Since I haven’t actually been taking advantage of the connection between this blog and the ECP dashboard until now, I thought it might be a good time to link back to some recent posts you might have missed.

First, let’s talk about managing contacts. Most email programs have some version of contact management, but they don’t usually cross over to functions outside of email. Check out 3,2,1 Contact… How Do You Keep Track to find out how much more Email Center Pro has to offer.

Learning how to control your email is a common thread on this blog. The recent Who’s the Boss post addressed some outdated ways to gain the upper hand, and suggests alternatives to the same-old same-old approach.

Finally, we see the frequent articles and blog posts about the demise of email at the hands  social media and we just don’t agree. Don’t Believe the Hype offers a counter argument to the currently popular “email is dead” chorus.

To see an example for the current topic, click the Examples tab in the Instructions and Examples window:

Click Next Example to see more.

Click Paste Into Topic to paste the current example into your topic as a starting point for your own text.

The Premier Edition of Business Plan Pro has a neat little feature called the Cash Pilot for testing out these scenarios with all of your plan financials taken into account:

• On the plan toolbar, click Cash Pilot.
• The bottom section is your Control Panel: click in the boxes and type (or adjust numbers up and down with the arrow keys) to change your assumptions for:
  • Months of Inventory On-hand
  • Minimum Inventory Purchase
  • Collection Period
  • Sales on Credit %
  • Payment Delay

The left side shows your Planned Cash (your plan’s current numbers). The right side shows Adjusted Cash (what happens to your Cash Balance and Net Cash Flow with the new assumptions):

Go ahead, test out your ideas, and see what happens to your plan. If you like what you see, just close the Cash Pilot to apply the new numbers to your plan. If your tests show these changes would put you in the red, click Reset All (in the lower right corner) to go back to your original projections.

Meet Alex and Evan, two of the dedicated ECP programmers who used to get woken up at 2:00 in the morning with alerts that the servers were struggling to handle all of your mail. These days, they’re a lot more rested.

The most recent improvements to Email Center Pro are largely behind-the-scenes upgrades that help you serve your customers faster and more reliably.

More helpful Search results

One change you can actually see is in the Search function. We noticed that a lot of our users were using search for “names@domain”, rather than opening the Contacts tab to look specifically for people.

You’ll see that the Search box on the top right of your Email Center Pro screen now contains an arrow. Click the arrow next time you’re using the search, and use the drop-down menu to focus your search results on emails, contacts, templates, or tagged conversations.

Then you might want to consider forecasting your sales (or part of your sales) with a subscription, or churn-rate, model. This kind of sales forecast allows you to make projections that take into account ongoing revenue, new customers, and cancellations.

Both Business Plan Pro and Marketing Plan Pro have a special add-in sales forecast for handling subscription sales. To access this feature:

First, download it from our website

1. Make sure you have a working Internet connection open
2. Open your business or marketing plan in your Palo Alto software program
3. On the Tools menu, click Add-ins
4. (Note: your serial number should automatically load in the web page. If it doesn’t, you can find it by clicking About in the Help menu)
5. Scroll down the list until you find Sales Forecast-Subscription (Churn Rate) Model
6. Click Download Component
7. If prompted to Find a program or Save the file, click Save. Then browse to a location where you want to save it, such as your Desktop.

Then, import it into your plan

1. Return to your plan software
2. On the File menu, click Import
3. Choose Import an Add-In, and click Next
4. Browse to the location where you saved the downloaded file
5. Highlight the downloaded file name and click Open, then click Next
6. Click Finish

The new subscription model sales forecast will open for you to see and work with. Instructions above the spreadsheet get you started. You can also click Search on the Help menu, and search for “subscription” to find more information.

Finally, link it to your tables
The Subscription forecast currently exists in your plan as a stand-alone table. It doesn’t replace your regular Sales Forecast table, and doesn’t feed into your plan’s financial data. To make your subscription forecast part of your financial plan, you can build a link in the main Sales Forecast table to the “Total Sales” row of the Subscription Model sales forecast.

Click here for detailed instructions on linking your Subscription Model to your main Sales Forecast.

