Create Your Perfect Event Planner Invoice Template for Management

Event planner invoice template for Management

- And welcome to Basecamp Customer Success office hours. We're gonna be focusing on event planning and I hope I can see some of you in the chat right now. The first thing I wanna tell you is that we will be demoing Basecamp with the product, we'll be demoing it live. And then we're actually gonna go through a project setup that has been used in event planning. So you'll be able to see exactly how Basecamp can function for you for all the different kinds of event planning that we, that you might be encountering. And so I also want you to know that this is not just one-sided. You'll have an opportunity to get any specific questions that you have answered and we'll also show you some best practices, just some things that might be really helpful for you as an event planner and especially using Basecamp. And if we have time, we'll also share a couple of new features that are just gonna make everything a lot easier for you. That's always our goal, but I think it's nice to be able to see it, especially to talk with us about it. And so a little bit about me. Again, my name is Ashley, my name is always there on the corner on the bottom side. And I've been with Basecamp for over six years. And I've moved from the customer support team over to the customer success team where I spend a lot of my time speaking with all of you actually. Mostly in one-on-one situations, sometimes in team training situations. So if you feel like you need specific help after this session, reach out to me, reach out to Rodrigo. We are the two that will be helping you with any kind of one-on-one assistance. And so that's guides@basecamp.com, and our friends will put that in the chat here. And that is actually another note I wanna mention that chat, some of you have found it and I'm so glad. So please do use that chat, it reaches all of us who are on the success team at Basecamp and then it reaches everyone else in this session. And so we'll be able to answer any questions. And you know, if I can ask you really quick, could you let me know where you're from? I will start, I will toss in. I'm currently based in Prescott, Arizona, so let us know where you are right now. And then also underneath the chat option, there is a question mark option, and that is our Q&A section. So if you have a question, put it there, or we'll move it from chat over to there. And then you might even see others in that space and say, you know what, I had that exact same question, let me upvote it. So two places to kind of keep in mind. And then the last thing here is that there is a poll, underneath the Q&A. And if you go ahead and click on that, I would love to know kind of what part, oh actually I think my poll is, let us know kind of what your experience is with Basecamp. Have you ever used it before? You've maybe used it before but not recently, just kind of let us know a little bit more of of how that, how your experiences with Basecamp so far. And so with that, let me go ahead and bring someone else to the main stage. This is Laura. Laura is the head of the customer success team and I'll let her speak a little bit more. - Hi Ashley, good morning everyone, or good afternoon, depending on where you're located, maybe even good evening. I lead customer success here at Basecamp, I'm glad you've all joined us today. I've been with the company for about a little over a year and we've been running the function for that long. So while it's a little bit newer considering how long Basecamp has been around, it's certainly something that we were working on, bringing just educational resources to all of you. And if you've opened an account recently, you'll have seen me pop up in your messages, so it's nice to put a face to the name. Welcome anyway. After the session, I'll follow up with a link for the session recording so you can follow along or you can watch it later or you can share it with anyone else who hasn't been able to join us today. There will also be a separate link if you have any feedback or questions for future sessions that you'd like to share with us. Thanks for being here. - Awesome. All right, and then the star of our show, the star of our lives, Kimberly will be joining us in a moment here, but she used to be an event planner. I'll let her tell you all about that. But what she does now is that she focuses on customer education on the success team through video format. So if any of you have seen her before in her videos, you know how informative she is, you know how thorough she is. And so I wanna show you just a little bit of one of those videos. So let me go ahead and- - Campfire works really well when you're working with clients. You could have one Campfire that only your internal team sees and a separate Campfire tool that's shared with the client. This keeps both chat features within the same project, but divides them into private and client facing categories. I have a separate video about working with clients in Basecamp, so make sure to check that out if you haven't already. The beauty of Basecamp is that it's incredibly flexible and it can grow with you as your project grows. If you start with one docs and file tool and then find that there are more items than you can keep up with, you can easily add a second one and reorganize some things. You can move items between tools. Hello everyone. Excited that you guys are here. Ashley, I think you're on mute, so unmute yourself if you wanna chat with me. You're back. I realized earlier today that I'm wearing the same shirt I was wearing in that video. I promise I do have other clothes that are not Basecamp branded, just to clear that up. So as Ashley mentioned, I used to be an event planner, a wedding specifically, did some corporate and non-profit events for really my entire career. Worked for myself with my own planning business for almost 12 years. Prior to that, worked in corporate events. So I have a long history with event planning and was also a Basecamp user. So when I first started my event planning company, as many of you probably have been in this situation, as soon as you have more than one client, you're like, I need to figure out a system. Because people are doing different things at different times. Event might be next week and an event might be in a year and everyone's doing different things at different times and you need a system to keep track of it all. So I originally just started researching some project management software. My husband is actually in software development and he gave me what I thought was really great advice at the time. Like find the best tool, not necessarily one that is industry specific. Back then when I started my business in 2011, there weren't a lot of these like niche software situations like there are now. But that's a piece of advice he's always given me. Like find the best tool, not necessarily one that's specifically made for what you do, because there's a lot of people making great software out there. So I found Basecamp in 2011, was on the original version of Basecamp, what we called Basecamp Classic. And then I transitioned to Basecamp 2, gosh maybe 2015? And then transitioned more recently to Basecamp 3 in like 2020 actually, pandemic times, I had some free time. And now we call Basecamp 3, Basecamp 4, it's the most up to date version. I know some of you have reached out to me, some of you I know personally have reached out and said that you're on earlier