CLIENT COMMUNIQUÉ 2006 TUTORIAL

Client Communiqué Overview

The most important part of any data intense software is the area where the data is entered.  Client Communiqué was designed to make it as easy as possible to enter your contact and communications data. This tutorial takes you through the actual data entry process and provides you with the tools to organize all of your clients and contacts. You'll also learn how to use virtually any medium available to communicate with anyone you know, or need to know! In addition, we'll also show you how to track and organize any important web links, user names, passwords, email addresses. You'll learn how to import contact information from Outlook and other email accounts, your saved "Favorites" from Internet Explorer or other internet browser program.

This video will give you a brief overview of Client Communiqué, its many features and capabilities, and the reasons you should be using Client Communiqué as your primary contact management program. This video will also demonstrate how to use some of the various maintenance or data entry screens to input new or edit existing contact information for your clients and personal contacts. Client Communiqué, or CC for short, contains seven different maintenance screens which enable you to enter information for various contacts that you may have for your company. These maintenance screens can be accessed from various places within the program, such as in the “Lookup” screen, which you can access by clicking the “Lookup” button on the Main Toolbar. To illustrate, we will click the “Lookup” button from the Main Toolbar. In the “Address Lookup” near the bottom center of the screen is a “Maintenance” button which then takes you into the add/edit screen for the particular “Address Book” selected above. Note, the various “Address Books” are available from the dropdown button at the top of the screen. Once you finish adding or editing the data in your particular address book, you are then returned to the “Lookup” screen where you can then continue your search or start a new one. You will find Maintenance buttons in any of the other “Lookup” screens, as well as in the screens for printing labels and envelopes, which can be found throughout CC.

Client Communiqué contains maintenance screens, located under the File Menu, where you can add new or edit existing data for the following:

Also found under the File Menu are the Category Maintenance screen (for organizing web links) and the Group Maintenance screen (for organizing the data in your client and contact address books).

Although every maintenance screen is slightly different to accommodate the kind of data maintained, they all have the same basic layout with the following parts:

You will note that contacts in CC are broken down into 3 categories. The first category is for “Public” contacts. These are contacts that can be shared with other CC users within your company. They are normally stored on a network drive and can be added to or updated by anyone using CC. In addition, public contacts are also synchronized whenever you exit the program. In CC, you may also have “Personal” contacts. These contacts will be kept locally on each user’s C drive. Changes you make to these contacts are automatically saved when you make them in CC. The 3rd type of contact is “Included” contacts. These contacts are included with the CC program and are limited to state and federal taxing authorities, CPA societies and state boards of CPAs. These contacts are updated via the “Update” options in CC. These contacts can only be edited by first adding them to your public or personal contacts.

In addition to contacts, you may enter into CC any personal or public web links. You can also categorize these web links into separate folders much the same as your “Favorites” in Internet Explorer. From the File menu you can also perform “Group” maintenance on clients that have previously been set up in CC. You will learn more about Group Maintenance in that specific video. From the File Menu you can also backup or restore data, import data from Outlook and other formats, or configure CC via the Configuration Wizard.

From the Communicate menu you can lookup and print single or multiple envelopes, address labels, postcards, emails and faxes. You can compose and save postcard messages via the Postcard Message Wizard and even browse emails that have been sent.

Moving on to the Reports menu, you can print reports for clients, personal and public contacts, web links, as well as group and category reports for your clients and contacts.

In the Housekeeping Menu, you can Rebuild your data’s index files, synchronize your data with the network, or delete an entire group of contacts via the “Bulk Delete” option.

Finally, the Help Menu provides help for all aspects of the program, as well as a Tutorial, FAQ’s, and our online discussion board where you can pose questions to our support staff or browse questions previously asked by other users. You can also print out a comments/questions/suggestions form to email or fax Pro-Ware or an order form to purchase CC from us. You can also enter an activation code if you are using the CC demo program or verify your registration information and make changes to be submitted to our company.

 

Adding and Editing Clients and Contacts

Background
 Even though all maintenance screens are important, the primary objective of Client Communiqué is to maintain a list of clients and contacts with whom to communicate.  This can be done within the Clients, Personal Contacts, and Public Contacts screens located under the File Menu.

“Add” mode is used to describe the process of adding data. "Add" mode is initiated by clicking the Add button. When you are in “add” mode, you will navigate through each page beginning with the second tabbed page.  As a shortcut when adding data, if there are several tabs on the maintenance screen, the record pointer will be positioned on the first field of the following tabbed page whenever you tab out of the last field on a page. When you have finished adding data on all pages of the maintenance screen, you can click “Save” to save your new record and exit “Add” mode.

“Edit” mode is used to describe the process of editing data. "Edit" mode is initiated by clicking the Edit button. When you are in “edit” mode, you will need to click on the tab at the top of the screen to change information on that page. When you are finished editing your data, you can press the “Save” button to save your changes and exit “Edit” mode.

Clients
The Clients screen can be accessed by clicking the Clients button on the toolbar or by selecting the Clients option under the File Menu.   The Client screen is divided into six tabbed pages as described below. 

