Lesson 8 - How to Manage Your Contacts

Bulletproof Notion Work Management System

For Accountants and Bookkeepers

I’ve never been overly happy with any contact management system that I’ve seen. For the longest time, my biggest issue was that no matter what I was using as a CRM, I still needed to duplicate my contacts in Google Contacts, because that is where I needed them to call or email them.

Nowadays any app that has a good mobile app with a Phone Number field will work, because our mobile devices are much smarter now.

Contacts are integral to everything we do, because every thing we do involves at least one contact, if not more.

So it was important to me to be able to add contacts in this system and link them to anything I need. The obvious thing is to associate a contact with the client they are associated with.

There is no specific database for Vendors. I Just didn’t think it warranted a separate database. You will notice that your contacts have a “Status” and that is where you can indicate that the contact is a vendor.

If it is a vendor, then you can simply title it based on the company and the contact name (e.g.) Honest Plumbing - Mario Mario. Then for the status you would choose “Vendor - Business.”

No, that wasn’t a typo. In the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie it was confirmed that Mario and Luigi’s last name is Mario.

This setup will also make it easy to create views in your contact database filtered for any / each of these statuses.

All in all, this keeps things simple and practical.

Of course you can have as many contacts as you need associated with a client, and you can easily pull up a contact on your mobile app and tap to call or email them.

If you run through the fields for a contact, most of it will be really straightforward. I have added a few things that I want to clarify for you, starting with the one thing I can’t believe no other CRM I’ve worked with to date has done.

Preferred MOC

These days we have so many different people we talk to and everyone has a different way of messaging. I talk to many people on Slack, but there are plenty of people that I just message with in different apps. So I added a field where I can indicate their “preferred mode of communication”

You can edit this (or any field) to add or change the options.

Stay In Touch

This is a date based field you can use to add a date and reminder of when you want to follow up with the contact.

Firmwide

I haven’t talked about this yet, but you have the Wiki template (it has always been there), so if you check off this box it adds the contact to a company wide directory so that everyone on your team has access to that contact’s info.

Contact Call Log

This is mainly intended for you to use with a contact when they are a “prospect” so that you can track your calls and discussions. Once they become a client, you would more likely use a Meeting Notes template like the meeting agenda for this, but you can certainly use this however you see fit!

That’s about it for the Contacts Database.

Get into Slack if you have any questions.

UP NEXT: LESSON 9

Create and Manage Linked Databases

See ya in the next lesson ;-)