Ok so you’ve installed the app, created your account, now what??
Obviously you can have a look around and get familiar with the screens, but to get the most out of the app I’ve put together a few things you may want to do, a kind of starter pack.
Add yourself to your client list (Client screen) with the email you created your account with.
First off this gives you the option to mess around with creating appointments, sending emails (to yourself) and editing sessions. This way you can see what the appointment/session emails looks like. Afterwards you can delete the appointments and even yourself as a client if you like.
The app knows the email you registered with and if you book an appointment with a client with this email it will show an extra appointment type - Personal. This shows up as a yellow dot in your diary screen, so if you’re booking time off it’s useful to have yourself as a client in the app.
Any time a new feature is added you can always test it out against yourself instead of a client.
Head over to the Settings screen to set up your individual preferences.
Go into ‘Edit your profile’ and update your Name and (optional) Instagram handle. The name used here appears on any Session reports you generate and on all emails sent to clients. Save this info.
‘Manage Studio(s)’, here you can change your studio name and add any other studios you might work at, or a convention etc… When you create an appointment, your default selected studio (the one with location icon next to it) will be used for that appointment. You can obviously change it when adding an appointment too. Your studio name appears on reports and emails sent to clients.
‘Palette settings’ is where you can set when you will see warnings in your palette for expired inks and ink open duration, set this to what you feel comfortable with.
In ‘Product Suppliers’ you can add or remove any of your preferred suppliers that you buy inks from. These can be changed any time you want. The reason for selecting them here is when it comes time to add an ink you can select the supplier you purchased it from which is helpful in your reports.
The ‘Manage ink brands’ screen lets you select which brands of ink you use. When you add an ink in the Palette screen, the brands you have selected here will be the ones you can select inks from.
‘Appointment settings’, here you can set up your default start and end of day which your diary will default to.
You can also set an ‘Appointment interval’ in minutes if you want the app to force you to only book appointments a selected number of minutes after each other, no back to back bookings.
Choose to ‘Allow appointments to overlap’ if you don’t want any warnings when double booking.
Choosing ‘Include payment info’ will allow you to add any payment details to an appointment like a quote, deposit etc… The app doesn’t do any payments, this is for your eyes only and you can generate reports from it.
‘Send emails for appointment by default’ will basically always default to sending an email when creating an appointment (if an email address exists) but you can also deselect this option while you’re creating the appointment.
Selecting the ‘Sync to device calendar?’ option will give you a list of the calendars you have connected to your default device calendar (eg Google Calendar, iCalendar etc..). Choose a calendar to automatically add appointments you make to. Great if you need to check your appointments from another device or laptop and also acts as kind of a backup of your appointments.
To make life easier you can set up ‘Pre-set appointment times’. These pre-sets make things a lot quicker when making an appointment. You can add things like ‘Consultation’, ‘Full day’, ‘Morning session’ or whatever you want really. With each pre-set you can assign a start time (optional) and duration. When you’re making appointments these will be available for you to select and will set the appointment time or add the duration of your pre-set to the appointment time.
Lastly check out the ‘Backup database’ screen. Here you can set how often you want to be reminded to make a backup. Also worth making your first backup to get familiar with the process. Choose ‘Backup now’ and your phone will ask you where to save it, Google Drive, iCloud, One Drive are always good options, or simply email to yourself as an attachment. That’s your data backed up and if anything happens you can restore this file in the app.
Check out the Palette screen
Here you can get familiar with how to search for inks, add them and view information on them. It’s probably best to do this when you have your inks at hand or know what inks you use and then update them when you have the bottle of ink with you so you can add Lot numbers, Batch numbers and expiry dates etc…
While it might seem like a lot of setup, some steps literally take a few seconds. It’s a good way to familiarise yourself with the app and the options available to you. There are other Settings but they’re fairly self explanatory.
Hope that was of some help and if you get stuck or have any questions, the Discord, Instagram or email are all available to ask or make suggestions.
Needledrag