Lesson #11
Calendar – Send Assignment Notifications/Cancellations function
Instead of notifying resources of assignments as soon as you enter them in RB, do a day’s worth all at the same time. This will save your time if you have a lot of notices to send on a daily basis. Or maybe you prefer to wait to notify resources until after setting all assignments.
(You can also notify resources of cancellations the same way, but most likely you will do those individually as they occur to let your resources know ASAP that their jobs have been canceled.)
Notifications are sent via email or text or both. You can also print out notifications to hand out or fax.
Automatic attachments
Assignment notification emails automatically include the reporter worksheet for the task. You can customize the default worksheet — for example you can add the scheduling client’s email address — and create additional ones in Form Templates.
Before sending notifications use System Preferences to customize the subject line, the message and whether the worksheet 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 job location and witness name, add images, and style the text with fonts, text treatments, sizes, and colors. You can also customize the subject line and contents of text messages with your own text and contextual data fields.
Emailed assignment notifications can automatically include other attachments such as the relevant job notice or a shared word list, or you can attach files individually as you are sending an email (but RB will not send files over 20MB). In addition to setting up which file types will be attached (in System Preferences) you can also designate which types of tasks will receive these automatic attachments (in Lists). For example you probably don’t need to send word lists to resources handling your conference room.
You can also automatically include an iCalendar file with emailed assignment notifications that the resource can import into their own calendar. You can customize its subject line and description.
You can do the same customizations for assignment cancellations with the exceptions of no file attachments beyond the notice and no iCalendar file.
Emailing notifications
In Send Assignment Notifications/Cancellations, you can email assignments by day scheduled or job date (if you assign jobs the day before they should occur). Cancellation confirmations are selected and sent by cancelled date. If desired, you can refine your notification list to:
- A specific date or date range
- A single job number
- One or more job types
- One or more tasks
- One or more resource types
- One or more business units
The notification list displays each job’s number, date, task, start time, status, witness, resource, notified date, acknowledged date, ordering client, business unit, job type, and job location. Canceled assignments results also list the date each 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.
When sending notifications you have the option to attach additional files from either your desktop or RB’s Job-level Repository.
RB records emails sent in the Email Log function in Tools (RB9 only), so you can refer back to them later.
TL;DR: Instead of notifying resources one at a time, save time by emailing or texting a day’s worth of notifications at once.
RB9 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.
Job Type: Categories of jobs requested by clients, such as Deposition or Real-Time.
Resource: Person or thing that provides your business with a service, such as reporters, videographers, interpreters, scopists, account executives, other agencies that cover jobs for you, or a conference room.
Resource Type: Profession (such as Scopist, Proofreader, or Interpreter) and other categories of resources.
Task: Service requested with a job, such as reporting, interpreting, or video, that require a separate resource (person, company, thing) to accomplish. More >
