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.

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.

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.

Once you publish a contract for use, you can attach it to a job, mark it as signed, and print it from the job editor’s Financials module.

When the full Client Access system is released in the coming days, your clients will be able to electronically sign their contract online!