of QuickBooks® export.   Just head on over to the Settings section and you’ll find it in the data management section with our other export tools.

We believe it’s your data and we’re just providing better ways to make use of it, so you can look forward to even more import and export options in the future.

The blog’s design is inspired by our upcoming website refresh and merges our old blog with the “New Features” blog that was previously only available inside Táve Studio Manager.  Users will notice that the old “New Features” tab inside the application has been replaced with a “News & Updates” tab that will highlight any time this blog is updated.   If you still want to be the first to know about new features, visit the Idea Bank and edit your email preferences.

We’re so excited about the new website’s testimonials page that we just couldn’t wait for it to be released, so we made it part of the blog! Check out what our users are saying about us!

Recent Updates

We’re keeping busy with some pretty substantial improvements to the application but haven’t let that stop us from publishing a number of useful updates in the past week or so:

• Drag & Drop in Quotes.  You’ve been asking for it for a while now and we delivered.   You can now rearrange the items in a quote  by simply dragging and dropping the items.  Just look for the grips on the left of the quote, click when your cursor changes, and move it around.
• Availability Calendar.  We’ve improved the usefulness of the availability calendar by having separate colors for meetings and sessions.
• Getting more from Idea Bank.  You can now change your email preferences inside the Idea Bank to hear about any new idea that get suggested or to hear when any idea is commented on or released.  By default you’ll hear about ideas you’ve voted in favor of.   We also added “Coming Soon” and “Started” tags so you can get even more insight into what we’re doing.  Just visit Idea Bank and click on the “Coming Soon” list to see them all.  Note that we only tag ideas submitted by users (so what are you waiting for?  If there’s something you want, let us know!), our actual project plan may contain other features not listed in Idea Bank.
• Google Analytics integration.  We’ve always supported Google Analytics but you had to add the tracking code to your themes manually before we’d take advantage of it.   The theme editor now has a field to enter in the website ID to use and does the rest for you without requiring you to use the advanced HTML editor.
• Fixes and little things.  The time dropdown now defaults to the middle of the list at noon, so you don’t have to scroll through the wee early hours to set a time in the evening.  IE users can now use Client Access systems that have been embedded with an IFRAME.  The client’s email address was added to the quick search results.  Transaction ID and Check Number have been added to the payment editor.

All that and we’re still making steady progress on a complete rework of the client editor, implementing custom fields, adding Authorize.net integration, and working on the other items tagged as “Started” in the Idea Bank.   It’s hard to stop when you love what you’re doing!

While several users have voted for Google Checkout support in Idea Bank, there has been some debate in our users-only forum about using Google Checkout because of potential issues with their seller policies.  Also, if you wish to only accept the retainer through Client Access, you’ll find a new setting for that in the page editor.