We'll be the first to admit it... Dubsado has a lot of features to navigate! Whether you're new to using a business management tool, or you're coming over from a different platform, we hope this article helps you get acquainted with our "lingo" here at Dubsado!

When you create a Dubsado account, a primary brand is created to house all of your projects, clients, templates, and more. When you click on the gear icon in the top navigation bar, you can customize your brand logo and color, along with other settings for your brand.

If you have more than one business, you can create additional brands under your single Dubsado account and easily switch between them by clicking on your logo in the top right corner.

The dashboard is the very first thing you’ll see when you log into your Dubsado account. Here you can gain insight into your most important business information.

You can view financial indicators, calendar events, tasks, and pending actions that need your approval.

Dubsado is organized around projects. Within each project, you have a command center for communicating with new leads and booked jobs. Each project is associated with an individual client and can be treated like a folder.

The main projects page allows you to oversee which stage each client is at in your business process, what types of clients you're currently working with, and who has signed contracts and paid their invoices.

A client is your main point of contact on a project. Each project you create is associated with only one client, but you can create multiple projects with the same client.

The term "client" in Dubsado does not necessarily mean a paying client. You can track whether a project for a specific client is a lead or a booked job using project statuses.

Our reporting features assist with basic bookkeeping and tracking lead traffic.

The invoices, transactions, and chart of accounts provide information on which invoices may be overdue, how much money you have made in a certain service, or how and when a particular client paid you.

The project sources and breakdown provide context on where your leads are finding out about your business.

The calendar gives you an overview of project dates, appointments booked through the scheduler, personal events, tasks that need to be accomplished, and payment reminder dates.

You can connect an external calendar account to keep track of every single life and business event.

Tasks will help you remember the important things that need to get done manually for your clients. It's our "to-do list" feature!

When clicking Utilities, you'll find some features that may not be Dubsado's main focus but can be very helpful. It's a hub of the completed form list, clients in your address book, and the time tracker.

The form list is a record of almost every form that has been applied to a project in your brand. The address book is your contact list where you can find client information. The time tracker keeps track of billable hours that can easily be added to a client's invoice.

The Templates section is where you will create a library of all your content (forms, canned emails, schedulers, payments plans, workflows) that you are planning to send out to your clients and use in projects. Creating templates ahead of time will save you loads of time and diminish stress when a new client comes your way.

Project statuses allow you to keep track of where your client is at in your business process. You can customize your statuses into phases or important milestones to monitor what important stages each client is going through from beginning to end.

Project tags allow you to keep track of what types of clients you're working with. Create tags according to service type, client demographic, or any other identifying feature of a project. This feature is similar to using a #hashtag on social media.

The scheduler feature allows you to create different appointment types, from discovery calls, to follow-ups, to mini sessions, to venue tours. Eliminate the back-and-forth and allow your clients to schedule an appointment time based on the availability you've set on your scheduler.

Dubsado forms make it easy to collect the information you need from your clients. Our drag-and-drop form builder makes it fun and easy to design branded, custom forms! There are five types of forms, each with different uses.

Contracts are a secure way to communicate your general terms and conditions. You can add signature areas and initial fields to your contract, and these elements can be signed electronically after you've shared the form with a client.

Because each project can only have one contract assigned to it, you can gather additional signatures using sub-agreements. Just like a contract, a sub-agreement can include spaces for a client to sign or initial electronically. They're great for things like amendments, waivers, releases, or even design proofs.

Questionnaires are one of the most open-ended and versatile forms in Dubsado. It's the perfect form for either collecting information from a client or providing information to them. You can include short answer questions, free responses, checkboxes, drop downs, and date selection. Plus with the file uploader element, clients can even upload files to share with you.

Proposals streamline the booking process by giving your potential clients the ability to select a package, sign your contract, and pay their invoices all in one place.

Lead capture forms bring new clients into Dubsado. You can embed this form on your website, or share it via hyperlink in an email newsletter (or on social media). Whenever this form is filled out and submitted, Dubsado will automatically generate a new project with the client's information.

Canned emails are templates for emails that you send time and time again. If you've sent the same email to more than three clients in the past, create it as a canned email template so you never need to type it out from scratch again.

A smart field is a text placeholder you can use in your email and form templates that will autofill once added to a project. Dubsado smart fields can be identified by their double curly braces, for example {{client.name}}.

In addition to the default fields for basic client and project information, you can add custom mapped fields that are relevant to your business so you can capture all the information you need. These fields can be added to client profiles or projects and can store text or dates.

Packages are the building blocks of invoices. On proposals, the packages are like the items on a menu. Although the word "package" implies a bundle, in Dubsado, a package refers to a template for line items on an invoice. A package can be a single product or service, or it can be multiple products and services grouped together.

A Dubsado invoice does not have a due date by default, but you can add one with a payment plan. A payment plan breaks down an invoice total into one or more installments and sets a due date for each one. You can even have reminders automatically sent before or after the due date!

A workflow is a series of automated steps. When building a workflow in Dubsado, the goal is to take each step that you do with a client during a particular service, and program it into a workflow to automate the things that can be automated, and remind you of the things that you need to get accomplished, so each client goes through a well-thought-out process.

A workflow action is what you want the workflow to do at each step in the process. By choosing from the 15 different actions, you can have the workflow action send a form, email, contract, invoice, scheduler, create a task, and more.

Workflow actions have triggers. The triggers tell the action when you want it to run. By programming when you want certain actions to happen, you are controlling the client experience to make it seamless and efficient. Actions can be triggered based on contracts being signed, appointments being scheduled, forms being completed, payments being made, and much more.