Organizing my clients

[InventorSmart 0]

Hi thanks in advance for your advice....

The goal is to organize my clients and logging ongoing activity, web clippings, files, etc...

What is the best way to keep track of clients. I started by creating a notebook titled clients, then should I create a note that has the clients name in it? But I have so many notes and things going on with each client, so should I create a notebook for each client??

Once I have a client, I need to send my emails into evernote to go into their file/folder... I have web clippings, I need to keep a log of the time i meet with them, etc, etc...
I am new to evernote (well its been a long time ago i was a customer and now coming back)

I also cannot find where that email address for my personal evernote is so i can foward my emails and then file them accordingly.

Thanks!

 

[DTLow 5,736]

On 7/28/2020 at 7:32 PM, InventorSmart said:

The goal is to organize my clients and logging ongoing activity, web clippings, files, etc...

I'm a tagger, so my organization would use a tag for each client

>>I started by creating a notebook titled clients ...so should I create a notebook for each client??

That could be a stack titled clients; with a notebook for each client
Be aware of the notebook limit  (100250)

My concern with notebooks is the restriction of a single notebook per note

>>that email address for my personal evernote is so i can foward my emails and then file them accordingly

Using the web platform (www.evernote.com), I log into my account
and   settings > Email Notes to

[gazumped 11,686]

21 hours ago, InventorSmart said:

I also cannot find where that email address for my personal evernote

On that point first - Basic accounts don't get to email into the database.  You get 5 free emails (I think) and then the service stops until you subscribe.  If you use Outlook or Gmail there are mail clippers that will send mails direct,  otherwise you're limited to copy and paste.

I'd also question whether it's a good idea to use a free account for business critical information - if anything goes wrong,  you're going to want support from the 'official' team.  This Forum is -mainly - user-supported and we can't see any server-side information if things go wrong.  Whatever you decide - make sure you keep regular backups of your data!

On the main issue:  I started out a tagger,  but I'm a dissenter from most of my colleagues here now - I've gone to the Dark Side and run a notebook for each person, company or project that I'm involved with.  I also use a leading date in my note titles so that sorting by title gives me a correct timeline for those notes.  Means I can look at the notebook for Acme Engineering and immediately see that they filled the order for one dozen anvils last week.  For me that saves a small but significant amount of time whenever I need to look something up.

Evernote is completely flexible though - the most important thing is to start now and use a system you're comfortable with.  If it works,  keep doing more of the same.  If you need to tweak or change it,  you can easily do so.

[PinkElephant 8,150]

It is quite simple: Do as you feel it serves you better.

If you start with a notebook per client, and later want to tag, make a new „clients“ notebook, select all notes in one of the old notebooks for client123,  tag them all with client123, and move them to the new notebook. The link of all notes of that client to itself will then be done by the tag. The advantage is that you can use the tag for more: Let‘s say you send an article to several of your clients, and want to follow up on it later. You can tag the single note with that information with several client tags, without a need to duplicate it.

If you have more than just a few handful of clients, you will probably end up with tagging, because the number of notebooks is limited, the number of tags (practically) is not.

They have raised the system limit a while ago, you can have a total of 250 notebooks in a Basic and 1.000 notebooks in a Premium account. The Tag limit is 100.000 for all accounts.

For professional use, I would always use a paid account. A business account only makes sense if there is a minimum of 2 users (and maybe there should be 5 or more to make it effective). If working on your own, I would use a Premium account.

[CalS 5,281]

On 7/28/2020 at 9:32 PM, InventorSmart said:

What is the best way to keep track of clients.

End of the day at the top level clicking on a notebook or clicking on a tag will yield the same result.  I'm a tagger so I would use a tag per client storing all notes in one notebook.  Notebooks provide stratification but it is harder to search across notebooks for like items, not impossible, just harder in my view.  You can create an interaction note per interaction or create a note with a table with columns of date, who, what, next, whatever and tag it Interaction.  Think about how you will be wanting to view your notes as you set the process.  Choice is yours to try. 

The good thing about EN is that you can change in the future, as @gazumped has done going to the dark side of notebooks (ongoing joke between the two of us).  But to the point, he has a lot of notes and has switched to notebooks after a long time with tags and I am happy tag user with a lot of notes with no intent of switching.  Find what feels best to you knowing you can morph as you learn more about your use case..

[DTLow 5,736]

On 7/28/2020 at 7:32 PM, InventorSmart said:

I need to keep a log of the time i meet with them

My process starts with a note for the event
(this gets sync'd to my calendar)

Add to the note contents - agenda, minutes, ...
Add to the note title - hours

So the note title is something like 
          2020-07-29-11:00 Event-ClientMeeting [aaaaaa] ?Client-aaaaaa Hours2.5
Tags: !Type-Event-ClientMeeting     ?Client-aaaaaaa