We’ve fixed:

• Daylite Mail Integration (DMI) compatibility for Mac OS X 10.7.3 and Mail 5.2
• an issue where the Live List print layout was not generating any data
• an issue in the Activity Set preference pane where the “Owner” drop down was not being remembered/saved

You can get the latest versions of Daylite and Daylite Server from our Daylite downloads page.

*Note: Be sure to follow these steps when upgrading Daylite and Daylite Server.

STOP THE MADNESS!

Spending your time copying and pasting into Excel or using a calculator to total up your earnings for the year is definitely not how you want to be kicking off the new year. Or worse, how you want to be spending late nights in April, or just prior to your tax deadline, trying desperately to figure out how much you invoiced and expensed over the past year.

InDesign is an awesome product for making print layouts. It’s time to make a resolution to invoicing differently in 2012. Consider any option that meets the following three criteria:

1) Keep running totals of all your invoices, categorized per client, automatically.

In Billings, in the source list select Reports and then choose “Invoice Details by Client”. Then choose the date range you’re looking for and click run. You’ll get a report that shows how much you’ve made from each client along with details from each invoice.

2) Give you totals of all sales taxes you’ve collected for much easier tax remittance.

If you collect sales tax, you need to be able to easily total up how much you’ve collected either on an annual or quarterly basis. Even if you’ve tracked the grand totals in a spreadsheet, having to go through each invoice manually to pull out this data, or calculate it based on your totals can be extremely annoying. Again in the Reports section of Billings, choose “Taxes Collected”, set the timeframe to pull data from, and click run. Both you and the taxman are happy.

3) Has some sort of expense tracking capability, preferably one that helps you keep track of mileage and categorize your expenses.

Even if you don’t bill back expenses to your clients, it makes tax time quite a bit easier when you’ve done the inputting all year long instead of spending days on end searching through shoeboxes of faded and wrinkled receipts. In Billings, categories are defined in Preferences which is found in the Billings menu. Select the labels pane and then choose the categories tab. I add in each expense category I use with the prefix “Expense:” so they’re all grouped together when I’m selecting it in the slip entry window. To see how much you’ve spent, look under Reports > TimeSlip > Expenses By Category or Expense Tax Report. Take these to your accountant, or tax software if you’re doing your own and enjoy writing off all your costs of doing business.

What’s Your Time Worth?

Consider what your normal billing rate is and than estimate how much time you spent organizing all of this after the fact. Any solution you choose will pay itself back in no time.

No matter which way you go, having a system in place from the beginning of the year will make the task seem so much more manageable. Having a pile of invoices and receipts three feet tall is just the sort of job that gets procrastinated over and over again until the very last minute. Setting yourself up with a simple system that you make time for once a week, or once a month, becomes infinitely more manageable. In our next article, we’ll look at some easy ways of customizing the invoices Billings generates so your clients will be as impressed with your invoice as they are with your work.

Seven Macworlds. Sounds like a lot right? I thought so too until I talked to some real veterans of the show. A few people that I encountered had been attending Macworld for 20+ years. So, even though I’m not holding or breaking any records with my measly seven attendances, I’m still proud to have rep’d Marketcircle for this many years.

We had plenty of visitors to our tiny little booth, affectionally referred to as ‘lemonade stands’ or ‘phone booths’. This is the only show that we do that is attended by only Mac and iOS users. It’s so great to interact with customers face to face after sometimes years of relationships based solely on email & phone exchanges. I hope that every Marketcircle employee can experience this one day to see what great people are out there using our software. I somehow feel guilty to be the one that always gets to go, but knowing how much I love California, (my hometown is beautiful SF) I don’t think the higher ups dare to bench me.

Speaking of hometowns, I experienced one of the best ‘firsts’ of my life on Sunday January 22nd at 3:00pm Pacific.

Aly and I scored tickets (thanks to Abbi of FastMac) to the 49ers–Giants game. I was finally able to attend a Niners game in the legendary Candlestick Park where the best quarterback in the history of the game (my opinion and I’m sticking to it) Joe Montana himself played the game.  To say the experience was memorable would be the understatement of the year.

And much like Candlestick, Macworld is home to the giants of the Mac industry. You cannot substitute meeting and interacting with some of the best developers from all over the world. Having us all in one OS X zone allowed us to refer traffic to each other and feed of each other’s energy. It was great way to spend time with our fellow Mac and iOS developers.

I’m very much looking forward to continuing the tradition of traveling to San Francisco each year to participate in this event.

No Magic Words

If you are looking for magic phrases to say at closing, or ways to convince people their objections aren’t valid (“The sale starts when you hear the first ‘no.’” – Some-guy-from-the-80′s), this probably isn’t going to be for you. Nothing is worse for sales than putting on some fake persona and saying things you wouldn’t normally. Be real. Improving your sales has more to do with forming good habits than anything you could possibly say.

What We Believe

We at Marketcircle very strongly believe that a key aspect to growing a business is focusing on getting new business. It seems like an obvious statement, but I’m sure we can all think of someone we’ve met in our lives whose default mode is to sit back and wait for customers to come through the doors. While this may work for some companies who have worked for years to build a brand and make some of the greatest consumer products ever (see Apple, Inc.). But for the rest of us, sales and revenue may take a bit more effort and hustle.

Where to Start?

I’d like to start by talking about sales cycles and how understanding your own sales cycle can help improve your cash flow.

Without going all MBA on this, cash flow is the movement of money into or out of a business (as defined by the borg collective). Usually, one prefers to have more coming in than going out. I believe this, in financial circles, is called positive cash flow. So increasing sales obviously results in more money coming in and we should be good to go, right? Well, only if you have enough **time** to sell to the next customer before the repo man comes to take away your Aeron chair. Think of your sales cycle as the time it takes from first identifying a prospect to finally signing a contract and receiving payment from your new customer.

