An activity set is a collection of tasks and appointments. The tasks and appointments in an activity set tend to be repeated frequently and in the same way—for instance, court
proceedings, house closings, film shoots, and step-by- step sales tasks. It consists of activities that are completed in a specific order, and either starts or ends on a specific date.
For many people, no matter how different each workday is, they do many tasks over and over again. For example, sales is repetitive in many ways. Although each customer is different, successful professionals work from a well-defined set of actions to convert an opportunity into real business. Activity sets enable you to collect a series of tasks or appointments into a set, ready to be retrieved, and applied at once to the opportunity, so that no important task/ appointment is missed.
There are 2 types of activity sets in Daylite:
1. Forward: All the activities in the activity set are assigned due dates after the start date. 2. Reverse: All the activities in the activity set are assigned due dates before the end date. When you customize an activity set, you specify relative dates; when you actually use an activity set in your work, the relative dates are replaced with real dates.
There are two prerequisites for working with activity sets. You should first define an activity set in the Activity Sets pane of Daylite Preferences. You can record a series of generic tasks, appointments, or any repetitive steps required to accomplish a goal in your business. Once you have defined an activity set, you may apply it in Daylite.
Letters
Daylite allows you to create letters for people in your database for correspondence purposes. There are different methods to write a letter in Daylite. You can set up letter templates in the Preferences and use them for writing letters. Or, you can set up a template in Word, Excel, OmniGraffle, Pages, Numbers, or Keynote and use one of those templates to write a letter. These templates can be re-used to create letters and the merged letters can be saved in a folder that you choose.
When you are creating a letter, you can choose to email it, print it, or open it in Daylite. Once the letter has been created, Daylite displays a copy of the letter you have sent in the Activity tab of the Detail pane.
You can customize letter templates by choosing Daylite > Preferences and clicking Letter Templates. Here you can add new templates, remove, or edit existing templates. Only those letter templates that are set as Active are available in Daylite for selection.
Reports
A report is a template that describes “what” to get from your database and “how” to present that information. Reports can access any information in Daylite and present it in a useful format to aid in improving business decisions. All Daylite reports are designed using the Report Engine.
The Report Engine is an extremely flexible design tool and data extraction engine that produces high-quality Portable Document Format (PDF) output for printing, viewing on- screen, or sharing over the internet. Conceptually, the Report Engine may be seen as
consisting of 2 parts: First, the engine itself, which works "behind the scenes" and actually extracts data, and second, the Report Designer, which is where you design reports and print layouts. The Report Engine is built into Daylite.
You can work with one of Daylite’s standard reports or create your own custom report that matches your business requirements.
Some examples of reports in Daylite 4 are:
• List of contacts having no activity for the past 3 months. • List of opportunities created in a specified date range. • All projects completed in a specified date range.
Linking
Linking is the process of connecting the objects in your database for keeping related data together. It allows you to record historical and current information and view it in one place. Linking is the glue that holds all your information together and provides a context to your random bits of data.
For example, consider you are working from the calendar. Linking gives you the ability to quickly see all the people in a meeting. If you are working on a project, you can view all the tasks and appointments linked to that project. Linking a person to a company allows you to specify the ‘role’ played by the person in that company. You could also link 2 people or 2 companies to define the relationship between them.
The benefit of linking is that you don’t have to enter the same data repeatedly. For instance, consider you have a person working on a web design project. The same person will also be working on documentation and testing projects. You can create the person’s record once and link him/her to all 3 projects. If there are people in your database who will be working on a certain project, you can perform a search and link them to their project, thereby reducing double-entry. Linking enables you to tie objects to each other and provides rich history and information about how one aspect influences the other.
Linking a person to a company