Introduction

At its heart, SeedCode Calendar Complete is a straight forward FileMaker calendar template. You can filter the calendar by contact, project, user, appointment type, and resource to see just the events that matter to you, letting you keep any number of "calendars" in the same file.

The Basics

Daily View. The daily view of the shows all the appointments for the current day, color coding them by appointment type.

(You can create as many types as you’d like and assign your own colors to them).

If the appointment is linked to a contact or project you’ll see some information about that as well, along with the user(s) assigned to the item. Note that the mini-calendars on the right hand side of the screen present a small green dot if there are appointments on that day which match the current filter criteria.

Appointments (Activities, Milestones, Comments, etc.) We often refer to appointments as "activity" since an appointment can really be any number of things; it can represent everything from a project deadline to some notes you recorded about a phone call. Now you may not want all these activities to show up on the calendar, so you can designate some as just a "comment" using the icon at the top of the screen below.

Here you can link appointments to contacts or projects and even create new contacts and projects right from within the calendar while you’re making a new appointment. You can even record complex vacation or work schedules using our repeating-events engine:

Other Views

Month View. The month view can also be filtered to show just a single project or a single type of appointment. And while you can print the contents of this month as a list, you’ll also find an innovative print layout that will print the month as a grid while sliding each day to accommodate all of its appointments (up to 2 pages of appointments per day).

Week Views. The calendar places items on your week to correspond to the duration of the appointment, this lets you quickly scan your week for gaps.

You can also change the scale of the week, switching from 15 minute increments to 5 minute, 30 minute, or hour increments. Note that conflicting appointments are displayed with a red line to the left of the conflict.

These "visual" displays of your schedule can get pretty crowded if you don’t look at them in a highly filtered state (if you’re looking at everyone’s appointments, for example) so we have an alternate week view that shows a simpler version of the week. Note that this view will also show events that might not have a start time associated with them.

Introduction

In addition to the regular calendaring functions of scheduling appointments, meetings, due dates and the like, Seed Code Calendar Complete allows you to schedule resources and scan your day or week for gaps when a particular type of resource might be available.

Resources can be anything-- conference rooms, trucks, vacation rentals, people-- anything that is scheduled off and on over the course of a day or week.

Scheduling a Day

Daily View. The main scheduling view shows a single day as a grid with resources across the top and times down the left side. Notice that you can change the time scale here (using the scale buttons along the bottom edge of the screen) just as you can in the week view.

Across the top you see the first 5 resources from the resource type you’ve selected in your filters; you can create any number of resources types so that you’re always looking at the first 5 most likely candidates for fulfilling a particular appointment. If you have more than 5 resources in a given type, you can use the "previous" and "next" buttons beside the resources to "scroll" to the next 5 resources.

Horizontal & Multi-Day Views

Flipped on its side. You can also view a horizontal version of the scheduling screen. While this shows less information about each appointment (detailed information is available in tool tips by hovering over an appointment), you can see more resources at once this way.

Zooming Out. You’ll see two additional scale options on the horizontal version of the scheduling screen, letting you zoom out to view each column as a day or week. This is great for scheduling things that are booked in whole day increments.

Introduction

SeedCode Calendar Complete includes a basic contact management component that you can extend to manage your contacts, customers, and prospects.

Contacts & Companies

Recent Activity. Of course your contacts are integrated into the rest of the calendar so you can easily see recent activity for your contacts right on their main screen.

You’ll also find additional tabs for reviewing a contact’s projects, their invoices, and any mailings you’ve sent them.

Phone, Fax, and Email. While you’ll want to build out from this file, adding your own contact-specific fields, you’ll find the basics already here for you, crafted in a straight forward, well commented fashion. You’ll be able to record any number of phone numbers and email addresses for each contact, marking one of each as "main". These "main" numbers show up on the overview screen...

...additional numbers are available on small detail screens.

You can reach these screens from within the calendar as well so you can easily record additional phone numbers and email addresses when reviewing appointments in the calendar without necessarily having to jump back to the contact’s record.

System-wide Quick Search

How it works. In addition to FileMaker’s built in Find Mode, we’ve added a fast and intuitive Quick Search to every screen of the calendar so that you can easily find what you’re looking for.

This routine searches all the main tables of the solution, returning matching results be they phone numbers, invoices, appointments, etc. And best of all, it does this without disturbing your current focus or found set, so you can search for a phone number while you’re in the middle of something without loosing your place. And of course our documentation makes its easy to add your own new tables to this search.