versions. So I'm really excited to show you the most up to date Basecamp 4 version that we're working on now and kind of talk you through that transition if you have questions about that, let me know in the chat. As Ashley said, I make video tutorials. I think Rodrigo's put that link in the chat. And Jillian, you mentioned I used to have a previous event industry podcast. I also host our company podcast called Rework, I put that link in the chat as well. So if you're looking for another podcast to follow, it's a great one. It's with our founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, all about a better way to work and run your business. So I was actually a podcast follower of theirs before I ever started working here. It's a really great line for just good sound business advice. - Fully agree. - I think that's all I got before we get started. Hi friends, Andrea, Molly, it's good to see Kawania. I know some of you which is pretty exciting, and those of you I don't know will be fast friends. - Indeed. So next I'm gonna ask Kimberly to share her screen and kind of let you all see what Basecamp looks like for her event planning business. And so if you do have those questions, put them in the chat or put them in that Q&A section and we will make sure that they do get answered once she's done showing us a little bit more of how things work for her. Perfect Kimberly, whenever you're ready. - So I'm gonna walk you through, keep in mind all of these events are in the past, so I'm gonna be going kind of backwards in history. But Basecamp was something I was had open every single day of my event planning life. This is my home screen. And most of these were archived because they were in the past. I brought them up just to kind of give you guys a view for what things look like. So this is the new Basecamp 4, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, you can add your company logo so that it is a little bit more branded. Each of these squares is a project, and for me they were each individual events. Clients were involved in every single one of my projects. So some people use Basecamp only with their internal team. I think Basecamp really shines to be perfectly honest, when you invite clients into your projects, because you can control what parts of the project they can see and you can have one place for all your communication with them. So I often would tell clients like don't text me, don't send me an email, don't text me, don't like send a carrier pigeon, like put it in Basecamp. Like that's the only way you're gonna get information from my team. And for us internally, it helped me and my assistant really stay on top of all of the tasks and responsibilities. Those of you who are in any kind of event, whether it's weddings or corporate or nonprofit, you know there's like a million tasks that go into planning and Basecamp is really not to make a sales pitch, but really helped me keep organized with all those things. So on my home screen you can see I've pinned one project up here, this is the one I'm gonna walk you through. But all of these are individual projects in this recently visited section. They are sorted alphabetically, and I would organize them by date. So I would title the project by the event date so that they would automatically be sorted in event order. You could pin any project and they come out here to the top and when they're at the top you can drag and drop them into any order that you would like. I think that's what you should know about the home screen. Oh, the other thing to know is, each of my clients would have access to just their project. So while my screen shows all of these projects and my assistant who worked with me saw all these projects, each of these individual people are only seeing theirs. So their screen is gonna look a little bit different, it's just gonna have that one project that they're working on with us. So I'm gonna pop into this project here. This is, oh gosh, 2021. Those of y'all remember those times frequently, well. Up here is what we call the lineups. You can see the date this event started. This is the day I did a welcome message in Basecamp for this client, 2019. And then their event was 30 months later because we had a pandemic in the middle of that. So a longer planning period, but you can see kind of the span of time that that event happened. Up here at the top you can see the people who were on the project. So there's three people who are marked as the client. I have a groom, a mom, and a bride, all our clients on this project. I'm here, my assistant Stephanie, and then we had an intern during the summer period of time, so she also had access to this project. With Basecamp, we can customize how things look and we'll kind of talk you through that in a bit. But for this project I had a message board, to-dos, which as you guys know, so much of what we do is based on tasks and to-dos, and docs and files. Campfire, which is like a casual chat, I actually in preparation for this, pulled this up and was like, oh my gosh, we were like chatting in the Campfire on her wedding day! Like that's kind of funny. But this is just for very quick casual conversation. Things that don't necessarily need a long paper trail. This is kind of funny. "Hey Stephanie, your makeup artist has Covid." Like these little quick chat things happen in the Campfire. Schedule, you are not seeing much on the schedule here 'cause everything's in the past. But if you go, I'm gonna click back just a bit to when this event actually happened. And you can see lots of events on the calendar. Not only appointments like bridal portraits, planning calls that we have, also payment due dates. So any task that has a deadline also shows up on the calendar, which is great. These blue dots show you the number of comments on each of these things. So if you can imagine in like previous world, each of these would be an email message or a text message, but they're all consolidated right here, which is great. You can also click into any of these things and see the detail. So for example, I added a task on the to-do list about a final payment for a light up dance floor, assigned it to the mom, gave them the information and gave her a due date. She mailed it, she checked it off the list. So you can really see that progression of how things are happening across the span of an event. If you take that one task, multiply it by 287 or however many tasks are involved in any sort of event, you can quickly see how this kind of organization is really helpful. We also have a link to their guest list. So I used Google Spreadsheets for that because I love that it's really interactive, multiple people can have access at the same time. Mom can be updating addresses at the same time, the groom is, but so instead of uploading individual Excel Spreadsheets, up and down, up and down, save resave, post a new one, it was just a lot easier to link directly to a Google Drive document. So we'll show you kind of how you can do that there too. The other thing I wanna show you here, message board, you can pin messages to the top. So I always start with a welcome message. Anyone who's working in Basecamp, it's something I highly recommend. Which is just walking through like this is what we use and this is how we use it. So it is a standard message I send to everyone. I customize it a little bit for each client, but there's something in the templates which I'll walk you through next that show you how that is set up. Just here's how things you should