Lesson #6
Calendar – Send Job Confirmations/Cancellations function
As a courtesy to your clients— but also to check that your information is correct — send your clients Acknowledgements of Scheduling, AKA job confirmations, to let them know you have added their requested jobs to your calendar. You should also send cancellation confirmations for the same reasons.
In RB you can email these acknowledgements as they happen or save time by sending them in batches, especially if you deal with a volume of jobs every day or if it is your practice to confirm jobs the day before they are scheduled to take place. Use the Send Job Confirmations/Cancellations function to handle this process.
In Send Job Confirmations/Cancellations you can email job confirmations by day scheduled or job date (if you confirm jobs the day before they should occur). Cancellation confirmations are selected and sent by cancelled date.
The default list shows all jobs scheduled for today. Refine your confirmation list to a date range, single job number, particular job types, or specific business units. Search for canceled jobs using the same search criteria.
Automatic attachments
Confirmation and cancellation emails automatically include the confirmation/cancellation form. RB comes with default confirmation and cancellation forms that you can customize. You can also create your own.
Before using this function to send confirmations or cancellations use System Preferences to customize each type of notice’s subject line, the message, and whether the notice is included in the body of the email, as an attachment, or both. You can include any text you wish, embed contextual RB data fields such as the job date and case name, add images, and style the text with fonts, text treatments, sizes, and colors.
You can also automatically include an iCalendar file with the confirmation emails that clients can import into their own calendar. You can customize its subject line and description.
You can preview the emails before they are sent and attach other files when sending the emails. You can attach files from your desktop or from your RB Job-level Repository.
Managing confirmations & cancellations
When you send job confirmations or cancellations via email, RB makes an entry that includes the receiver’s email address in the job’s Notes Log. RB also records the email sent in the Email Log function in Tools (RB9 only) so you can refer back to it later.
After sending out job confirmation notices either singly or in batches, track the jobs in this function to follow up with clients and record their responses in each job’s status. You can double-check that tomorrow’s jobs are confirmed by reviewing the Status column at the end of the day for any jobs still waiting for a call-back or not confirmed.
In addition to the Status column the results grid displays each job’s:
- Number
- Date
- Ordering client
- Location (of in-person locations not Zoom details)
- Business unit
- Type
- Date created
- Date confirmed
- Case
- Witness
Canceled jobs also list the date the job was canceled.
You can sort your results in the grid by one or more columns in ascending or descending order but when you exit the function RB will revert back to the default order. Export the list as an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV (comma-separated values) file to save, print, share, or use in other applications.
TL;DR: Use the Send Job Confirmations/Cancellations function to send acknowledgement emails to clients in batches at the end of the day then monitor the jobs’ statuses and follow up with clients.
RB concepts in this lesson
Business Unit (BU): One of your company’s revenue centers or any entity in your business that you want to track separately such as branch offices, other companies you own, affiliates, and profit-sharing operations.
Job: Usually the reporting of a deposition but can also be any kind of service you provide with your reporters or other resources. More >
Job Status: Stage a job is in, e.g., New or Cancelled. You can designate your own job statuses in RB.
Job Type: Categories of jobs requested by clients such as Deposition or Real-Time.
Notes Logs: Notes entered either by a user or automatically by RB appear in chronological logs in the database record where they occurred such as a case, job, invoice, or entity. Log entries are your internal paper trail because every entry is stored and listed separately, and entries cannot be edited nor deleted.