Since client information is generally used by several people in a company, the client addresses are shared and stored in the public files location setup in the Configuration Wizard.

Contacts
 Contacts are separated into personal contacts and public contacts.  The personal contacts address book is intended to hold the addresses of contacts to be kept personal, whereas the public contacts are used to hold addresses of contacts to be shared on the public files location.  Typically the public files will be located on a server for sharing.  Both screens are identical with the following tabbed pages as described below.

If we were adding or editing client information, we would see the additional tabbed pages listed above denoting information about our client such as tax information, recent CC information, and notes we may have entered for our client. Personal and Public contacts have less information than client data, but adding new contacts or editing existing ones is much the same as it is for adding and editing clients in CC. If we needed to add or edit client information, we would simply select the “Clients” button from the toolbar or we could select “Clients” from the File Menu. This video will give you an overview of how to add and edit contact information in CC.

Adding a New Contacts
 To begin, we first choose the category of contacts to we want to work with. The choices are “My Clients”, "Public Contacts" and "Personal Contacts". To add a personal contact, we start from the main menu and click “File”, “Contacts”, and then “Personal”. The screen for “Personal Contacts” appears where we can add, edit, or delete any of our personal contacts. We could also move through our list of personal contacts by clicking “Next” or “Previous”. Additionally, we can print any of the personal contact reports available in CC by clicking “Print”. Once we complete our adding and editing with the personal contacts file, we can exit this screen by clicking “Close” to return to the main menu. Any new personal contacts we have entered and any personal contact information we have changed is automatically saved once we close this screen.

Once we click “Add”, CC displays a blank contact information page which we fill out with our personal contact’s data. In this screen, we add the contact’s information as follows:

First, we enter the contact name Bob Smith (Note, you can select the layout of the first, middle, and last name of your contacts by clicking the “Check” button to have CC determine the correct layout of the name). Next, we enter the company name, address, city, state, zip, phone, email address and website. His company is Professional Associates, LLC, located at 416 W. Blaylock Dr., Suite 144 code Lincoln, NE 68158. His phone number is 402-555-1212 Extension: 102.His fax number is 402-555-1313. His email address is rsmith@pro-assoc-llc.com and finally, his company's website is www.pro-assoc-llc.biz

Once we are finished, we click “Save” to save our new contact.

Editing an Existing Contact
 To edit a contact’s information, we click the “Edit” button. To demonstrate, we select the contact we have just added to our list of personal contacts and then click “Edit”. In this case, we want to change the city and state. We click on the city field and change it from “Lincoln” to “Omaha” and then we also change our zip code from “68158” to “68134”. Once we are finished making these changes, we click “Save” to save our work.

Adding and editing Public Contacts is the same as it is for Personal Contacts. Remember that Public Contacts as well as Clients are shareable by other CC users, so the only difference when adding and editing public contacts versus the personal contacts is where the information is saved. Client records resemble public contacts, because they are accessible by other CC users. However, clients differ from both public and personal contacts because they have additional information which is displayed on 6 tabbed pages versus the 3 tabbed pages with personal and public contacts. Client records have tabbed page called “Tax Info” which contains information such as the federal tax id number, entity type and year end of the company, Additionally, there is a tab for communiqué’ information which contains information about any communication with the company, such as the number of year-to-date communications, contact frequency, the last communication date, and a description of the communiqué’. There is also a tab which contains any additional “Notes” we may have about the company.

 Deleting an Existing Contact
 To delete a particular personal contact, simply select the contact from the list shown in the List View screen and then click “Delete”. A confirmation message is displayed where we can click “No” to cancel the operation, while clicking “Yes” deletes the record from our database. After clicking “Yes”, CC prompts you to go to the “Rebuild Index Files” option found under the Housekeeping menu to complete the deletion process. To simplify the rebuild process, click “Mark All” to rebuild all marked files, and then click “Rebuild” to complete the process.

 

Adding and Editing Web Links

Background
Besides holding contact information, Client Communiqué can be used to store website addresses know in the program as web links. Similar to contacts, web links are divided into personal web links and public web links.  The personal web links screen is intended to hold the web links you want to be kept personal, whereas the public web links are used to hold web links to be shared on the public files location.  Typically the public files will be located on a server for sharing.  Both screens are identical with the following tabbed pages as described below. 

Web Link Categories
 Just as bookmarked websites in web browsers can be organized into folders, web links in Client Communiqué can be assigned to web link categories.  The Categories screen used to maintain these web link categories is found under the Web Link section under the File Menu.  It can also be accessed by clicking the Category Maintenance button on the Website Information tab of either web link screen. 

The Categories screen is divided into two tabbed pages as described below.

In addition to holding contact information, Client Communiqué can also be used to store web addresses referred to as Web Links”. This video will give you an overview of how to categorize and add or edit web links in Client Communiqué.

 Adding a New Web Link
 Starting from the main menu, we can click “Web Links”, found under the File Menu and then select the type of web link to add or edit. In this case, we will be adding a public web link that can be used by everyone in our company. To add a web link, we click the “Add” button at the bottom of the screen. Remember that “Public” links are normally maintained on a network and are accessible to all CC users in your company. If this were a personal link, we would select the “personal” option to set up our web link.