know. One of the things I like to do. Oh, once a task is completed, check it off. Like I'm just giving them instructions when files are attached, they'll show up here, et cetera, et cetera. And then last but not least, to-dos. Obviously a lot of these are completed, most of these are completed, they're really probably all completed. This view here is actually the card view. Ashley, this is the view you like for to do's. - Yes, because I like to add colors to these different lists, it just makes me feel happy. - So yep, you can do that with that little dot at the right and change any of these to any color that you would like. - Right, but what you probably see is like the list view. - Yep, so the list view is actually something I usually look at, which lists everything in any order. You can drag these as you would like, you can actually move items from one to-do list, oh right here, to another. And then you can also see comments on every task. So it's great. I kind of mentioned that blue dot and how that is individual emails that would happen. So here's a perfect example, I have a task hiring musicians for a ceremony. You can just see this long back and forth combination. Mom says it's good, bride's like yes, back and forth, all of these, here's the contract, it's signed, here's a receipt. All of that is connected to this one task and then it gets checked off the list. So it's not 18 emails, it's messages all connected to one task, which I think is really helpful. Ashley, is there anything else I need to show? Oh, you know what? Let's go to docs and files, because what you'll see here are these yellow highlights which indicate what the client can see. So as I mentioned before, Basecamp is really great when working with clients. And one of the things I love about it is you can decide what the client has access to and what they can't. And we'll show you that as well. In here, the yellow bars indicate which files they can see. So you can see this hitched events internal. It is only private to our team, no one else can see it. We have a list of Instagram hashtags, et cetera, handles for them. But all of the yellow items are things that they have access to, and we can control all of that from the message boards, docs and files to pretty much everything, which is really nice. - I wanna mention one thing. Is that I think one of the main benefits that I discovered even when I wasn't working in in event management is that when I moved over to Basecamp, before I was at Basecamp, one of the main things that it solved was that all the conversations and all the files and all everything was in one location. And so if I was looking for something, I didn't have to first search WhatsApp, and then texts, and then emails, and then maybe it's my other email address, and then maybe I should check in with this person. So that whole process was just eliminated because I was able to click on the find button and then look for the words there. And so if you can look by specific project, you can look for maybe all chairs across all projects. So looking at having all your information in one location is just so vital. It's so much easier and so much less stressing. - Yes. And Ashley mentioned the search function, the find up here, like just type in any keyword and you can see, like I picked flip flop. There's receipts for flip flops, there's links to flip flop, there's baskets for flip flops, there's a dog with a picture of flip flops, like everything related to a keyword word pops up across projects, which is really helpful. I'm gonna go ahead and jump into templates because I think anytime you're doing repetitive events, whether it's the same nonprofit gala that happens once a year or a wedding that has a similar structure, any kind of event that's repetitive, I think creating a template is the way to go. So let me show you how to do that. And I actually have made some updates to my project template since working here because there's things I learned that I didn't know Basecamp could do. So I kind of set up my ideal template if I were starting over from scratch. So when you go to make a new project, you would go to use a template. I already have some templates loaded here, so we would go to edit templates. And you can see I have a full wedding planning and event coordination. So any non-event that we're just coordinating has its own template as well, but let's click into this one. This is basically the structure or framework for any wedding planning project that I would have. So you can see that message board post that I mentioned, I've written it here. And of course I would edit it and make it more specific to the client and so on and so forth, but it's just a standard message that I want everyone to see when they get started on that message board. To-dos. This is a lot, because as we know there's a lot of tasks. And so what I would do during my setup is create tasks that are specific to my team as well as tasks that the client could see. And then once we spin up a project, which I will show you, you can pick and choose which of those lists the client can see. So for me, I just use all caps with our company name just for my own, knowledge about which ones I'm not gonna share with the client, and I really broke down every single task that I could think of. Like I'm gonna get a contract, they're gonna countersign it, we're gonna upload it somewhere, et cetera, et cetera. We're giving them give client access to Basecamp, making sure to hide the private tasks, like that is a to-do. All the way from, we're sending them a welcome gift, we're adding a note about blogging about their wedding, accounting tasks. So these are all group tasks, deposit payment, second payment, third payment, final payment, if they need to pay us. And then we get into tasks that are client specific. So I've divided it out by timeframe. Again, this could be any division. You could make it divisible by catering, and have just a full catering list. For wedding specific events, things are so time based and things have to happen in a particular order, so I have it divided out like this, this is how it works for me. Basecamp is super flexible, so you can use it how it works best for you. 10 to 12 months out, you can say I have all of these tasks, budgets, and payments. One thing I love about Basecamp is you can easily remind clients, I kind of showed you before, oh here's a payment, mom paid it, she checked it off. Anytime I would have a contract booked, let's say it's a band and they're paying a deposit, and then two weeks before the wedding or a month before the wedding or events, they have a final payment due. Like we all kind of know that scenario. I would always add a new task and assign a due date and assign a person, maybe give them payment details. So I have this budgets and payments category across multiple months. There's not a task here, but if I had a new one, let's say there's a remaining balance due to someone, to the band, I can give it a due date. This is a template, so you're not gonna see a specific date. We can talk about that, and I would add it there on the actual product. You guys get the idea, it's really broken down thinking through all of it. I think I would suggest that's the great place to start is just brain dump all of your tasks and organize it into a template. You can always edit your template too. So over the course of years, there were tasks that we would add because you know, dance party, dance floor props became a thing. So that was a new task that we