I have a friend who is starting out his career as an architect and is trying to build up his own independent practice. He told me about this guy he met who bought a huge old mansion downtown and was looking to develop it into apartment units. Four months later, we ran into each other again and I naturally asked about it. He said that they had only just recently finalized contracts and gotten the project underway. I remember him clearly saying, “I had no idea how long it was going to take to get everything sorted out before we could start work”.

Just like most people who decide to start a business, we tend to focus our efforts on our craft first and doing good work and hope that the business stuff doesn’t take too long. Problem is if you have no idea how long it takes to close another deal, you can easily get caught off guard and find yourself staring at next month with no projects booked and thus no money coming in. I asked my friend to recall how long it took from meeting that guy to getting a cheque from him.  I suggested that if it took four months last time, and he has scheduled this project to take nine months, then as of five months from now, he better have met his next customer. And then, he’ll need to juggle his time between completing his current project and developing that next sale. He said, “Oh,” his lip slightly quivering and with what looked like a small tear developing in his left eye.

So, do you know how long your sales cycle is? If not, find the last three (or more) contracts you signed and then go through your email and figure out when your first met those clients. Average those times out and now you’ve got a very rough idea how long your cycle is. In the next article, we’ll discuss some ways of shortening your cycle so ramen cup’o'soup can become fancy japanese udon noodles instead.

An easy way to integrate a Daylite Project and Dropbox together is by using file references that point to a project files folder stored on your Dropbox.

Optionally, this folder can be shared with other team members too*. With file references, you can point to either a local file, or a website URL. We’ll use a URL in this case, so that no matter which team member clicks on the file reference, it will take them to the correct folder. This same technique will work with other cloud storage providers such as box, that can give you a web URL. In addition, there is a custom box HUD that goes a little bit further as shown by Marni at macangel.com.

We’ve made a 60 second video that shows how this works:

* Check out the Dropbox help site for more info on how to share a project.

If you use the Projects feature in Daylite and are interested in learning more about how to use Dropbox within your current workflow or have any questions on this topic, we are hosting a Webinar on February 7th at 4 PM EST that will be focussed on how to become more efficient in tracking projects using Daylite. Register here to save your spot.

Update:

Due to demand, we’ve added a second session and have made it earlier in the day to accommodate our European friends. Please Register Here to save your spot.

This is Daylite Touch’s second major award, the first being Macworld’s 2009 Best of Show winner.

Billings Touch also received an honourable mention under the Business category, something we’re also quite proud of

Assume your hard drive will fail very soon.
Expect imminent disk failure no matter how old or new your hard drive is.

Even a brand new, fancy SSD can fail at any time. “A few days later he wrote back saying the SSD was the culprit.” writes a customer of Haystack Software’s Arq, an online Backup tool for Mac.

Backup is a MUST.

Backing up your computer is always an important thing for any user to do – home or business. Just like you don’t want to lose your family photo library, losing critical documents, or key operational data, like a customer database for example would be just as tragic for a business. If you’re using your computer for any reason really, backing up simply isn’t an option – it’s a MUST.

You might have your contacts and calendars, some of your files in Dropbox or iCloud maybe, but what about everything else? Even losing things like your applications and passwords could mean quite a bit of downtime and lost money if you have to start over. Everyone should consider all aspects of their digital lives and make sure their backup strategy is automated, simple and redundant.

The guys at Haystack have put together a great article outlining the 7 facets of a good Mac backup strategy. It’s a great reminder to ensure your backup plan is in order, or wakeup call to make sure you create one.

The PDF document helps explain how iPad can be used successfully to manage businesses relationships:

iPad is an incredible mobile sales tool to help you manage your customer relationships. With Wi-Fi + 3G connectivity and an amazing 10-hour battery life, iPad keeps you connected throughout the day to command the facts you need, so you’re always prepared for all your client meetings. The instant-on capability of iPad gives you immediate access to your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) data—whether you’re onsite at a customer meeting, in the office, or on the road.

Daylite is highlighted as one of iPad’s most useful apps for managing customer relationships. When you’re looking up customer information on the go, you don’t just see their personal information. You see the appointments you have with them, the tasks to do for them, and the notes and email correspondence you’ve had with them. You also see what companies they’re with and their roles at those companies. Everything you need to know about your customer is available, right at your fingertips.

We believe CRM is just a part of growing a business – not the whole picture. Daylite is a business productivity manager, offering tools to help you keep track of your schedule, the projects you’re working on, and the team you work with, and more. And it doesn’t stop there of course, as Daylite’s also available for your Mac and iPhone.

Apple’s iPad in Business site also features some great stories of cool companies using iPad in business – they’re definitely worth checking out.

Daylite is also being showcased on iPads in Apple’s Retail stores, which is pretty neat! It’s great to see that Apple (and the rest of the world) see iPad as a serious business tool.

Or leave your suggestions in the comments!

In the interview Jim discusses his transition from working as a celebrity hair and makeup artist into building a very successful photography business.

He attributes a good deal of his success to building solid relationships, something Daylite helped him achieve.

I built my professional network through relationships with the talent I worked with, and by using an online database called “Adbase” to find clients. This database helped me identify contacts at the biggest companies and agencies, and then enabled me to make new connections that I wouldn’t have otherwise found. I organized these contacts in my personal database that I customized using “Daylite” by Marketcircle.

Jim’s also featured in a Daylite photography case study on our website, where he goes more in depth about his Daylite usage.