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.

We just released a seemingly minor change that actually provides quite a lot behind it.

Payments are now applied directly to sales orders, instead of to a job.  This means you now know the balance outstanding on each invoice.

We’ll be taking further advantage of this soon in order to show balances that will be due soon or past due, create invoices, and several additions in our next reporting update.

Of course, many times you’ll have multiple sales orders but only accept one combined payment.   By selecting “split payment…” in the dropdown menu where you select which invoice to apply the payment to, you can split the payment or credit redemption between any of your sales orders.   

In the above example, we accepted a check for 1,750.00, and split it between two open sales orders.  If you enter in the amount of the check before selecting “split payment…”, Táve Studio Manager will automatically split the payment up for you.