started adding to our templates. Or, using hashtags on your wedding became a thing at some point. So we would add a task to the template. So every time we spun up a new project for a new client, that new task would show up. You'll also see that I have files and contracts, I made folders for every single category in the template. Schedule, added a schedule to the template. And then here you'll see two Campfires. So Campfire, as I mentioned, is that kind of casual chat tool. With clients accessing a project, you can decide if they have access to Campfire or not. And so I on this one made two separate Campfires, one which the client can Campfire with us, and then an internal one where me and my assistant could Campfire amongst ourselves and the client couldn't see it. So in order to do that, you would just go up here to these three dots, change or rename tools and you can add any tool, you can duplicate any tool. If you just wanted to add another, if you wanted two separate message boards for any reason, two separate to-do lists, et cetera, you can do that here. And I actually, that video clip that we played is from a video about customizing project tools. Laura or Rodrigo, if you guys will drop that in the chat. It's a good one to kind of explain all the different tools and why you might want more than one in a project. From here, let's go to the homepage. Ashley, interrupt me if you want me to go in a different direction, but I was gonna spin up a new project if that works. - I was gonna say we should set up a new project, so perfect. - Perfect, so let's just make a test project, we're just gonna call this test event. I could add start in and end dates, so we're gonna say that that starts today and it ends next month, which is amazing. We're gonna create this project. So that's starting a project from scratch. Yes, simple to do. You can also start a project from a template. So I'm gonna go here, use a template, I'm gonna choose my template and what we're gonna call this test event from a template. - Test wedding. - And I'm just gonna create this. So Basecamp will take a minute, it will spin it all up and you'll see the template that we were just showing you as a base project. - I think one of the best parts is that maybe the dates that you figured out beforehand, you're like, all right, I know I need this week for day one. That just is already gonna show up in the schedule. So if Kimberly had to set that up, it would just be there. So these things you don't have to think about twice once you actually hit create this project. And you can even delay when that happens. So if you're like, all right, it's April, this doesn't start technically until May, like mid-May, then you can even choose a later start date. - Absolutely. And one of the things that I would do, I made my template very generic, which I think works. I would, before I invited a client to a project that's 10 to 12 months out, I would be very specific. So that's between now and May of 2023, I'm making that up. But they see these new headers that make sense for them. Because as you guys know, if you're doing any kind of event planning, you might have a client who's hiring you for an event in two weeks, and you might have a client who's hiring you for an event in 14 months. So you have to kind of make adjustments for each individual project. So that template is kind of the framework. And then once I spin up a project, I'd make it specific for the actual client. - While we're in this particular project, can you actually change the start and end date for the lineup? - I sure can. - So that we can kind of show that when we have a smaller event like we made previously, just a moment ago or a smaller project for a smaller event, we have that timeline. Well if you have an an additional project with a longer timeline or just any other timeline, they're gonna show up in the same location on your homepage in the lineup. - So with that edit project details, I've added start and end dates to this now. So you can see it upfront. Says it hasn't started yet 'cause I did the start date as tomorrow, it ends June 28th. And then if I go to the lineup, like Ashley mentioned, you see this event that started today and then this other event that I just created, which will start tomorrow. If you had multiple events being planned all at the same time, you would see them layered on that same lineup page. - Definitely. - Let's see, test event from a template. Let me see if I can add a client to this project so I can on client access to it. Actually Laura, I'm gonna invite you to this project. So the first thing to do is you have to add a client to the project with this button. So you can't turn on client access without really hitting this button first to say yes, I want clients to have access to this event. So this is what client do I want to add, let's call this the Laura's Wedding. - I'm already married but I got excited. - I'm gonna take you through how this would work 'cause it's a little, not tricky, but it's a multi-step process, and let's actually drop in the chat, there's a video about working with clients, it's very specific into how you set them up, all the stages of the process. So I'm gonna go here and I'm looking for Laura. It's not that Laura, so, hmm, she's not there, which is weird. So I would go back and add her to my account. So you first have to invite someone to an account before you can invite them to a project. This screen is really important because this is someone who works with me, meaning they have access to everything. This client is what you want, if you want to ch turn on or off access to particular parts of the project. So I'm gonna add Laura here. I dunno why I can't type as soon as I'm like having people in front of me. - It's always that. - So Laura, that's your email address, she's from Laura's wedding. She's gonna get an email inviting her to my account and then I'm gonna choose which projects I want her to see. And the only thing I want her to see is test event from a template. All of these other events she won't even know exist, the only thing she's gonna see is this test event from template. So I'll change those changes, here we go. And now you'll see this LR, which is Laura, she is the client, she has that yellow circle indicating she's a client. And that yellow circle kind of transfers everywhere across the project. So right now, Laura can access my Basecamp account. She knows that this project exists, but she literally does not see anything on this page and that's because I haven't turned it on for her. So I do want her to see the welcome message, so I would just go up here and change that to allowing her to see it. And now Laura can see that message. Same thing with to-dos, I would go to my to-dos here. I don't want her to see all these client onboarding tasks. I don't need her to know I'm writing her a thank you note. She doesn't need to know about all the accounting things, but she does need to know about this. So I could go here, change this, and allow the client to see it. And now those are the to-dos that she will see on her project. Internal chat, she doesn't need to know about it, so I'm gonna keep it private. This is just me for my internal team, but I do want her to be able to chat with all of us. So I would change that here as well, allow the client to see it. So it's one of my favorite parts about Basecamp, it is private by default as we say, and you have to physically make the change for it to be public. - Very true. We actually got a