 Categorizing Web Links
 Looking at our screen, the first thing to note is that the category field is blank. When we click on the dropdown symbol to lookup the various categories for our web links, a list appears that contains all of the categories or folders which we had previously set up in CC. If we had first selected the option to import web links from our internet browser, we would see the various categories or folders that exist within our browser are now present in CC. To select any of these categories or create a new one, click the “Category Maintenance” button. We then create a new category called “Yahoo Links” in which to place our new web link.

Next, we minimize CC in order to bring up Internet Explorer. Since this is only for demonstration purposes, we will simply copy and paste our home page link and add it to CC under our “Yahoo Links” category. In addition, we could also enter an optional user name and password for this link. This allows you to keep user names and passwords for any links you may already have in Internet Explorer. If your user name and password are personal, you would not enter that information here. Instead, you can create a new personal link by closing this screen and selecting the “Personal” option under Web Links in the File Menu. Since this is a public link, we will not be adding any user name or passwords for this link. However, if you have a web link that can be accessed by anyone and it requires a company-wide user name and password, it could be added here as well. The user name and password fields are optional and can be skipped if necessary. You can also add any notes for this web link in the optional notes field. Here, we will add “Home Page” as our note since this is the link that Internet Explorer would normally open as our home page. After adding our notes for this link, we click “Save” to save this web link.

 Editing and Deleting Web Links
 From this screen we can change any information for our web link by clicking the “Edit” button. We could also navigate through our links by clicking the previous or next buttons. If we no longer wanted to keep a particular web link, we could click the “Delete” button to remove that link. Note, that the user name and password are also deleted with the web link, so make sure you no longer need that information before deleting any web links.

 

Using the Group Maintenance Screens

Background
 Client Communiqué can be used as more than just a simple contact manager. It can also be used to perform routine correspondence tasks for just one client or for entire group of clients or contacts at one time. For instance, if you have a quarterly tax newsletter that you mail to a select group of clients, you can identify these clients with a fully customizable group code. In CC, you have the ability to group your clients or contacts by entering a unique identifier in any one of the Group Code fields. In this video, you will learn how to use group maintenance screens to group clients and contacts so that you can email, print labels or send postcards to pre-selected clients at once. To accomplish this task, we will create a group code identifying the type of mailings that we send to clients. In this case, our example will allow us to group our clients to receive either quarterly or monthly newsletters.

The Group Maintenance screen, located under the Groups section of the File Menu, is used for adding and editing 15 character group codes for each of the five available user-defined groups.  These group codes can be assigned to clients, personal contacts, and public contacts and are used as filter options on lookup screen and reports.  The groups screen is separated into two tabbed pages as described below.   

As an added feature, the Groups Maintenance screen can be accessed from the Clients and Contacts maintenance screens by clicking the Group Maintenance button on the Group tab page.

 

Assigning Clients to Different Groups
 To assign a client to a group we have already setup previously is easy. Just click the “Client” button on the toolbar or select Client found under the File menu. Next, we select the Group Maintenance option under “Groups” in the File menu. From there, we drop down the “Group” list and select any unused group code which we would like to use as the identifier as to whether our client will receive a quarterly or a monthly newsletter. In this case, we’ll use “Group Code #3” and we change the default designation to “Newsletter” by first clicking the ellipses (…) button and then typing “Newsletter”. Once finished, we can add as many group codes as we need to identify the different newsletters we will be sending out. For this example, we have only 2 types of newsletters, quarterly and monthly, however, we could have many more than that. In addition, if we have clients that we do not want to send any newsletter, we simply leave the “Newsletter” group blank. Otherwise, the “Newsletter” group for our clients will contain either “Quarterly” or “Monthly”.

The next thing that we would like to do is to perform some Group Maintenance by creating a new group for our personal contacts. For our example, we will be using Group Code #5 to designate the type of industry that applies to our personal contacts. To begin, we click “Contacts” from the File Menu and then choose “Personal” from the “Contacts” submenu. Next, click the “Groups” tab for this contact and then click the “Group Maintenance” button. Now, we click Group Code #5 in the “Group” drop-down list and then click the ellipses (…) next to the Group. A message box appears telling us that changing this group designation or screen prompt will affect all of our personal contacts, not just the one we are editing. Once we click “Yes” to change the screen prompt we can change our default screen prompt from Group Code #5 to “Industry” which tells us exactly what this group code designates. We then click “OK” to continue.

At this point, we have not yet entered any industry codes, so we click “Add” to add our first industry and type “Accounting” in the Group Code field. We could add a group description as well if we were using some code or abbreviation in our Group Code field. In addition, we will add 2 more codes, “Banking” and “Food Services” to our list of industries. We could add as many as we need for all of our personal contacts, however, we will keep our list short for this example. Notice that if we had a rather large list, we could scroll through the list of industries we have created using the up and down arrows, we can scroll using the “Next” and “Previous” buttons, or even perform a search to find one of our industries. Once finished, we click “Close” to return to our personal contact screen. Now, we can properly designate the industry for this contact by clicking on the “Groups” tab and then clicking the “Edit” button. Next to the Industry field, we can drop our list down and select the appropriate industry for our contact. Since our contact is a CPA, we select “Accounting” as his industry.

