Running the daily office

Managers and owners sign in here, at the admin address. Pop in your email and password and you're into the full system.

This is your home base — Today's work. Each tile is a pile of jobs with a live count: customers who've replied, emails to sort, orders waiting to be confirmed, packs to post, books to dispatch, companies to re-sell to, and disputes to fight. Click any tile and it takes you straight there. Work them down to zero and your day's done.

The orders list is every sale in the system. Search or filter to find what you need — there are quick filters for orders with a new reply, a bad email address, or money overdue. You can see at a glance the book, the school, which rep sold it, and whether it's paid. Click a row to open it.

Open an order and you've got everything in one place. Across the top are your actions — email the customer, take a payment, print the cover, view the proof. The form holds all their details; if you change something important like the school or the quantity, the system asks for it to be confirmed again before it ships. And at the bottom is the timeline — every email, text and note about this order, in order.

To write to a customer, hit Email customer. You don't start from a blank page — pick a template like 'chase an unpaid invoice' or 'payment received', and the wording writes itself with their name and details. There's also Draft with AI: tell it in one line what the reply needs to do and it writes a first draft using this order's real invoice number, balance and dates. It never invents a price or a delivery date, and it never sends anything — you read it, change what you like, and press Send yourself.

Before any paid order ships, someone rings the customer to confirm it's all genuine — that's the confirmation room. Get them on the phone and click Confirm. If they don't pick up, log the attempt; after a couple of tries you can send a 'we tried to reach you' email, and that's enough to let the books go out. Every paid order comes through here — there's no shortcut past it — because this call is the record we rely on if a payment is ever disputed. If despatch tell you a paid order hasn't appeared in their queue, this is almost always why.

Credit control is your chase list — everyone who hasn't paid, most urgent first. Start your day with Next debtor: it hands you the most urgent account no colleague is already on, and opens the order ready to dial. When you're on with several of you, you'll see rows badged 'With Robyn' — leave those alone, the system keeps you apart. After every call press the CC button on the dialler, then Log contact here: no answer, call back — tap one hour or two days and the time writes itself — or they promised to pay Friday. Snoozed rows come back exactly when they're due, and a broken promise jumps straight to the top. And if someone says 'remind me what I'm paying for', the row menu has Send proof link — choose Text and the cover link's on their phone before you hang up.

When money lands in the bank, don't just tick it off — Record payment. The full balance is pre-filled; add the reference off the bank statement and save. The invoice settles, the chase ends, and the customer gets the same receipt a card payer would. If a lower price was agreed on the call, type the amount that actually arrived and tick 'this was the agreed price' — everything re-prices to match, and the write-down is on the timeline for the manager to see. And if their saving lapsed but they'd pay with it back on, Re-offer saving puts it back with a fresh deadline — tap Today and they've got until midnight tonight, with the offer landing in their inbox before you've hung up.

When customers email back, the system files most replies straight onto the right order — and reads them on the way in. Each one gets a label and a one-line summary, so you can see at a glance that this is a payment query and that one is a complaint, without opening either. Anything angry, or threatening to cancel, is flagged urgent and floats to the top of the list. If someone asks to be left alone, that's flagged too — but nobody is marked do-not-contact until a person ticks the box.

Open one and the system shows its best guesses and any clues, like the sender's address. Find the matching order and attach it, and it drops onto that timeline. If it was a bounce, attaching it flags that the address is dead so you know to get a new one. Tick 'remember this sender' and it'll file itself next time.

The post room is for the hard-copy packs that go in the mail — a covering letter, the invoice, and a cover sheet. Print the day's run in two goes, one on plain paper and one on the cover card, and the moment you print, that batch is locked in as the run. Fold them into envelopes, then mark the run posted — and it stamps only the packs you actually printed. If a new order sneaks into the queue while you're printing, it simply waits for the next run, so nothing ever gets marked as posted that never came off the printer. Print first, bag, then mark — in that order.

Once an order's paid and confirmed, the actual books go to the school from the dispatch room. Print your labels and the slips that go in each parcel, and the weight is calculated for you. Dispatch books it with Royal Mail and records the tracking; when it's delivered, mark it, and the customer gets an automatic 'your books have arrived' message.

Sometimes a customer disputes a payment — that's a chargeback, and the deadline to respond is tight, so they're sorted soonest first. Log it against the order, then Generate evidence and the system builds a complete pack: the two confirmations, the emails and texts, the call log, and proof the books were delivered, all in one PDF for the bank. Add anything extra, send it, and record whether we won.

Happy customers are your easiest next sale. The repeats list shows companies whose last order is old enough to call again. Hit Start repeat order and it opens a new deal already filled with their details — hand it to a rep and they're halfway to a sale before they dial.

Two more handy lists: Customers is every company you've dealt with and their history, and Schools is the full directory of UK schools the system picks from. Use them whenever you need to check a record.

Your team has a Report a problem button on every screen. What they send lands under System, Bug reports — with who sent it, what they said, and the exact page they were on. Work through the new ones and mark them fixed or dismissed.

Every standard message — welcome emails, payment reminders, the letter that goes in the post — lives in Templates, with a live preview of each. If the wording needs tweaking, Edit wording lets you change it, and the customer's name, your phone number and the logo all fill themselves in.