While the wizards are designed for users who aren’t used to doing their own financial projections, the spreadsheets still offer a great deal of help in understanding what kind of data belongs where.

Row Help
In addition to the general Instructions above each table, spreadsheets contain definitions for every row, which depend on your Table Settings. To see Row-by-row help in your Spreadsheet, simply click on a cell in the row you wish to learn more about, and read the definition which displays along the bottom of your program window.

Can’t See Row-by-Row Help?
If you do not see the Row definition window below your spreadsheet, make sure there is a checkmark next to Row by Row Help on the View menu.

Example
The top line of your Row-by Row help lists the row number and label, to make sure you are reading the right definition. In the example below, all three row names have been filled in; note how the new row labels appear as part of the row definitions (”University Students“).

How could this be? I WRITE help files for a living!

Well, first, they often have so much information it takes forever to wade through it to find what I want, and I’m terribly impatient. Secondly, help authors seem to phrase everything in unexpected ways – if I want to know about ADDING, they talk about SUMS. Harrumph. I’d much rather turn around and ask the expert user sitting next to me a question, in plain English, that cuts right to what I want to do.

Did you know that we’ve tried to give you that quick, expert user answer on every screen of Business Plan Pro?

At the top right of every screen, just below the buttons to close and minimize the program, is a little “How Do I?” button, offering shortcuts to the most common questions our users have. Go ahead and click it; I bet your question is in there.

And since planning involves different tasks, like writing text, projecting financials, printing your plan, etc., the How Do I? button will give you additional task-specific tips when you click it from within a topic, table, or chart.

So there you go. A little digital expert to consult for your quick questions, with quick, easy to follow, simple answers.

Of course, when you’re ready for more complex questions, like the difference between expenses and assets, or whether labor costs for production belong in your Sales Forecast or your Profit and Loss tables, we’ve got that covered in the full Help file.

With features like full-text searching, an Index, and lots of ‘Related Topics’ links, we hope using the Help is easier in our programs than in some software we’ve had to use. But, if you end up using only the built-in Instructions, Wizards, and the occasional How Do I? tip, we won’t blame you.

In fact, we designed it that way.

1. Open Firefox 3.x.
2. Log into your Email Center Pro account.
3. Paste the following code snippet into the address bar (NOTE: you should replace “paloalto.emailcenterpro.com” with your actual Email Center Pro account domain name. Also, if you have SSL enabled, the protocol should be https instead of simply http): javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#%s","Email Center Pro") and hit Enter.
4. Click the “Add Application” button on the info bar that shows up just above the browser viewport to allow Email Center Pro to handle the mailto links.
5. The next time you click on a mailto link in the browser, it will prompt you to make a choice.  Select Email Center Pro and choose “Remember my choice for mailto links” if you would like to skip this step next time.  These settings can be updated at any time by viewing Tools > Options > Applications and searching for the Content Type of “mailto”.

That’s it!  If you’ve made it this far, you’ll now be able to spawn a new ECP message by clicking on the mailto link in your browser.  Another thing to note is that the ECP message will open in the same window, so it may be useful to right-click on the mailto link and choose “Open link in new tab”.  Go ahead and send us a message and let us know how it worked!

Alex Boone
ECP Developer

1. On the View menu, point to Tables, Topics, or Charts (depending on what you’re looking for)
2. An alphabetical list of all the tables, topics, or charts in your plan will display
3. Click on the name of the item you wish to open

It’s that simple!

And you can see the same list by clicking the All Items area below the Outline, then using the drop-down box to filter the list by Tables, Topics, or Charts.

To change the colors in all your charts:

• On the Tools menu, point to Options and click Charts.
• Click on the Colors tab.
• Click the pull-down arrow and scroll through the list to see different palette options.
• Highlight the new color palette name and click OK.

To change the colors in a single chart:

• On the Chart formatting toolbar, click Custom Format.
  • Use the Palette button to change the entire chart.
  • OR, right-click on the data series (line, bar, or area) you would like to change and select one of the options that appears.
• For more detailed changes to background, gridline, or chart box colors, click the custom format Properties button, and change the settings on the General and Y Axis tabs.