question in from someone who says, are we able to see what it looks like on Laura's end? And while you're logged in is Kimberly, Kimberly cannot see what it looks like on Laura's end, but it's so similar but if you'd like, I can show you what it looks like for me to be in a project. - As a client. - As a client. And let me just kind of adjust my screen sharing. - Yeah, I will stop sharing that and let you. - Thank you. Share this one, I'll share this tab. So here hopefully we can see it in just a moment here. But this is a project that Kimberly actually invited me to. And I'm a client here, and so I don't see anything yellow around my own name or anything like that. I see that there are different tools, but when I go into docs and files, I only see one item. I can actually create new items as a client because we have a very kind of trusting platform. And so if someone, that's part of why we write that welcome message so that we kind of outline our expectations and kind of best practices for other people that are joining us in Basecamp. We want folks to be able to truly collaborate. And so I can see in the to-do section, I can see just a certain number of to-do lists. But anything that's not visible to me, I would just have no clue, I have no idea that it's there. So the look is very similar. We're just missing that kind of yellow indicator and you know, there's no way I can keep it from Kimberly's, so I don't have that option to make it private to the client, it's just kind of is. Hopefully that one helps. - Yeah, that's great. - And then someone also asked, I would love, oh chilling. I would love some best practices for the non-client or non-company contacts that are integrated into a Basecamp project, so like a photographer that doesn't need to see everything. Kimberly, I don't know if you wanna speak a little bit about how clients act as like one group of people? - Yeah, absolutely. So I actually did not invite vendors into my Basecamp project, but if you wanted to, you could, I would just set them up as "a client." So we're saying the word client, but that client is really anyone who you want to control access to parts of a project. So don't let that kind of terminology get you messed up. But you could invite a DJ into it and only show them tasks related to them. When it comes to selecting music or final walkthroughs or anything like that, you could have those specific tasks involved with those specific people, and only let them see everything else. I will say this, and Ashley correct me if I'm misspeaking. Clients are kind of bucketed into one category. So if you had a caterer, and a DJ, and a photographer, you can't control what the photographer sees versus what the caterer sees. It's either client access on or client access off. So you might wanna kind of think through that. - Yes, I actually, let me propose a potential solution if that's not striking someone super well, let me do a another Chrome tab, let's do this. I have like five different windows up, so hopefully this is the correct one. All right, so what you could do, for example, this is a project that I have with a, again a starting an end date. We're going into docs and files, and let's say that I need someone to receive this invoice, but I don't want to, or this is for the photographer. And they don't really need to be in the Basecamp account. And so what I can do is that I can use these three dots next to basically anything and then choose get a public link. And so what this does is that it generates a way for someone outside of your Basecamp account to really see what's inside of Basecamp without having any kind of access. There's also an interesting thing here, if I go back into the file specifically, we can see that there's a conversation here, just a heads up, I emailed this, and Kimberly, we love this format, et cetera, et cetera. So all this information is not visible to someone outside of the company. So comments are private, but the kind of the meat potatoes of what it is that you're trying to share can be shared with someone else. And so if you're on a trial account and you're not seeing this, that's because it's for paid customers only. I think that's like literally the only feature we don't allow for trial users. So just a couple things to note, but that could be an alternative for you. - That's a great solution Ashley. And what I did personally is I used Basecamp for all of my clients because that was the majority of the people I was communicating with and needed to be on board. And then I used my email for all other vendors. So I would have a separate email conversation and then put the results in Basecamp. Or get the contract through email and then post it for my client in Basecamp. That's how I worked, but there's lots of ways that you can work with the product. - Yeah, definitely. There is also something else. There are just like a couple functionality questions that I wanna get to. So first is that, does the Basecamp schedule/due dates, do they show an internal Google calendar? So I'll talk about dates and we'll get to how to change dates in bulk too. So for this, what you can do is that we have a couple of dates here that are coming from a few different sources. The ones with the check mark or the option to check it off, they're coming from to-dos. This standalone one is just one I entered in by clicking on new event. And so you have two choices here. One is that you can click on a singular event and say I wanna add this to my individual calendar, this single occurrence to my Google, Apple or Outlook calendar. And so you can definitely make sure that you are getting whatever's in Basecamp into your external calendar. But I also really just kind of prefer to do add this schedule to your, add this entire schedule to Google, Outlook. So that way amongst all my other things, I will have a project in or rather an additional calendar in my external one that says, last name, first name, and then the event itself. And I can see all the different dates, all the different tasks, almost all the other things I need to do that are outside of Basecamp in one location. So I highly recommend clicking on add this schedule to your external calendar. But if you're like, you know what, I just need to see all my events in Basecamp. Then click on activity at the top of the page and then on upcoming dates it'll pull everything from all projects you're a part of into one location, and you can even subscribe to that as well. So again, you have a lot of choice, but we wanted to make it integrated with whatever it is that you currently use, since we know folks are using Google, Outlook and Apple pretty heavily. - Okay, Ashley, I'm gonna jump in because this feature, this being able to subscribe to individual calendars is one of the things that when I moved from Basecamp 2 to the newer version, I was like, oh, this is a game changer. Because what I used to have to do is, I'd have an event that I'd post in Basecamp for my clients, and then I'd also have to put it on my own personal calendar as like a 2X4, or like my assistant would be trying to schedule something for me and she'd have to look at one calendar and they wouldn't sync up. Now I just subscribe to each of those client calendars and I use Apple Calendar personally, so I would have each of my clients' individual calendars color coded, so I could see at any point in time, who's at a tasting, who's at a dress fitting, who's going to cake tasting all in one place? So it's one of my favorite transition features