With our final and largest beta being readied for release to our beta testers, today’s 3.0 preview post will be longer than usual as Beta 5 covers a lot of ground.

Beta 5 is all about the client facing items. Proposals, questionnaires, invoices, and contact forms are all added or recreated with this release. Client Access as it was in T2 is no more. With T3, clients access items directly, be it an invoice, a questionnaire, or a proposal. With this, Brands become much more important and far more powerful.

In T3, your public look and feel, your contact information, and even custom domains are all determined by the brand. As part of this, we’ve added more color and image settings, including separate email and printout graphics (as well as container HTML for emails and printouts in the advanced configuration page).

With these options you can easily create highly customized pages without ever touching the advanced configuration page. With the exception of the invoice screenshot that illustrates how customizable the design is, all of the screenshots below use the default options. If you don’t provide a page background, we add a texture to your background color to make the page a bit less plain.

We had to change the proposal editor inside the app (compared to the prior version) to handle the additional features. The advantage of the new layout is we can show more information on the page.

When you hover over the recipient, several icons appear, including one to email an invitation to the recipient and another to open the direct link in another window. Using the Email Proposal button at the top, all of the recipients will be sent their own trackable direct link in an email you compose. Unlike T2, there isn’t a preview mode as that often caused confusion for users, instead we added a button to resets the statistics for the proposal. Clicking on the direct link icon pulls up the proposal either on your brand’s custom domain or its secure tave.com subdomain.

In this example proposal, I’ve provided two quotes, which are displayed along with my introduction (the order is customizable too, another new feature in T3). You’ll notice that the links showing the steps to book the proposal are now textual, allowing your brand to completely customize the look of them, a welcome change from T2 with its hard-coded Client Access navigation design. The orange colors in this Brand come from the default accent color seen in the first screenshot above.

The contact information below the page is all configured on the Brand as well. The screenshot above highlights two completely fictional quotes, one using a package and the other not. There’s an option to show individual package item prices as well as the package discount, but it isn’t enabled in this screenshot. Another new feature here is the ability for your client to explicitly decline a quote, which may provide more insight into what your client’s are looking for. The final item in the second quote, “Wedding Art Prints”, is followed by a description from the new product editor.

In the next screenshot, the client has selected the Gold Collection above and is prompted to select the payment schedule that works best for them. If you only added one payment schedule to the proposal they skip this step and continue on.

The subsequent pages are exactly what you’d expect, so I’ll skip them here, but the configuration for two of the steps are worth highlighting. Contracts have been improved with more explicit “initial here” boxes, many more placeholders, a copy of the sales order, and 1-4 signers (T2 was only 1 or 2, and it could only be set on the contract itself). Here’s a small clip from the Proposal’s contract editor, where you can configure those signatures and preview the quote based on which quote and payment schedule are selected.

The payment system in T3 has been enhanced to add an “Offline Cash Payments” option and you can now enable multiple payment options, so your client can select to mail you a check, pay with PayPal or Google Checkout, or use a credit card with your merchant account.

To illustrate just how customizable the new client facing pages are, here’s an invoice page using Karen’s brand design. When you or your workflow email an invoice to a client, they receive a direct link to this page.

There you have it, the highlights from the final Táve 3.0 beta!

Táve 3.0 Release Plan

With only a few small exceptions, like simplifying the new New Lead Wizard, this beta essentially brings us to feature complete status. That’s quite a milestone when you consider my very first code submission labeled as 3.0 was on November 2nd, 2009 (changelist 3009 and we’re on change 5960 now, though we did release 2.8 and 2.9 between then and now it still illustrates how nearly as many changes have gone into 3.0 as have gone into all prior releases combined).

We’ll be working out the details and scheduling of the public release over the next couple weeks and will post more details about that then.

Carli Morgan is a wedding and portrait photographer (and Táve user) from Fresno, Ca. She loves finding and sharing new stuff with her fellow photographers and she is joining Táve’s blog to do just that.

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.

Another feature straight out of our industry’s only Idea Bank—you can now use your Authorize.net merchant account to accept payments from your clients inside Táve Studio Manager’s Client Access system without having to send your clients to PayPal, Google Checkout, or your PickPic.

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.

IMPROVED: PayPal Website Payments Basic.  When using the PayPal payment gateway, your clients’ payments will automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager so you’ll no longer have to manually enter the payments.

NEW: PickPic payments.  You can now process payments through your PickPic system.  When enabled here, users will be sent to your PickPic cart with the amount already added to their cart.   You’ll then be able to process the payment as you normally would inside PickPic.  These payments will not automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager, so you will have to log the payments manually.

NEW: Google Checkout.  Basic Google Checkout support has been added and can be enabled here.  Once the “integrated cart” feature is completed, payments will automatically appear inside Táve Studio Manager.  Until that time, you’ll need to manually add the payments. 

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.

Visit the Settings section and you’ll see we’ve added a link to the blue Client Access module, called “Track agreements.” Click on the link to create contracts and amendments.

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!