You can add an Activity from anywhere in the CRM by hovering over the Add icon in the Top Right Menu Bar:
After hovering, you'll see the below:
Click the Activities area to bring up your Create Activity modal:
If you want to use an Activity Template (which you can select from the first field here), you can see this post for more details.
If you don't need any more detail for your Activity than this modal requires, you can enter that info here and click Create Activity. If, however, you have more fields you want to enter during the initial activity creation process, enter a Subject in the modal and then click the "create & edit" button. You'll then see the Activity Details page for the activity you're creating:
Let's take a look at each of these options during activity creation:
In the Subject box, simply type the name you want to give the Activity - this is the Activity name that will display on your Calendar.
Note: for both the Subject box here as well as the Description area below you should avoid including sensitive information in these fields, as the Subject and Description may be included in Activity Email Notifications. We recommend Linked Notes for that type of information. You can learn more about Activity Descriptions vs Linked Notes here.
You can then choose the Start and End Dates and Start and End Times for you Activity. In the example above, I've chosen February 16, 2017 and 11am - 12pm. Clicking inside the boxes for these fields will display a Calendar or a rolling list of times to make entering this information easier. Note: if you check off the All Day? box, the Start and End Times boxes will disappear.
If you click within the Type field, you can select from any of the Activity Types created within your database.
The choices which appear in this pulldown list are based upon Activity Categories which you have set up within Redtail.
Then, you can choose to indicate a Location here as well.
Because not all Activities have the same level of importance, you also have the options to designate Importance and Priority.
Your Importance options are Low, Normal and High. Your Priority options are 1-6.
You can also indicate the current level of completion for an activity.
You can also enter a Description for the Activity (note the formatting tools, which will allow you to format the Description as needed).
You can also click in the Notify Team box to select a database team to send email notification to upon saving.
Privacy Options for Activities are explained here.
Setting up your activity as a repeating activity is also an option. Details for how to work with this are here.
If you have an account with Advisor Products, you have an option here to share the Activity with your Advisor Products account upon saving by checking this box off.
Here you see options to Print, Cancel creation or Save your Activity. We'll come back to these a little later, as you'll likely be completing some more of the Activity Details prior to saving.
These five sections are where you'll choose to whom the Activity is assigned (Attendees) and to which Contact(s) to attach the Activity (Linked Contacts), as well where you can link Notes, Accounts or Documents to the Activity.
You will automatically show up as a Linked Attendee, but can remove yourself by clicking your Actions menu and selecting "Remove from activity". To add a different database user, or users, as a Linked Attendee, click inside the "add or remove users... box and you can select that database user(s):
Or, to add a guest (non-database user) as a linked Attendee, click the "add guest" button and you'll this modal:
Note: guest attendees are not clients, but rather attendees on the activity that aren't database users.
Guest attendees (non-database users) will display the word "Guest" next to their name on the Activity's Details page. If we added three User Attendees and one Guest Attendee, this area might then appear as the below:
Note that under each User Attendee and Guest Attendee you'll see their email address. Under User Attendees you'll also see a message indicating their email Notification preferences for assigned, completed and updated activities. These preferences are set by individual users. Guest Attendees automatically receive each of these email notifications as they are sent by default and Guests have no way to set preferences.
To add Linked Contacts, click inside the box under Linked Contacts and begin typing a client's name and then select when you see their name. If we were to add two linked contacts, it would look something like the below:
The two highlighted icons in the Linked Contacts widget above are links to the Contact Cards for those two contacts.
If you want to link a Note, Account or Document to the Activity, you can just click the respective Add buttons within those sections to link those up.
Several Actions are available when working here on the Activity Details page: 1) Save & Clone, which saves your Activity and creates an identical one, taking you to its Details page. It's very useful if you need to create a second activity that is nearly identical to your first one. Just make your edits and save it as well, 2) Save & Complete, which saves your created activity and completes it at the same time, 3) Save & Complete & New, which saves any edits you've made, completes the Activity and takes you to a new Activity Details page, where you can create a new Activity, 4) delete the Activity or 5) see a Timeline of actions performed on the Activity.
Details display the database user that created the Activity as well as the date and time created.
Your final step would be to click the Save Activity button to create your Activity:
You also have Print and Cancel options to the left of the Save option.
Clicking Cancel will close the Activity Details dialog without saving your Activity. Clicking Print will allow you to print out the details of the Activity.
Note: if you click the arrow on the right side of the Save button, you also have Save & Complete and Save & Clone options. Save & Complete will save your Activity and complete it at the same time. Save & Clone will save your Activity and bring up a duplicate of what you just created, where you can make any necessary edits and save that Activity as well. This is useful if you have very similar activities you need to create.
Note: when creating an Activity where some of the Linked Attendees have potential Calendar conflicts with that new Activity, you’ll see a message next to your Create buttons to let you know about the potential conflict(s):
If you click that conflict message, you'll see additional information about which activities pose potential conflicts and can then click through on them individually if need be to resolve the conflicts or click "continue" to return to your activity creation.
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