Reference
Tips and tricks
Shortcuts, habits and details that save real time, gathered from how the product is actually used.
8 min read
Habits and details that save real time. None of these are hidden features; they are the things people work out in their third campaign, collected so you can have them in your first.
Setting up faster
| Do this | Instead of |
|---|---|
| Save your house form as an intake-form template after the first campaign | Rebuilding the same six fields every quarter, slightly differently each time |
| Save your cadence as a milestone plan | Retyping 7, 3 and 1 days before, and forgetting the after-reminder |
| Clone the previous campaign from step 1 | Starting blank when 90% of the config is identical |
| Paste the supplier list into bulk import | Inviting twenty contacts one at a time |
| Set a date window on date fields | Correcting out-of-period dates in review |
| Add optional fields freely, required ones reluctantly | Flagging thirty submitted items as incomplete mid-campaign |
URLs do more than you think
Everything the Received table does, and everything the shared table engine does, lives in the URL. That makes several things possible that are not signposted anywhere.
- A filtered table is a link. Filter to one supplier's pending items, copy the address, and send it to your co-manager. They see exactly your view.
- Bookmark the views you use weekly. Or better, name them with Save current view as… so they are one click on the campaign itself.
- A reload never loses your working set. Filters, sort and column choice all come back.
- Column choices are per person. Which columns you show is stored on your account and follows you to other devices.
Reminders that work
| Pattern | Why |
|---|---|
| A mid-window check-in, not just deadline reminders | Everybody ignores "7 days to go" on day one. A milestone halfway through with its own reminder catches the suppliers who have not started. |
| One after-reminder on the deadline | "You missed it, here is what to do" recovers submissions that a before-reminder never will. |
| Check the Reminders calendar before you open | Nine emails across eight days reads as organised. Nine emails across four days reads as spam. |
| Business days on, for everything except deliberate exceptions | A deadline that lands on a Sunday is a deadline nobody meets. |
| Milestone names written for the supplier | Detail forms due is the email subject they will read. DF-2 is not. |
Reviewing faster
- Bulk-accept the obvious ones first. Filter to what you know is fine, tick the column-heading checkbox, choose Accept selected, apply. Then work the remainder row by row, where each one gets attention.
- Draft, then commit. Save decision drafts lets you mark up a hundred rows across two days without applying anything, and lets a co-manager pick it up exactly where you left it.
- Show the columns you are deciding on. A Received table showing price and dates as their own columns is a table you can decide from without opening a single item.
- Sort by the field that decides it. Sorting by price, numerically, puts every outlier at one end.
- Communicate once. Decision notifications are deduplicated and consolidated, so decide everything first and press the button at the end. Suppliers get one clean email instead of six.
Keeping suppliers happy
| Do | Because |
|---|---|
| Write the campaign description as if it is the only thing they read | For many suppliers it is. It appears on their dashboard and in the invitation. |
| Attach the briefing materials rather than emailing them | They stay with the campaign, every contact can reach them, and nobody has to find the email. |
| Use help text on the fields people get wrong | It appears both online and in the workbook's help row, which is where it prevents the mistake. |
| Grant edit access rather than reopening the campaign | Reopening unlocks and notifies everybody, which invites a second round from people who were finished. |
| Write a note on every rejection | It is the whole content of the email they receive. Without it, they have to ask. |
| Add the option they keep typing | If three suppliers try to enter the same value into a dropdown, the list is missing it. |
Housekeeping
- Archive finished campaigns. They leave the everyday lists and become invisible to suppliers, without deleting anything, and they are restorable.
- Tidy the supplier directory before a big import. Two spellings of one supplier are two suppliers and two sets of reference IDs.
- Fill in internal IDs. They ride along in every export and make reconciliation against your buying system a join rather than a lookup.
- Take an export before anything irreversible. A big schema change, an archive sweep, a plan change. It takes seconds.
- Deactivate, do not delete, departed colleagues. The row is what keeps their decisions attributed rather than anonymous, and it frees the seat either way.
- Check the email log after opening a big campaign. Thirty seconds now beats a supplier telling you next week.