Tech Tips: Supercharge your schedule

Ideally, an electronic calendar is more than a calendar. It’s a way for you to organize your appointments, your tasks and your contacts. Many calendars now offer the ability to integrate tasks directly into the application, and to assign those tasks to specific times, if necessary. “Contact integration” means the calendar knows who you’re booking an appointment with, which saves you from having to enter crucial information to prepare for an appointment.

But perhaps the most important aspect of a calendar is sharing. Most financial advisors work with an administrative assistant who keeps track of their appointments for them. That assistant may be juggling more than one advisor’s schedule at a time. So, the ability to delegate calendar access is important.

– Google Calendar

Google Inc.‘s Calendar system is one of the most popular available. It offers a variety of sharing features, including the ability to delegate a calendar for others to manage. Adding appointments to the calendar is relatively easy with the browser-based interface, which lets you point, click and add information, such as the location (for later mapping) and the email address of the person you’re meeting (so that Google can automatically send them a meeting request).

Google Calendar is excellent when you’re connected to the Internet (which, for most people these days, is almost all the time) but there may be situations in which you want to access your calendar offline.

There are various choices here, as many third-party calendar programs integrate with Google Calendar. These include the native calendar application in Google’s Android smartphone’s operating system and Apple Inc.‘s iOS equivalent, both of which synchronize with Google Calendar out of the box.

– Android

Android’s calendar has some neat features of its own. For example, prodding the location that you entered when creating an appointment will also call it up on Google Maps. And the Google Now feature will tell you when you should leave your current location in order to make your next appointment on time, if you need to travel.

One limitation with Google Apps is that there isn’t much option to integrate with an existing client relationship management (CRM) system, and you may not feel comfortable storing personal client information on Google’s servers, let alone documents on Google’s Drive document storage system.

– Outlook

For many advisors working in a corporate environment, Microsoft Corp.‘s Office is the go-to software suite for productivity, and that makes its Outlook software the obvious calendar app. Outlook is a service for which shared calendar information can be stored either in the cloud or directly on local company servers.

Outlook 2013 has a smooth, clean look and feel, with some extra bells and whistles, including a weather forecast for the coming day. But some of the features that were especially useful in Outlook years ago – such as the ability to drag an email directly into a time slot on the calendar as the basis for an appointment – are gone.

Calendar sharing in Outlook is a breeze. Instead of the “delegate” feature, which used to provide multi-person access to a calendar, there now is “sharing permissions” – a feature that lets you assign control over various aspects of your calendar, including the ability to read, write and delete appointments, to another person.

Other useful features include group scheduling and the ability to overlay several calendars on top of one another. This might be useful for an administrative assistant who is scheduling appointments for multiple advisors in a wealth-management company, for example. An overlay would make it easy to see when each person is available to meet a big client.

Outlook can integrate with the calendar system in Google Apps using a connector available from Google.

Outlook features access to contacts and tasks from within the same application, but the truly savvy advisor may consider tighter integration with contacts and tasks in a team environment so that appointments can be linked closely – not just to people, but to sales pipelines and projects.

– Other apps

For PCs, ACT! (www.act.com) is a CRM system with integrated scheduling capabilities that also integrates with Outlook, synchronizing tasks between the two.

For Mac users, Marketcircle Inc.‘s Daylite (www.marketcircle.com/daylite/) is a full-fledged CRM system with shared team calendars and emailing capability. Daylite also has an iOS version, so you can see your appointments on the road. This app integrates with Google’s calendar and with Apple’s calendar app on the OS X operating system.

Corporate calendar apps such as these CRM-based systems may not be particularly sexy from a visual perspective, and they may not play well with personal schedules. Even busy advisors need a life. As long as your shared calendar system makes itself available to other applications, you can install a mobile solution that will show your client appointments while also keeping you abreast of other commitments, such as school plays, family birthdays and date night.

The native calendar apps on both iOS and Android allow this flexibility, but there are other calendars with even more features. UpTo Inc.‘s UpTo (www.upto.com), for example, lets you integrate a variety of pre-published calendars, including everything from movie releases to TV premieres and religious holidays.

In a profession in which building and maintaining relationships can make or break your business, meetings are your lifeblood. But scheduling and keeping track of those meetings shouldn’t drain your productivity in other areas, such as prospecting for new clients.

With scheduling software, you’ll be more productive – at work and, perhaps, even at home.

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