Organizing Your Dubsado Account
Keeping a Dubsado account organized can be difficult.
Duplicating templates can lead to a messy account where it’s hard to tell which templates are being used with clients and in workflows and which ones are gathering dust - so a lot of people keep them all just to make sure they don’t break anything.
There are ways to organize your Dubsado account and help you save time when you’re working on client projects or editing workflows and templates.
In this blog post, I’ll go over tips and strategies I use to keep my Dubsado account organized.
How to organize your Dubsado account
In your Dubsado account there are several ways to keep items organized and help you find things more easily in your account.
The biggest rule for me, is if I am sure I don’t need a form or an email anymore - I delete it. Keeping things around longer than you need them for just creates clutter - as it would in your house.
How to organize Dubsado projects
To keep projects organized in Dubsado, I use the following features:
Project Status:
Project statuses allow you to visualize your project by the different stages your leads and clients are in.
The way to determine this is based on your unique client process, but generally you can sort them by:
Leads: call booked, proposal sent, cold lead, declined, etc.
Jobs: onboarding, in progress, offboarding, support, etc.
This is what my project statues look like:
Project Status in Dubsado
I use project statuses to help identify what stage a lead or client is inside of my client process. I track leads starting from when they book a discovery call, then I track which leads I’ve sent a proposal to. If they decide to work with me - they move to ‘In progress’ and move along the job statuses.
Tip: I use emojis in the project status to help me quickly distinguish between statuses.
Bonus: you can decide which status you want to appear first when you click on your projects page - otherwise known as the ‘default view’ on your projects page.
In your projects page, click ‘Customize’ at the top right - then click the checkbox to select the status you’d like to have appear on the main project tab.
You can pick a specific status from your leads or jobs, or simply select all leads or all jobs.
Customize your project status default view
Project Tags:
Tags allow you to organize projects by type service or by another other distinguishing feature you’d like to sort by.
I use tags to sort by service, so I’ve created a tag for the different services or offers I provide:
Dubsado project tags
To create your tags, you can create them inside a project or you can go to your projects page, click ‘Customize’ and scroll to the bottom to create your list of tags.
Once assigned, you’ll see a dot beside the project name and if you hover over the dot - you’ll see the name of the tag.
View tags on Dubsado projects
Archive projects:
Archiving projects allows you to clean up your project list. I use it mostly for leads that have let me know they will not work with me or for leads that go cold / disappear.
Archiving a project will keep all the information in it, but any workflows will stop. Any schedulers or invoices will continue to send reminders.
Note: If the project that is being archived is in any lead status - empty invoices will be deleted and any open invoices will be closed and reminders stopped.
How to organize Dubsado templates
To keep your templates organized, I do the following:
Naming emails:
This is probably the biggest organizing tip for Dubsado - it will save you loads of time, especially when building workflows.
I noticed how much this helps when I was working on a client's Dubsado setup - I spent SO much time scrolling and searching through their canned emails to find what I was looking for that I had to ice my wrist at the end of the day because of carpal tunnel issues.
This is an example of the naming convention I use in my business:
## Name of Service | ## Name of Workflow | ## | Purpose of email
Here is an example of the name of a canned email in my account:
01 Dubsado | 01 Inquiry | 01 | Send Proposal
Let’s break it down:
## Name of Service = 01 Dubsado: I add a number so that all the emails for that service stay together - but it’s optional - then I add the name of the service so I know what the email is associated to.
## Name of Workflow = 01 Inquiry: ‘01’ because it’s the first workflow in my Dubsado setup services, and ‘Inquiry’ is the name of that specific workflow.
## = 01: it’s the first email being sent in that workflow
Purpose of email = Send Proposal: it quickly tells me exactly what that email is for without having to open it up to read the content. I know this is the email I send right after my discovery call where I send my lead the proposal for the services they are interested in.
How does this help?
It keeps my emails for the same service all together, and allows them to all appear sequentially in my canned emails list.
Here is an example for a coaching service:
You can see that all the emails for coaching are kept together, the workflows appear one after the other in the sequence they are being sent out to the clients. Within the same workflow, they are also appearing sequentially.
This is SO much easier for my brain to process vs. having emails scattered all across the different pages of my canned email tab
Dubsado canned email organization
Deleting templates:
Delete old scheduler, forms, canned emails, packages, workflows, payment plans that you are SURE you no longer use is a good strategy to stay organized.
If you’re not sure if you may need the form again, you can apply the forms to a test project and then archive the project. After you do this, you can delete the form. If you ever need the forms again, you can access them in the archived project.
In my clients accounts I’ve seen pages and pages of emails that aren’t being used, forms that are from years ago for services they no longer provide.
If things aren’t deleted or archived and sit there for a while, it’ll be more difficult to sort and clean up later - because you have to go down memory lane and try to remember what each email / form / package / payment plan / workflow was for - and if it’s even being used anymore.
It would be really helpful if Dubsado would allow users to have folders - but until then, this is a good tactic to maintain your sanity. You just have to remember to do it.
Renaming forms and emails:
If you’re worried about deleting things, one way to stay organized is to add a Z in front of the title of emails and forms you no longer use.
This will push them to the bottom of the list and allow you to focus on the forms and emails at the top of the list.
As you can see below, I have a number of forms I don’t use - but want to keep around just in case. Some of them are coded forms that I refer to for my client Dubsado setups but don’t use in my own services, others are for services I don’t provide anymore - but hang on to just in case.
Update project workflow
Reorganizing the order of templates:
For schedulers, packages and workflows you can reorganize the order in which they appear to fit your needs.
You simply just have to drag them around to reorganize them.
This allows you to pull the ones you use the most to the top, and keep the ones you don’t use - but don’t want to delete at the bottom of your list.
Changing the order of templates
Hopefully these tips help you clean up and organize your Dubsado account so you can find things more easily and save some time when working in your account.
Let’s work together!
Need help setting up Dubsado for your business? I can help you with a Done for you Dubsado setup. We’ll map out your desired client process so I can build it in Dubsado for you.
To learn more, book a free discovery call where we’ll talk about where you need help, and if it makes sense we can talk about what it’s like to work together.