Hey everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another quick tutorial for you, and this time it's a
product review and it's a product that I created. I created it for myself, so don't be too harsh
in the comments below but this is something I really needed and I'm sharing it with you
for free. The link is in the description below if you enjoy this and can use it and it's totally
free no obligations. I only ask that if you do enjoy it and you're using it, if you could give
me a small donation, which I'll have the link in the program and in the description below as well.
So this is a Contact Management Database. Previously I used Act
and it expired and I couldn't purchase a one-time payment for a standalone product that is loaded on
my computer. They're all online and they're all subscription based, so the payments never end.
It would have been a lot cheaper to do a one-time payment, plus it's local stored on
my computer which is all I want. So it's a little more secure and not out on the web.
The problem is that it seems nobody makes standalone products anymore especially with
this CRM. They're all subscription based, there's so many of them out there, and when I contacted Act to
see if they could do something, they can't. It's subscription based only. So I thought screw that!
I was able to convert all my data, except for the notes, I had to re-enter manually which isn't going
to happen for all of them, there's far too many. But I could at least export them so I can look up
history, but I made my own product. So I'm going to show you that here. Some of this information will
be not relevant to you. We've got our basic contact information but there's some things that are to
do with computers because I'm in the computer industry. So these fields wouldn't make sense to you.
A contract sign could apply to anybody and you can just choose from a pop-up date window here and
customer since as well is a date calendar that pops up. You got a special note here that you can
put just in case you get a phone call and you want to remember like oh no it's this guy again here!
Then you've got your notes that are all time stamped and as you click on each one it
changes the note over on the right which could be a very long note maybe even an email that
you paste an entire email communication in here. You can go into add a note and from here there's
your date pop-up as well if you want to put in the time you can but you don't have to.
Put in your note and whatever you want to put in there and you can hit save and then it shows it
right over here. Now you don't actually have to hit save once you click over here to start looking at
other things it will refresh. This whole database saves on it on its own as you go but it just needs
some kind of trigger to refresh. So this save button is actually just a refresh button.
So you don't have to worry about saving so much but for these particular things like this,
I put that in there just so that you can be sure with confidence that it's in there. You can
also highlight a note and hit delete, it confirms you're going to delete, yep I want to get rid of it.
and it disappears from here but not over here. So if you were to hit save then that refreshes it and
takes that deletion out of there. There's computer info, again the wording may not make sense to you
but it's just a static place to put a bunch of information here and then some more over here
that you don't have to go digging through all your past notes scrolling through them all.
You can just find your common important information right here. Now because this is a business address
you would have their home address here and you can put their spouse there as well. So that way if
you're talking them you want to be more personal you can address them and ask how their spouse is doing.
There's also secondary contacts. So in the business you could have multiple people and you
can list them all here and what their relation is to the company and their own personal information
which you can even scroll over and have their own address as well if it's different from the company.
So this is all the information about
the contacts that you'd be working with. Now you can also navigate through these as well
and just scroll through them it tells you how many contacts you have and you can delete a contact
that you're looking at currently or going to add a new one and here you can go to search for contacts.
This makes it so much easier than it was an Act. Previously I'd have to go into find first name or
find last name. It doesn't matter what you want to search for you can type in anything here and just
type in part of it you don't have to type in all of it and it shows everything here. So if I type
in the person's first name it shows up there. If I type in part of their name here. Last name.
and even a phone number then it shows anyone that's got part of that number listed there and
if you click on any one of these you can click and open or just double click and it takes you right there.
So from here if you want to go back to your main home contact, you can hit clear filter, because
these navigation buttons won't work to scroll through them if you don't clear the filter first.
So that also has a search secondary contacts. So for some of them like this guy here has
somebody in the secondary. If we look at the search contacts it shows every contact I have and
first name, Patrick, is not in there. So if I go and look in search secondary, there he is.
So if I was to search and find who that belongs to, I can click on them
and it takes me to this company with this contact but under the secondary contacts there he is.
That's who we were looking for and now we know what the contact or company is that they belong to.
Now aside from working within the contacts, there's a main here.
there's a bit of stuff in here to look at. First of all if you enjoy this product
because it's free, I greatly appreciate if you can give me a donation, there's a link to it right here.
There's version information here. So you can see all the changes that I've been making.
There's a link to open a contact, so that just takes you back to where we were.
So we'll go back into the main menu. There's a request for customization. So if you want to make
any changes to this program and customize it for your own needs you can certainly do
that either by clicking this button or if that doesn't work for you, if you're more using Gmail
just send an email to this email address here and throw this information in the subject line.
Makes it very clear for me to find and then you can tell me what it is that you would like to make the changes on.
If you click here on check for updates,
it takes you to my website and then you can scroll through here to see
what the latest version is and a link to download it. I also have a follow-ups link
and this will pop up a reminder every 30 minutes letting you know
that there is a follow-up waiting for you. It tells you down here that it's every 30 minutes.
So if you want to add in another follow-up you can put in today's date of when you're doing it,
when you'd like to make the follow-up, and then select from your list of who you want
to make the follow-up with. Then just put in your notes as to what it's regarding.
If you want to delete any one of these, just click anywhere on one of these rows, now it
shows that the there's two rows per contact. So click on any of these fields for that note that
you want to get rid of, hit delete selected, it confirms you want to remove it, and it's gone.
So that'll pop up a reminder letting you know that there's a reminder waiting for you.
I've got a coming soon section here, to let you know things that I want to do that I haven't got to yet
but I'll have that available for you. I've got this is something that you're going to want to
have sooner than later but at the making of this video I haven't created that ability for you yet.
Because I locked this program down, so there's no way that you can access the back end and look at
things and make changes to it. It's also to protect yourself as well but also hiding the code for all
the hard work that i did. Okay so there is an export database feature. So I'm not holding your
contact information hostage. You can certainly go in here click on each one of these buttons and
export each one of them as an Excel file. So all your data is available to you if you decided that
you wanted to have it in Excel to do anything with or to switch over to another program at some point.
Now if you've been using this program for a while and enjoy it and you want to get the latest update,
after you download the update, which you could see from checking for updates,
and then you can follow these instructions here, which are very basic and I'm going to
tell you right now, the first thing is copying your program into the C
drive in a folder called CRM. Just paste it in there and rename that file to old.
So it's going to be able to import your data into the new program from there.
So we would first start from the top here closing the contacts form and then delete the existing tables.
Even though it's a new program you're wanting to delete them first, otherwise if you
just go straight to import, it's going to import duplicates and it's not going to show them there.
So then we go into open and we can see everything is gone, because I imported an empty database.
So this would be the equivalent of you downloading the latest update. So we'll go back into the main
menu and assume this is the latest update you want to get all your data imported back in here.
So let's change this back.
We got your database here, we're going to rename it to old.
In this folder. So it's going to pull the data from this. So we'll just go through these motions again.
Even though the tables are empty, we have to delete them and then go into import
and then open the contacts and there's your database. You can see everything is back in
here again. So it's a little bit of work to update, but you can see that it's pretty quick to do
and the buttons are all in line, just click them all in order, as long as you follow these basic
instructions, you can upgrade to the newest version anytime without any trouble at all.
So that's it for this quick tech-torial and product review.
I hope you enjoyed it and if you think this is a good product and any comments you have on it.
I mean, I made it for myself, so I want to have something that works
and something that's FREE. So let me know in the comments below and if you enjoyed it please do
give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already and ring the bell to be notified every
time I come out with a new video. I got all kinds of helpful videos on here that show you how to do
all kinds of stuff. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.