from the older version to the newer version. - Absolutely. That one's pretty important to me too. There is also, there's a question here about adjusting dates. - Yes, it's right here from Robin. How do you manage things when dates change? Is there a way to change dates for multiple items? - So there is, there is a way. So let's go back to the to-do section of this particular project. I have something funky here called a hill chart, which is 100% optional. So if a visual like this is pleasing to you as it is to me, then you can adjust your to-do list to kind of fall onto this hill chart, and they have nothing to do with dates at all. So just wanted to explain that briefly, and if there are questions, I'm happy to answer them. But what I do wanna show you here is that I have a new logo request, and within these contract details, I have all these different dates, right? And so I can actually select all of these by clicking on those three lines to the left of a task. And then I'm holding down the shift button as I click the one on the top. And that gives me choices, it gives me a way to bulk do anything. So here I can bulk assign these five tasks, I can adjust the due dates, I can even move these to a different perhaps list or maybe even a different project or maybe make a copy of them so that they're in two locations at one time. So there are lots of things that you can do here, but let's choose the, let's adjust the dates a little bit. So if they all happen to fall on the same date and you know that you need them to actually be due on the 11th of May, you have that choice. Or what is more likely is that you like the staggered events and then you just need to shift the due dates forward by, you know what, we need 14 days, a full two weeks, or a fortnight. Let me save this. And then those dates have shifted for you. And that is one of my favorite features of Basecamp. - And it's kinda new too. - It's kinda new and I'm really happy about it. But it gives you a way to be able to move these pieces over so that you are not manually clicking into each one and adjusting the date and making sure that this is moving into in the right direction. And so now these new dates, if we go to April 18th, I'm actually gonna click these little dots and get to the schedule. I can see April 18th there, that task was. And so all these things are kind of adjusted on on the schedule. Oh, just a good feature. - Ashley, while we're on to-dos, let's get to Andrew's question about grouping to-dos. I showed it in my template how you can create kind of sub lists as we call them, but groups to-dos. But if you wanna walk through how to do it, that'd be awesome. - Yeah, you can do it at any point. So you can do it when you are in the building of a template, either a project template or a to-do list template, or you can do it on the fly. So I have nothing in my brain, so I'm gonna go ahead and click on just numbers. I'm gonna brain dump everything out, and then what I'm going to do is I can select these different items, I can group them together, and then I can say, this is a new group, maybe this is a color that I wanna add and I can even add, I don't know, some kind of emoji if that makes sense or if that just delights you. So that's one way to make a group. Another way once you're clicked into this list is that you can click on the three dots on the top right hand side and then you click add a group. So two ways to do it, one is multi-selecting and the other one is just saying, even newer group. That's correct, and then save. And then I can take these things, and maybe I only wanna take these two and I'll pull them over here. And actually that made it to the wrong spot, so let me just adjust it there. So you have a lot of choice when you wanna click and drag into these different things and even say, you know what, this should be at the top, because it's more important to me, or whatever else it is. So lists can have this additional level of organization to them that I find extremely helpful, extremely functional, plus I also enjoy the colors. - This is a feature I didn't know about when I was using Basecamp. And I was on a demo with Ashley like my first week and she showed it and I was like, wait, what? So the template that I created was updated after learning about this feature, so yeah. - I'm glad for it. There is also a question here about the cards functionality. So lemme go ahead and bring that one to the front. So to-dos are a very important function of Basecamp, but there is also something on the newer side, it's called a card table, and I've renamed it to intake requests in this particular example. Now card table and to-dos, you can approach them in a lot of different ways. But the main thing is whatever works for you is gonna work for you. So for us, the way that we think about it is that if I have a process that I a node, a node- A process that I know has all these different stages, then I'm gonna go ahead and create a card table and I'll call my columns, these little friends here, I'll give them different names so that I can go ahead and say, this is moving from drafting, to internal feedback, to client feedback. So if you have work that follows that kind of progression, then you can actually use cards to say, you know what, this new thing that we're doing, I'm gonna assign it to someone, I'll save the card. I've put it into their kind of their triage section, I've put it on their radar really. And from there that, whoever's in charge of this piece of work, they can take it and they can move it through the different stages, let's move it directly to internal feedback, and that move is tracked. So Kimberly, I'm not sure if you have like a great example of when someone in events would want to use a card table. - I actually was gonna jump in. So a couple things to know, currently card tables relatively new, there are not card table templates yet. We think that might come sometime in the future. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend card table for recurring work, because you're gonna have to remake those cards every time currently. Whereas to-do lists you can create a template for. However, something that I use this kind of CONBON board as kind of the functionality for was internal work with my team where I needed to have some visibility into like the status of something. For example, if I'm asking Stephanie, who is on my team to book a bus for something. I would make a card for her that's like, book bus for this event. And then my columns would be something like, not yet started, in progress, waiting for vendor feedback, needs Kimberly's help, and complete. And then she could move that card for that internal task to the different stage. So I had some visibility into where is it. Like it's not done, so it's not checked off the list. But I also don't wanna be like, what's going on with that? When she could easily move the card to the column that says, I'm waiting to hear back from the vendor. And that would help me with visibility. Card table did not exist when I was doing event planning. So we actually used Trello for that purpose. Now that card table's here, I would just add it as a tool within each client's project. So we could have an internal, not showed to the client card table for progressive work. It also would help me if I just need to assign a task. Like off the top of my head I'm thinking of something, I would just drop a card in the card table of like, this is the work I need you to do. - Yeah. And I think that's another