Our Users Are So Smart: Using BatchBook as a Project Management App

• Posted February 18th, 2009
• By Adam Darowski (bio)
• Filed under: Our Users are So Smart, Using BatchBook

If you take a look at our website, you can pretty much tell what BatchBook is—a social CRM and contact management web application for small businesses and freelancers. There are many things BatchBook is not. But BatchBook is also very flexible (thanks to features like SuperTags and affiliations), which opens the possibility of people turning it into something we never imagined.

New forum user dcis-steve is one of those people. He went from “newbie user” to “BatchBook for Project Management” pioneer in two days. We had a good discussion on the BatchBook Forums about what he was up to. Here is his summary of how turned BatchBook into a project management application.

Prerequisite

First of all I have a supertag for “Projects”. The fields for this SuperTag I use are:

• Bid Amount (text field for dollar amount)
• Type of work (multiple choice – for my various types of services that I do bid work for)
• Status (multiple choice – bid/proposal, active, completed, on hold)

Having this SuperTag attached to each project/company record allows me to easily call up all my projects by clicking the tag in the tag cloud. I have also created reports for Active Projects Only, etc.

Creating the Project

Since there is currently no place to create a project, I use a company record to represent my project.

• Create a new company labeled with an @ on the front and then title it accordingly (ex: @New website for ABC, Inc.)
• Tag it with your Project SuperTag and fill in the fields for the SuperTag as needed
• You can optionally provide contact info for the project if you want, but I don’t bother since I will be affiliating the project with the company it belongs to.

Setting up the Affiliation

I create two different new affiliations to use with my projects:

• Project : Company
• Project : Customer

When I am affiliating the project with a company record, I use the first affiliation, and when it’s associated with an individual, I use the second one. This may or may not be the best way to do this, but it works for me.

Now that your affiliations are set up, you can create the affiliation for the project. Assuming you are affiliating the project with a company, you just enter the company name and then select the proper affiliation that you just set up. You’ll know if it worked right if you see the company listed under affiliations on the project. If you click the company name to go to that record, you should see the project listed under affiliations for the company.

That’s pretty much it. Now you have a project associated with the company or individual, which you can log project specific comms and to-do’s against.