Improving Your Outlook

The journal tracks your activities for you by providing a record of messages you've sent or received, calls you've made, and letters you've sent. Along with tracking the calls, the journal includes a duration field so that you can easily see how long you spent on a project. Rebecca owns a consulting business and uses these features to her advantage, resulting in more accurate accounting of the time spent on a project and customer billing.

She keeps all of her contacts in Outlook and when she needs to make a phone call, she uses Outlook to dial the phone. The journal item is created automatically and the duration is logged.

Rebecca has configured Outlook to create automatic entries for Word documents, so she knows how much time she spends creating and editing each document. When Rebecca creates her documents, she always completes the document properties dialog box and enters the contact's name as a keyword. Later, she can sort or group by keyword, and associate the contact with the journal entries. After that, the journal items are listed on the contact's Activities tab.

When Rebecca works with other programs, she creates a journal entry and includes shortcuts to any documents she created. She includes notes on each journal item to remind her exactly what the journal entry is about if the client has questions charges on their bills.

At the end of every month, Rebecca uses a custom view that shows only the items created within the past 30 days. She adds up the time spent for each journaled item, and then prepares the bills to send. As her business grows, she knows she'll need to automate the process and is reviewing some third-party Outlook add-ins she discovered at http://www.slipstick.com. If she doesn't find an add-in that does what she needs, Rebecca found some VBA samples she can use to provide some automation.

Rebecca also uses the journal for personal business, such as house and car repairs, and to record medical and dental information for her family members. She felt it would be easiest to use separate Journal folders for these records one for repairs and one for medical records so that they wouldn't be mixed with her business journal. She created custom journal entry types to use, enters detailed notes for each entry, and scans her receipts and inserts them in the journal entry and has a complete record of the work done. When she needs the information, the records are easy to locate and contain all the information in one file. At the end of each year, Rebecca prints out copies the journal entries for home repairs and stores them with her tax records. When it's time to sell the house, she can easily answer buyer's questions about repairs and use the same records to help calculate her capital gains.