great function of the card table is that I'm watching or this person, I'm watching this triage section. So if something new goes into that area, then I get notified, and I'm not assigned it, but I get notified about this and then maybe I'll say, let me actually, let me take this on. So instead of this person, I'll go ahead and take it and maybe I'll write some notes as to why, maybe I'll kind of in include little bits of, I spoke with with this same vendor last year and so we're kind of buddies now. So I'm gonna go ahead and take this one for us. And then a few things can happen with this, if you're thinking about how this could work for you internally, what I can even do is I can click on someone, and this could be yourself, or everybody else, and you can see what their assignments are, or see what they've been up to. So you can answer a lot of questions that you might have might currently ask others for just by this function built into Basecamp. So currently I have this assigned to me from this particular project for the logo art design over here. And you can see where it actually is, I need somebody's help. So you have this like add a glance view just by clicking on someone's image or initials and then clicking on and seeing what their assignments are. Same as how we found those upcoming dates for all projects across all- For all dates and all events across all projects, you can also click on activity and click on someone's assignments, get the same thing there. So it's visible to you at any point. And this goes for desktop, web, and mobile. So you can just have your phone with you if you're not feeling like using the computer, you can just see all this on your phone as well, or iPad or tablet. - So Catherine, it answer to your question, couldn't you just use a to-do list for assigning those tasks? I think you mean for like my internal team? And yes I could. But for me, card table works really well for progressive work where you need to see the progress. And so that's why I would use it for internal things when I need to follow up on what's the status of something, and the task I assigned to someone on my team? So I hope that answers that. - Yeah, you really have, you have choice, you have flexibility, which is really kind of the main point of this all. - So Ashley, there's two questions that I'm gonna kind of put together. One which is transitioning clients to a new version of Basecamp. So Charlene is on an earlier version, is there a way to keep some clients on their current Basecamp format and then start new clients on a new template? I don't wanna disrupt existing client accounts and make them relearn things. - Yes, I very much support you not disrupting the work with a particular client. We've already taught them how to use one platform, there's no need to kind of break that if you decide to move to Basecamp 4. So I wonder if I can actually stop sharing this screen and pull up a different one because there is, I think it's a little bit easier to see with, how to kind of move between the two. So let me share my clear window. - And while you do that, I'll also say Charlene, that that's what I did when I transitioned both from classic to 2, and then from 2 to 3, which we now call 4. I kept clients on the platform they were on and just let their event finish out. And then new clients, I started their new project on a new platform so they never even knew the old one existed. The exception I made to that was Covid when people were with me for two and a half years. I was like, we're moving like it's a work, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna wait. But there is an easy way and this is what I think Ashley's gonna show you to switch between the two different accounts. - Definitely, so as I'm logged in here, this is my actual email address. I have a lot of Basecamp 4 accounts, so we're just gonna scroll past them and we're gonna look at my Basecamp 2 accounts. So just by clicking this little, the logo and the Basecamp name at the top left-hand side of your page, that gets you to any other account you have, whether you're working in somebody else's account and maybe they have Basecamp 2, or you have a Basecamp 2 account, you can switch into that platform really easily. And so here is everything I'm doing with my Basecamp 2 clients. We're already in this particular kind of soup, we don't need to move to another time at all if we're just working on this seamlessly. So you can continue to do everything that you're used to doing in Basecamp 2 with them, just work in that project normally, and then switch over whenever you need to to get back to, let's go back to this pane. And so you just kind of toggle between the two easily, as long as you're using the same email address to log into both. And if you're not, something I can easily help you with and fix so that you can just switch between them. And that way all your email notifications are still going to that one address and you're not missing anything on either platform. And if you do move someone over from Basecamp 2 to 4, the work that they did in Basecamp 2 just gets archived. So it's still accessible, I can click on nine archived projects at the top right-hand side and see everything here that I really need to. And then when I get into Basecamp 4, which it still says 3, but it is still 4, they are the same thing. When I go over here, then I can look for that same project and find everything about it that is active in Basecamp. So be pretty painless to move. But I get that, it's very sensitive, I think it feels very sensitive. And so if you wanna talk about how to move things specifically, we can also answer that at guides@basecamp.com. Rodrigo, maybe Kimberly also Laura, will be able to answer you. - And also on that note, Charlene, transitioning clients over, I think you could also start with just one, like start with one that you think is tech savvy and move them over. I think you'd be surprised how quickly people can adapt. I was very nervous about making a transition. In fact the newer Basecamp came out for years before I ever moved over. Like I debated it for the longest time and then finally just made the plunge and I'm really glad that I did, just 'cause you get additional features. It's also the software that we update. So new things happen all the time on the newest version of Basecamp. Literally every six weeks they're making some kind of improvement, or update or change, or added feature. And the old versions just don't get those updates. Ashley, on that transition, Kawania, how do we migrate from 2 to 4? Is this a demo, one-on-one conversation situation, what do you think? - It is, it is. I will just briefly say that I have mistakenly written a guide about this and so hopefully some of that we can put this, I'll just put it in the chat now for you all. I'll answer it with just that there are resources for it, but the better answer really is that, I'll be happy to help you one-on-one. We can just move you from a Basecamp 2 to 4, or at least talk about it. - Amazing. And then there was also a question about a charge for switching from one to another. And I know there's some kind of special, if you like move from one to another, at some period of time, you're not paying for both. - Right, so basically if you pay for Basecamp 3/4, then you don't have to pay for Basecamp 2. And so we put that on a free plan and you would be able to put it on a free plan and then you would be able to work normally in Basecamp 2. And actually you can see it here, I