Adding and editing categories for personal and public web links works in much the same way as it does for contacts and clients. However, instead of group codes for your web links, you will have “Categories” which correspond to the various folders you may have in your Internet Explorer “Favorites”. Performing “Category Maintenance” for your web links works the same as performing Group Maintenance for your clients and contacts.

 

Using the Lookup Screens

Background
 Client Communiqué contains many advanced features that will enable you to easily locate, sort, and group your clients. In this video, you will learn how to use the lookup screen and many of its features. The lookup screen for your clients is an integral part of CC and once you master it, you will be able to better organize and group your clients. The various "Lookup" screens are primarily used to select either single or multiple addresses for printing on Labels, Envelopes, Postcards, and Fax Transmittals. It is also used on the "Compose New Email" screen for selecting email recipients. As an added shortcut, the Lookup screen can also be accessed by clicking the Lookup button on the Main Menu Toolbar.

By default, when the Address Lookup screen is opened, all clients, personal contacts, and public contacts are displayed in contact name order in a grid with the currently selected contact highlighted in blue.  To choose another contact from the grid, use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to scroll through the list or use the mouse to move the vertical scroll bars to the left of the grid and click on the contact you desire.

If the Lookup Screen allows multiple contacts to be selected, a "Mark" column will be included in the grid to mark contacts for selection. In this case, to mark a contact for selection, simply click the checkbox next to the left of the contact's company name.  When checked, the contact's line will become highlighted in yellow to signify it is marked.  To unmark a contact, click the checkbox again to uncheck it.  As a shortcut, you can double-click on the contact's row in the grid to mark/unmark them. 

 

Lookup Screen Options
 While you can easily scroll through the grid to find the contact you are looking for, you can expedite the process by using the Address Book, Primary Filter, Sort by, and Search options located on the top of the page. The Address Book option allows you to narrow the contacts displayed in the grid based on file location.  From the Address Book dropdown, you can choose to view all contacts or just clients, personal contacts, or public contacts.

To further narrow your contacts in the grid, you can use the primary filter option. The first filter pull-down box, set to "Select" by default, contains the types of filters that can be performed. The filter types are described below:

After a filter type is chosen, the second filter pull-down box will be populated with the available filter options.  For instance, the group code options will be populated with any corresponding user-defined groups previously set up in the Group Maintenance screen.  Once one of these options is chosen for the filter, the clients displayed in the grid will be narrowed to the ones that meet the selected filter criteria.  To reset the grid and redisplay all contacts in the selected Address Book, just return the first pull-down box to "Select". 

Unlike the Address Book and Primary Filter options which narrow the clients in the grid, the Sort by option simply reorders the existing contacts in a grid in ascending order based on the selected sort option. The available sort options are contact or company name. The selected "Sort by" option is also used as the searched field in the Search option.  Whenever characters are typed in the search box, the first contact that begins with the matching characters in the selected sort by/search field will be highlighted in blue.

 

Buttons on the Lookup Screen 
 The following buttons are located on the bottom of the Lookup screen:

Using Various Lookup Screens 
Starting from the main menu using the sample data file, we click the “Lookup” button located in the upper left-hand corner of the toolbar. The “Lookup” screen appears allowing us to select any “Address Books” that we have available to us in our drop-down list. In this case, we want to search for Pro-Ware, LLC, the maker of Client Communiqué, so we choose the “All My Contacts” address book. Next, if we previously set up a Group Code to identify this client, we could select the proper group from the “Primary Filter” drop-down list. In this case, we identify our “Monthly Tax Clients” as our primary filter and then verify that the only companies listed in our drop-down list are “Monthly Tax Clients”. In addition, we could also select the city or state from the primary filter drop-down list. To find Pro-Ware, we first select the option to search for the company rather than the contact. Note that once we begin typing the name of the company or contact, CC automatically moves our pointer alphabetically in the file. So typing “P”, for Pro-Ware, takes us to the first company that begins with the letter “P”. As we type additional letters, the program moves to its proper place in the file. Once we have located the company we are looking for, we can edit the company’s information by clicking the “Maintenance” button or add the company to our “Favorites” list which we can then select from our drop-down list of address books. Normally, we only add companies to our favorites if we will be accessing them often to print labels, send emails, faxes, etc.

