Clients
Offshore teams lose hours to a simple question: what time is it where the client is. Every client card answers it, next to the country and the contacts.
A client record holds the company, the country, its status and the date it was added. Projects link back to it, so one card shows everything running for that account.
Contacts are plural. A client can carry several people, which matches how an account actually behaves once it is past the first month.
The card shows the client's timezone and the time there right now. A line reads like America/Moncton, UTC−3, 4:36 PM.
Opening a client opens its projects. From there the portfolio scores and the meeting history are one click away.
The live instance holds 14 clients. Small enough to keep in your head, which is exactly when a directory usually gets skipped and then badly missed a year later.
The local clock sounds like a small thing. It stops the daily half-hour of somebody working out whether a 4pm call lands at 8am or midnight for the other side, and it stops the call that gets booked wrong.
Most tools leave that sum to the person making the booking, which is why the sum goes wrong twice a year when clocks change somewhere.
Country and status do the sorting work. Status separates live accounts from dormant ones, and country groups the ones a single person can reasonably call in one afternoon.
What it does
- Local time on the card
- Timezone and current local time, shown where you are already looking. No mental arithmetic before a call.
- Several contacts per account
- Contacts are a list, not a single field, and a project names which contact it runs through.
- Projects linked back
- One card shows every project running for that account, with its status.
- Country and status
- Enough to sort an account list by where it is and whether it is live.
What it needs before it works
- Nothing. A client can be added on day one, before any project exists, and projects attach to it afterwards.
- The timezone needs setting on the record for the local clock to be right. A blank timezone shows nothing rather than guessing.
- The clients permission controls who can add and edit. Seeing the accounts you work on is part of what everyone gets by default.
- Naming the contact who owns the relationship is worth doing on day one. A card with six contacts and no lead is a card nobody uses.
Questions people ask
What does a client card show?
Company, country, status, date added, every contact, the linked projects, and the client's timezone with the time there right now.
Where does the local time come from?
The timezone set on the client record. The card renders the current time in that zone, so a team in one country can see a client's working hours without converting.
Can one client have several contacts?
Yes. Contacts are a list, and each project names the contact it runs through. Accounts past their first month usually need that.