have myself on the free plan. See how this little project plus symbol is? It's currently red because we decided with the new free plan that you cannot start new projects unless they're in Basecamp 3/4. So everything works normal except you can- That is truly here, that's it. All of your subscriptions work the same, as in like external subscriptions. Nobody's access changes, and so once you're on the free plan, you just don't need to, we assume you don't need to create new projects in Basecamp 2. So those will just need to be created in Basecamp 3/4. - Andrea, I'm gonna go to your question but I don't actually know what it means, Ashley, maybe you do. Do you foresee card table and to-do's being like Asana? I've used Asana, but I've only used it as like the card table function with like the CONBON moving forwards. So I'm not sure what... - I'm not a hundred percent sure either, but from what I recall to do, yeah, for real. To-do's and card table don't overlap, and that might be a little bit more of what this question is? - Oh, but we do have steps in card table now, so maybe that is something that's helpful. - Yeah, and so if I go into a project and we look at the card table, and I know we're getting short on time here, but I think it's valuable. Let's make a test card, and then let's go into this one. So after you've created a card and done some basics, some basics added, maybe given an assignment or a due date, then you have an option later to add steps to a card so they do not overlap with to-dos at all. But if you know that for this you need to do A, and also B, and C and D, and maybe you need to do this one by a specific date, then you can add a kind of like mini tasks into your card. So that's probably as close as we get to integrating the two, if that's what you meant. If that's not what you meant, please let me know. - Yeah, let us know. And it's easier to explain, not just in the chat message than hit us up at guides@bacecamp.com. Is there a way to link a file in doc and file to a to-do, basically an internal link? - Yeah, absolutely. - You can link all kinds of things. - You can do whatever you want. So in here, oh perfect, we'll get this picture of my dog, my first dog. So what I can do at the very top of the page is I can take this URL and I can copy it and then I can go to anywhere else, truly anywhere else in this account. Maybe let's, I think we said to-do's, so let's go to to-dos. Huh, write up a profile for the dog. Perfect. And so in here as a comment or anywhere that I can write, I can just paste that URL and I'll save those changes and then when somebody clicks on it, they get taken directly to that file. That's just kind of one way to work so that all of your docs in your files are in the docs and file section. But if you'd really rather include the attachment this way, then you can go ahead and use the attachment option, it would just appear right there. So you have again, choice between the two, but if you don't wanna upload it twice, or maybe it was a huge video file and it doesn't really need to be uploaded in two places, just click on the actual file itself, copy the URL and paste it somewhere else in Basecamp and it'll get there. - And I would do this a lot with clients when they would post something somewhere else, like something random on the message board, but it really is a task. I would go to that task, click it and include the link to it internally. Like, hey, let's discuss this here with a link to it just to keep everything organized. And that's something we do internally a lot, Basecamp is linked to other parts of projects just to keep everyone in the loop of where things are. I think maybe we have two questions before we wrap just a few minutes, I think we can do it. Is there a way to easily move accounts from the desktop app? I'm a user in the WIPA account, and I can easily- I can really easily switch between my account and WIPA from the mobile and web, but I can't do it from the desktop app. - Oh, do you mean multiple Basecamp accounts through the desktop app? - I think that's what she means. - I'm trying to make sure that I upload the right page. Let me stop sharing my screen and up and share my, I wonder if it'll allow me to share the actual Basecamp desktop app because you definitely can. I wanna share my entire screen of screen two. So let's kind of see this at the top left hand side of the page. It does work the same whether you're on Windows or whether you're on a Mac. I just happen to be on a Mac today. So when you're in this particular Basecamp account and I'm in our actual Basecamp account, you'll see at the tops there are a bunch of choices here. Click on account and then there are all of your other accounts for Basecamp 3. It will not load Basecamp 2, because it's an entirely different platform. So a big part of why I use Basecamp on the web is to be able to switch from 2 to 3. But if you're going from your account to someone else's account who's also using 3/4, then you can go ahead and use the desktop app for that. So it's gonna be very specific to that there is no desktop app for Basecamp 2, and that's because we just we don't add new updates to Basecamp 2 any longer. Also a brief note here as well, if you are copying something from a particular project or a file that we were looking at before, well there's no address bar in the desktop app, so click on page and copy page address. So just a minor note. - Amazing. Andrea, I love the like light bulbs happening over there in the chat. Last question that we're gonna get to and it seems more of a how Basecamp works in theory and our internal structure. Any tips for scheduling time with internal folks while leveraging Basecamp? If you guys know, Basecamp is not very meeting heavy. We are very asynchronous company, is all remote with employees all over the world and we're very protective of our own personal time. So the question is how do we go about scheduling time on other people's calendars? - First we kind of discuss if we even need to. Is this something that I can do just with like a quick paragraph and an image? Or is this something that I can do, is it just better to discuss over a call? And usually someone will just kind of share a Zoom link and they'll be on the other end and it might be an instantaneous thing or it might be like, oh you know what, I really can't do this today. But really just asking, but we tend to default to writing first. - That is true. I even think with client work, there's very many times where it's like we don't really need a meeting. Especially when you have things organized and very detailed like this, we do a lot of writing here and in my previous event life I did a lot of writing. I always wanted to explain something so thoroughly in writing that we didn't need to have a call to talk about. So I think that's kind of our default here and something I also used in my previous life as well. - Yep. - Well it is the top of the hour friends. - The top of the hour actually. - We're not gonna keep you any longer, but as Ashley said, if you have any further questions or you need a one-on-one demo time, Ashley's great with transition, as well as Rodrigo on our team. If you are on a previous version of Basecamp and you're interested in moving, how you can do that easily and seamlessly, we can help you with that. - Absolutely. So again, guides@basecamp.com, that is where we are gonna ask that you email us if any of those questions do come up. But otherwise, we really appreciate your time here. I loved all.