In addition to the Lookup button on the toolbar, the lookup screen for our clients can be accessed from virtually anywhere in the program. For instance, if we wanted to print an address label for a particular client, we can click the “Label” button on the toolbar and select the proper label settings. Notice that there is also a “Lookup” button on this screen which we can click to locate the client whose address label we would like to print. This time we are looking for Karl Smith from a marketing company. We’re not sure what the exact name of his company is, so we will search by contact. We could search for his last or his first name by selecting the appropriate option from the drop-down list next to the client sorting option. When you change the drop-down list from first, middle, last to last, first, middle, you will see your file re-sorted alphabetically by first name to last name. This enables you to find a contact even if you know only part of their first or last name. Once you locate the desired contact, you can either double-click the client or click select with the client highlighted in the grid. Once you click “Select” you will be returned to the label options screen where you can print the label for this client. Settings on our lookup screen are always saved while we are working so that we can return to the lookup screen as often as necessary to complete our work (i.e., printing labels, sending emails, etc.)

 

Addresses, Envelopes, Labels, and Postcards

Background
 Client Communiqué can be used as more than just a simple contact manager. It can also be used to perform routine correspondence tasks for just one client or for entire group of clients or contacts at one time. For instance, if you have a quarterly tax newsletter that you mail to a select group of clients, you can identify these clients with a fully customizable group code. This video will demonstrate how to print a single address as well as multiple addresses on envelopes, postcards, or labels.

Selecting a Single Addressee to Print
 Starting from the main menu, we first select “Envelope” from the Toolbar or click “Envelope” and then “Single Address” from the Communicate Menu. CC displays the Envelope data entry screen. We first select the type of envelope to print and then check the box to include our return address, if necessary. If we were printing an envelope for a contact or client already in our database, we would click the “Lookup” button first to find the contact in our address books. However, if we wanted to print a new address that isn’t already entered in CC, we would simply type in the address information, click “Print” to either “Preview” or “Print” our envelope, and then click “Cancel” when finished to return to the envelope’s data entry screen. We can save this envelope we have created by clicking the “Save” button and giving the envelope a name. The next time we need to print an envelope, we can first click “Open” to open any of our saved envelopes. In addition, we can add this contact to our client, public contact, or personal contact address books by clicking the “Save Address” button on the right-hand side of the screen. If we want to print a self-addressed envelope for return mail, we can swap the mailing and return addresses on the envelope by clicking the “Swap” button. We could even change the return address by either typing in a new one or using the “Lookup” to find an alternate address in one of our address books. Printing a single address label or postcard is the same as printing a single address envelope except that you must first select the correct label or postcard type in the drop-down list.

Selecting Multiple Addressees to Print
 To print multiple address envelopes, labels or postcards, you must select the multiple address option for the media you are printing. For this example, we will print multiple address labels for all of our clients. We first select “Labels” and then “Multiple Addresses” from the Communicate Menu. The first selection we will make on this screen is the label type, so we click the “Select Label” button located to the right of our current label selection. We want to use Avery Label 5160, so we must first change our printer to one that supports those type of labels. The default printer for your labels is set through the configuration wizard, so you may have to change it depending upon whether your printer will support the 5160 Avery Labels. We change our printer to a laser printer that we will load with our labels. Next we choose the 5160 Avery Labels as the label type and click “Select” to return to the multiple address label screen. Note that the label we have selected is not large enough to print our return address, so that option is no longer available and we cannot select any options regarding our return address.

Next, we click our “Lookup” button to take us to the “Lookup” screen where we make our addressees selection. We want to print a label for our clients, so we change the address book selection from the default “All My Contacts” to “My Clients” and we see our list get smaller. Additionally, if wanted to further narrow down our list, we could do so by selecting filter options. Since we want to print a label for all clients, we select the “Mark All” option to select all of the clients on the screen and then we click “Select” to return to the multiple address labels screen. Next we click “Print” to go to our print/preview screen. Note that with labels, we can select precisely where we want to start printing our labels. This option makes it handy if you have used some labels previously on a sheet and you want to start printing on a different label from the first one in column one, row one. Since we are using a new sheet, we will start from column and row one. We now click “Preview” to see what the printed labels will look like and after verifying our printer is loaded with the correct labels in the correct printer tray, we simply click the printer icon in the preview screen. Once finished, we close the preview screen, the print options screen, and the multiple address labels screen.

 

Postcard Message Wizard

Background
 Client Communiqué easily allows you to create, save, and send postcards to pre-defined groups of clients and contacts using the Postcard Message Wizard. For instance, you may need to send all of your tax clients a postcard to inform them of a new tax law. The Postcard Message Wizard contains many preformatted postcard layouts. You simply type in your message and print as many postcards as you like. You can then print multiple addresses by selecting that option under the Postcard option in the Communicate Menu. Unlike the Single Addressee and Multiple Addressees Postcard Printers which print mailing addresses on postcards, the Postcard Message Wizard is used for printing pre-formatted messages on the letter-side of postcards.

The Postcard Message Wizard

  1. Select Your Postcard Type
     This step allows you to select the postcard type and template to use for your postcard message. Options on this page are described below.