Introduction

Your can record activities against projects (or jobs, or work orders) and then filter the calendar by project to make sure items don’t slip through the cracks. Complete offers a very simple project table, containing the project’s duration and status, to which you can add your own project specific fields and tabs.

Projects

Project Overview. Just a simple project table ready for your enhancements; but we have taken great care with the project dates, so when you enter project dates into the project’s record, you’re actually creating a project overview record in the calendar.

You can then schedule additional activity for the project either right on the project’s record, or from within the calendar.

Phases. We’ve introduced a simple phase concept to the calendar so each project can have any number of phases (though phases themselves can not have phases).

Phases can make it easy to review your project on the Gantt Charts.

Gantt Charts

How it works. Gantt Charts provide a central place for reviewing a project’s activity and for examining schedules across and between projects. In the screen shot below you’ll see the chart filtered to show a single project.

But it could also be filtered to show just "waiting" items, items for a certain user, or for a certain client. You can also use our "hide" filters, for example, to show everything except items that are "completed."

Dependencies. While you can certainly just edit an item’s date by using FileMaker’s built in date picker. You can also link items together in a dependency chain so that schedule changes cascade through the other items in the chain.

Introduction

SeedCode Calendar Pro Complete links invoices to contacts and/or projects. You can maintain a simple list of invoiceable items, or add your own ad hoc items to an invoice. You’ll also find basic tax calcs that you can modify to suit your needs.

Invoicing

Not Accounting. This is a simple invoicing system that you can extend to generate great looking invoices out of FileMaker. You can record an amount paid against each invoice and thus see the current outstanding balance for your contacts and projects.

This isn’t an accounting system, however, and is really best thought of as the customer-facing side of your accounting (the invoices and reports a customer might see). You’ll likely want to use a regular accounting package for payables and your other accounting functions.

Reports. You’ll also fund two example sales reports you can duplicate and modify to get your started in making your own reports. One summarizes sales by customer and the other summarizes them by product. Both reports work off a found set of invoices so you can search for invoices by date range to get date specific reports.

Introduction

Complete will let you email or print letters to found sets of contacts as well as to the contacts linked to found sets of projects, invoices, and appointments. You can send free form mails or use mail templates with merge fields from your database.

Adding Contacts to a Mailing

The print "letter" button at the bottom of most screens will let you begin a mail for that found set of records. These mails are linked to the relevant contacts, projects, etc. so that you can review which mailings went to which contacts.

Once contacts are added to a mailing you can write your mail using merge fields from the database or apply a template to the mailing.

Mail Templates

How they work. You can create any number of mail templates and select the one that works for each mailing. Templates can include merge fields that represent the salient fields from your contact, project, invoice and appointment tables. And of course our documentation includes clear instructions for adding your own merge fields from new tables. Once you’ve applied a template to your mailing you can preview how each recipient’s email will look and even customize or personalize some or all of the mails being sent.

And, if you’re using the SMTPit plugin, you can preview and send HTML emails (the preview also requires FileMaker 9 or higher).

Introduction

SeedCode offers relevance-ranked, context sensitive help to document some of the most important features of the calendar and to describe some common modifications. You can modify and extend the content here to deliver your own help or policy documentation to your users.

Though most people will get inside the layouts and scripts of SeedCode Calendar Pro Complete to make their own changes and configure the system to their liking, there are a number of settings you can change without getting into the code.

Help & Documentation

Built-In. You can find our built in documentation in the Admin section of the software. Filtering the documentation for a word ("delete" in this example) brings up the matching entries sorted by relevance.

This content is completely editable and you’re able to add, delete, and rearrange entries.

Online. You can find the same documentation online if you’d prefer. The online version also contains illustrations where applicable.

Context Sensitive. A "?" button available in the upper right corner of almost every screen brings up the same documentation in a floating mini window offering context sensitive help for that section of the software.

Settings

Types etc. Many of the "value lists" in SeedCode Calendar Complete are small tables themselves where you can maintain lists of users, appointment types, etc.

Navigation. Complete also employs a novel navigation engine that allows you to easily manage the tabs and layouts available to each user, making it very easy to add new layouts and to rename and rearrange the navigation tabs without having to touch every layout. You can even teach the navigation about layouts in other files. Best of all, you can still use FileMaker’s built in Access Privileges to control access to your layouts as our navigation engine "scrubs" the list of possible tabs against access privileges to only show users layouts they are allowed to visit.

Browser like Back and FWD buttons make it easy to get around: something else that is easy to add to new layouts or to layouts in your own file.