We started using Marketcircle’s Daylite on our Mac computers in the office a few weeks ago as a way to do a better job of keeping in touch with current and potential clients, as well as for tracking status of projects. So the software and database are on our office server, with desktop “clients” connecting to that server database. That way, our whole team sees the same info. It’s designed for any small business that runs on Mac computers.

I can see how this is going to be useful to us as we move forward and grow. Here are just a few of the things we’re going to use it for:

• Following up in a few days with potential clients who have expressed in our services
• Following up after certain client appointments
• Making regular phone calls to our current clients
• Delegating tasks to each other
• Creating a master project and then creating lots of individual tasks to be done for that project

What I’m really enjoying about Daylite:

• I can delegate a task to another employee and actually see if it got done
• Really to create follow-up tasks from existing tasks
• Really easy to create custom “activity sets”–for example, for a potential client, with one click I can set up follow-up calls for 3, 5, and 10 days later
• Great for showing how people are related to each other, especially which clients referred us to which other clients
• I can see the content of all the emails received from and sent to a specific person, including emails sent by my colleagues

What I’m still sorting out:

• Keyboard shortcuts: Too much mouse clicking. I need to set as many keyboard shortcuts as I can, to speed up data entry.
• Lots of customization and options: It’s a little overwhelming. We’re still regularly discovering functionality, and figuring out how to make it work for us.
• Workflow: We’re still creating company-wide solutions for how to do a series of steps, and I’m sure we will continue to standardize these among us.
• The iPhone and iPad versions (“Daylite Touch”) seem to be limited in terms of functionality, compared to the desktop application
• Need to decide how to integrate Daylite with our current invoicing system, or am I moving to the Billings software (which is made to integrate with Daylite)?