  1. Entering Your Postcard Contents
     This step allows you to enter the contents of your postcard. The following fields are contained on this page:

  1. Step #3 - Print Options
     The final step in the Postcard Message Wizard is to preview, print, or save the postcard message.  The following fields and buttons are contained on this page:

Creating, Saving, and Printing Postcards
 Starting from the main menu, select “Postcards” from the Communicate Menu and then select the Postcard Message Wizard. On the first screen of the wizard we select the layout and postcard type for our postcards. We will choose the type of postcard to print as Avery #5389 – Laser Postcard (2 postcards per sheet). We will leave the default format for our postcards as business and click “Next” to continue to the next screen where we will then enter our message text to be printed on our postcard. Note, that if we had previously entered and saved a postcard message, we could first click “Open” which will display a grid containing any messages we have previously created and saved in the wizard. CC allows us to save an unlimited number of postcard messages, so that in the future, we can select any previously saved postcard message, edit the message text and then save the new postcard message. CC also shows you the last time that our saved postcard message was modified and even allows us to search our saved messages. Since we are creating a new message, we can click cancel here and then “Next” to continue with the rest of the wizard.

The next screen allows us to enter our message text for the postcard. We can type the header or subject line of the postcard and then the body of the message we would like to convey to our clients. At the bottom of the screen we can select whether we want a 1 or 2 column footer for our company information. In this case we select the 1 column footer for our postcard. Additionally, we can also select a .jpg to print at the bottom of the card for our company logo, etc.

We then click “Next” to bring up the printer and postcard selection screen. After verifying that our printer selection is correct, we select the number of copies of this postcard we would like to print. Notice that we can also change the actual postcard we want to print as well. This enables us to re-use our sheet of postcards and select which sheet (1 of 2) that we would like to print. In this case, we will print an entire sheet of 2 postcards, so we select 2 copies and we see that both of the postcards on our sheet are now highlighted indicating that the entire sheet of 2 postcards will be printed. We can click “Save” to save this postcard and its message text for printing later or maybe to modify the message text slightly for some of our other clients. Next, we can click “Print” or “Preview” to either print or preview our 2 postcards on the screen. Finally, we click “Finish” to exit the Postcard Message Wizard.

 

Composing and Sending Emails

Background
 Composing and sending emails is easy using Client Communiqué. To compose an email, simply select the “Email” button on CC’s toolbar or select “Compose New Email” from the “Email” option located in the Communicate menu. If you have not already done so, make sure to setup your outgoing email information first in the Configuration Wizard located in the File menu before composing any email messages in CC.

The "Compose New Email" option allows you to compose and send an email message through the Internet.  The following options are available on this screen:

Composing and Sending an Email to Selected Clients
 Starting from the main menu, click the “Email” button on the toolbar or select “Compose New Email” located under the “Email” option in the Communicate menu. Since you are able to enter up to 3 separate outgoing email addresses, you will first want to select the appropriate outgoing email address for the email you are about to compose. Next, we can either type in our recipient’s email address or click the “To:” button to lookup the address where we would like to send this email. Note, that you can go right down the list of addresses in CC and mark the ones that will receive this email. To select a pre-defined group, just drop-down the list from the Primary Filter list and select the group for this email. Here we will select the companies located in our “Tax Clients” group and then we will click the “Mark All” button to select all of the companies in this group as the recipients of our email. Now, we click “Select” which takes us back to our email dialog box. Here we can see that all of the email addresses of our intended recipients have been placed in the “To:” field.

Next, we can select carbon copies and/or blind carbon copies to be sent to other users. These buttons work the same way as the “To:” button, so we can select other companies or even another group that is to receive the copies. In this case we do not need copies emailed, so we omit any entries in these fields. Moving down the page, we can click on any attachments we want to send to these recipients. Note, that if you already have an HTML document created, there is a checkbox to use the HTML document as the body of your message. In this case, we have no attachments, nor HTML documents for this message, so we simply omit an entry here and skip down to the “Subject” line to enter the subject of our message.
Since this message will be sent to our Tax Clients group, we will type “Important Tax Update!” as our subject line. Moving down, we then type in the body of the message. Once we are finished typing in our message, we can select a signature for this email by either clicking the drop-down to expose signatures already set up in CC or the ellipsis (“…”) button to locate a signature for this email. Alternatively, you can omit the signature by selecting “None” if you don’t want a signature entered for the email. Finally, you may click the checkbox to save this email message if you like so that we can send it to our other users in the future. Next, click “Send” to send the email to all intended recipients. Once you click “Send”, the email is sent to the recipients and the information contained in the message is saved to your hard drive. Note, that you can print a report from the reports menu that will give you a list of all recipients for this message that have been emailed so far from CC.

 

Creating and Saving Faxes

Background
 Creating and saving fax transmittals is easy using the Fax Transmittal Wizard in Client Communiqué. The Fax Transmittals Wizard is used for quickly filling out and printing fax cover sheets. This section describes the steps required to print fax transmittals.

  1. Select Your Fax Transmittal Template
    This step will allow you to choose the template to use for the fax transmittal sheet.  The options on this page are described below.

  1. From... and To... Options
    T    his step will allow you to enter who is sending the fax and select how many recipients will be receiving the fax. The following fields and buttons are located on this page.

  1. Recipient, Header, and Notes/Comments Options
     If the single recipient option was selected on the second page of the wizard, you will be prompted to enter the contact name, phone number, and fax number of the fax recipient.  Otherwise, if the multiple recipient option was selected, you must select the recipients by checking the appropriate contacts on the lookup screen that is accessed by clicking the lookup button. The following fields and buttons are contained on this page:

  1. Fax Transmittal Print Options
     The final step in the Postcard Message Wizard is to preview, print, or save the postcard message.  The following fields and buttons are contained on this page:

Creating and Sending a Fax Transmittal
 Starting from the main menu, click the “Fax” button on the toolbar or select “Fax Transmittals” located in the Communicate menu to start the Fax Transmittal Wizard. Next, we will choose the template to use for our fax by selecting the format style on the left-hand side of the page. Note that as we move through the different selections, we see a preview of each of the different formats on the right-hand side. In this case we will select the “Business” template for our fax. Note, that you can also select a previously created fax if you have one saved already. Since we are creating a new fax we simply select “Next” to move through the wizard. On the next screen, we can type in the information for the sender or use the “Lookup” button to find our own company’s information to use as the sender of this fax. We locate Pro-Ware, LLC by selecting the “Company” field as the search criteria and then type in Pro-Ware as the company. Note that it will not be necessary to type in the entire company name, just a portion of it to place the program’s pointer on the correct company. Once we highlight the correct company, we click “Select” to return to the wizard, where the return address information is filled in with our own company information. We then select multiple clients to receive this fax and then click “Next” to continue.

We intend for this fax to be sent to all of our tax clients, so we first click “Lookup” to go to our contact lookup screen. Next, we choose the entire group of tax clients by selecting the “Tax Clients” group as the criteria for our primary filter. We will then click the “Mark All” button to mark all of our Tax Clients as the recipients of our fax and then we click “Select” to return to the Fax Transmittal Wizard. Finally, we type in our subject line, our carbon copy recipients if any and then select the date for this fax and the number of pages. We click “Next” to proceed to the Notes or Comments page, where we can type in the body of this fax. After typing in the “Notes”, we click “Next”. On this page we could select additional copies of the fax to be printed, if desired. We only want one copy so we leave the number of copies as 1. We can also print or preview the fax by clicking those respective buttons. If the fax looks the way we want it to, we can then save that fax for later access to re-send to other clients or to customize maybe for other clients. Once we have printed our faxes, we can then click “Finish” to leave the Fax Transmittal Wizard.

 

Viewing and Printing Reports

Background
 Viewing and printing reports in Client Communiqué is very easy to do. All of the reports contained in CC can be found under the Reports menu. We can print reports for clients, personal or public contacts, personal or public web links, and group listings or category listings for clients that we have previously set up in CC.

The Reports Menu contains a wide variety of reports to preview on-screen, print to a disk file, or send to a printer.  The list of reports is quite extensive and should easily fulfill your reporting needs.  Reports are separated by the following categories:

Report Specification Screen

When you select any report to print, there are various options available depending on the report you have selected.  The options displayed on the Report Specification Screen, are unique for every report, although many reports contain the same features and options. After selecting your report options, you can then select whether you want to Print, View, or Cancel printing reports altogether. When "Print report to file" is checked, a dialog box will be displayed allowing you to print the report to PDF, DOC, RTF, XLS, TXT, HTML, or XML format.

Viewing and Printing Various Reports
 Starting from the main menu, we will first select “Client Reports” from the Reports menu. This option gives us the ability to print the entire detail of any client desired, to print all of the clients in CC in just one listing, or to print the entire Client Listing with any “Tax”, “Group”, or “Communiqué” information already entered in the program. In this case we are interested in printing the entire detail for just one client, Pro-Ware, LLC and just to contrast this report to the client listing for all clients we will also print the Client Listing for all clients. To print these two reports, we can check the box for both options. We can then click view to view the first detailed report to screen. Here on this report we can see the entire detail for Pro-Ware, LLC. Once we are viewing this report, we can click the printer icon if the report is the one we want. Alternatively, since it is not necessary to view any of the reports first, we could have clicked the “Print” button instead of the view button. Note also that you may print these reports to file by checking the “Print to File” box in the lower left-hand corner. After we are finished viewing the first report, we can close it by clicking either the “X” in the upper right-hand corner or by clicking the “Exit” icon (which resembles a closing door). When we close the first report, the next report is generated automatically and opened in the view screen. Since this report has more than one page, we are able to navigate one page forward or backward or jump to the first or last page of the report as desired. When printing any of the Client Listing reports, we can select the filter option to print a particular group of clients or leave it as is to print all clients. In addition to these reports for clients, we could also print similar reports for either our personal or our public contacts. These reports are located directly beneath the Client Reports option in the Reports Menu.

Looking at the remaining reports available, we find that we can print either personal or public web links, using similar formats and options to the personal and public contact reports. Note that you will only have contact and web link reports for those contacts and web links you have entered into CC. For instance, if you have only public contacts and web links that are shared with other users, you will have no personal contacts or personal web links to view. Client Communiqué will notify us when there are no web links or contacts to print.

We can also print various Group Listing Reports by selecting the Group Reports option in the Reports menu. Here, we can print our different groups we have set up in CC and include assigned clients as well. We can print all groups and all clients and contacts assigned to a particular group or we can choose just one group to be printed for all clients. Since groups pertain specifically to our clients and contacts, we can have any client assigned to more than just one group. Likewise, contacts and clients do not need to be assigned specifically to a group.

Finally, we can print category reports for any web links that we have entered in CC. Web links can be assigned to various categories and the category reports work for web links much the same as groups work for clients and contacts.  

 

Importing Contacts and Web Links

Background
Importing Contacts and Web Links is easy to do with Client Communiqué. The Import Contacts Wizard found under the File menu, will import client address books from Outlook Express, MS Outlook, Yahoo, Intuit Pro-Series, MS Excel, generic .CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, and Pro-Ware’s Accountant’s Helper. The Import Web Links Wizard, found directly beneath the Import Contacts Wizard, will import web links, or “Favorites” directly from Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla’s FireFox, or Opera internet browsers.

To facilitate users who have entered a great deal of contacts/addresses in other programs and wish to save the time of re-entering these in Client Communiqué, we have included import routines from the more popular programs/file types listed below.

After you start the Import Contacts Wizard, you will be prompted to select the program/file type from which to import. Below the import selection, you can also assign a quick select group to the new contacts when importing.    Within the wizard you can also specify how to handle duplicates from the import.  The options available with regard to duplicates are as follows: 
  The final step in the import is to select which address book (Client Addresses, Personal Addresses, Public Addresses) to import new contacts into.  Select any or all address books by checking the checkbox in the column pertaining to that address book.

Importing Contacts From Your Yahoo Address Book
To demonstrate CC’s Import Wizard we will import our address book contacts from Yahoo. We begin from the main menu, selecting “Import Contacts” from the File menu. The import contacts wizard starts and an overview screen appears informing us of the steps to complete the import process. We click “Next” to advance to the next screen which allows us to select the address book to import our contacts from. We select Yahoo as the address book to import from and then click “Next” to continue. The next screen displays the instructions for importing our Yahoo address book which can be printed by clicking the “Print” button. Looking at the instructions, it is first necessary to export the address book from Yahoo, so we minimize CC, open Internet Explorer (or other browser program we may be using), go to the Yahoo mail login screen, and sign in using our Yahoo user name and password. Once in Yahoo Mail, we click the “Address Book” tab and then click the “Address Options” hyperlink on the right-hand side of the screen. Next, we click the “Import/Export” link and then click “Export Now” next to the “Yahoo CSV” formatting option for the export file. We enter the name and location for this file and, once completed, logout of Yahoo, close Internet Explorer and then maximize CC to continue with the import wizard. Note that these instructions may differ slightly based on the various program’s address books which we are choosing to import. Click “Next” to continue the import contacts process.

Returning to CC, we click the ellipses (…) button to navigate and locate our Yahoo .CSV file. Once we have located and selected the file, we click “Next” to continue. This screen provides us with various importing options regarding the addresses and other contact information currently in our Yahoo address book. For instance, we can choose between work and home for our contact’s address, phone number, email and website from the Yahoo address book. Once we have made the appropriate selections, we click “Next” to continue. On the next screen, we are given the option of having CC determine if duplicate contacts already exist in our contacts file. CC will import all contacts as new, adding the entire contents to our contact file or, alternatively, CC uses either the contact name, company name, or the address as the field to compare as a duplicate record for your current contacts file. In addition, we can view and be prompted when duplicate records are found in our current CC file. In this case, we are importing all new contacts from our Yahoo address book, so we simply click “Next” to continue.

This screen allows us to designate each Yahoo contact as either a client, public contact, or personal contact. We can then designate which address book each address will be imported into by checking the corresponding box. For this tutorial, we click the “Mark All Personal” button so all or our Yahoo addresses are imported into our personal address book on our local hard drive. Alternatively, we could also designate these imported addresses as clients and/or public contacts where they would reside on a shareable network drive which can be accessed by all CC users. Once you have designated all of the contacts to be imported, click “Finish” to complete the wizard. After you click “Finish”, CC will tell you how many contacts were imported and then take you back to the main screen.

Importing web links works much the same way as the Import Contacts Wizard. Simply access the Import Web Links Wizard in the File menu. If you are importing from Internet Explorer, no export is necessary. Once you have designated the web links as personal or public, click “Finish” to complete the Import Web Links Wizard.

 

Summary

The number of features and flexibility of the Client Communiqué program will take some time to discover. Perhaps one of our best features is that you do not need to be familiar with very many to take advantage of its power and convenience. The basic features may be all you ever need, but you can take comfort in knowing that when the need arises, chances are you’ll find a feature that will make short work of the task.

We encourage you to provide us with your feedback. There is an option in the Help menu that will allow you to fax or email your comments to our support staff. Many of the new features we add are a direct result of feedback from our users.

Finally, since support is included with the cost of your software (and upgrades), help is never more than an email or phone call away. We look forward to meeting your continuing needs.