Notes Overview

Learn about Notes

1 About Notes
2 Benefits
3 Key Terms and Glossary
4 Top Tips for Notes
5 Common Uses for Notes
6 Where to find Notes
7 Note Management
8 Importing Notes
9 FAQ’s
10 Further Reading

Search the Knowledge Base

Supporting Resources

On demand webinar: Getting Organised with Notes, Tasks, and Dashboards

About Notes

Notes can be used to provide more information, document changes, record points and ideas, and aid memory about almost anything within your training business!

Notes are a quick and easy way of capturing this information and making it accessible to your full team within the platform they already log into every day, this makes Notes a powerful way of centralising operations, staying on top of things, and helping your team to make better decisions!

In your accessplanit platform, you can add Notes against your Courses, Delegates, Invoices, Meetings, Purchases, Resources, Awards, User Awards, Opportunities and so many more.

Benefits

Here are the benefits of using Notes

Keeping track of changes	Notes are an invaluable tool for maintaining a clear and accurate record of any changes made to Delegates, Accounts, Opportunities, Courses and so many more. They provide a reliable way to track updates. By documenting the reasons behind each change, notes are a great way of communicating and helping create a comprehensive history of actions taken. This practice not only enhances accountability but also ensures that all Training Administrators can easily understand the context behind the adjustments
Sharing key information	Sharing key information through notes is an efficient and streamlined way to ensure clarity, especially when a Training Administrator needs to quickly understand the reasons behind recent changes or updates. Notes provide a centralised and accessible record that allows for faster decision-making and smoother communication among team members. By documenting and sharing essential details, notes not only save time but also promote transparency and accountability. This practice ensures that everyone is on the same page and minimises misunderstandings
Managing complaints	Utilising notes to manage complaints is highly effective for training administrators to gain a clear understanding of the complaint. Detailed notes provide crucial insights into the nature of the complaint, the circumstances that led to its occurrence, and the steps required for resolution. They serve as a comprehensive record, capturing not only the specifics of the issue but also the actions taken to address it or bring it to a resolution. This approach ensures that every complaint is handled with consistency, transparency, and care, enabling Training Administrators to identify patterns, improve processes, and enhance the overall experience for all customers involved.

Key Terms and Glossary

Mapped To	The Mapped To function allows you to select where the Note will be added for example, Delegate, Course, Opportunity, Course Template and so on. There are so many areas within the Platform that a Note can be added
Note Type	Note Type allows you to select what type of note it would be, for example, a complaint, update or refund note. Note Types can be customised if required using Custom List Items.

Top Tips for Notes

Here are some tips to get the most out of Notes within your accessplanit platform!

Define your own Note Types

Here at accessplanit we strongly recommend that you define useful and relatable Note Types to categorise your Notes.

Note Types can be invaluable when it comes to quickly filtering your Notes DataGrid and building reports, to add your own Note Types go to the Custom List Items page. You can return to this page to add more or edit your existing Note Types at any point!
Here are some common Note Types:

Positive Feedback
Complaint
Notes for Trainer
Payment Chase
Delegate Requirements

Build useful filters in your Notes DataGrid

As Notes allow you to share information transparently across your team; once you have established your Note Types, create some useful filters and share these with your team to allow them to find the information they want quickly, to save time and be more productive!

Here are some example filters that you could create and share:
1. Logged by me - only Notes that you have added
2. Logged this week - only see Notes that have been added within the last 7 days
3. Trainer Notes - only see Notes that your trainers have logged with the Note Type 'Trainer Notes & Feedback'

Automate your Note creation using Workflows!

To make logging information & updates even easier, you can use your accessplanit platform's Workflows tool to automate adding Notes for you when events happen within your platform. For example:

When a Venue changes on a Course
When a Course is marked as Fully Booked
When a customer Account is updated to be inactive

While it is rarely possible to automate all Notes, so many Notes are useful because they are a way for administrators to explain why an action or update has happened if there are any generic Notes that you can add via Workflows this is a great way to automate that boring task, and save time!

Always add a subject line

For each Note you and your team create, you can add in an optional Subject line to summarise the Note. Note Subjects give you a quick preview of the Note's content, and you can include it within your Notes DataGrid to make searching, navigating your notes, and viewing an overview of updates even easier!

Create Custom Fields

To make Notes work for your processes, you can capture additional information against each Note using Custom Fields!

Here are a few examples of how this could be used:

A checkbox custom field for ‘Escalation Flag’, could be used by leadership to identify if/when their involvement is needed
A drop-down box where we can set which department is involved with this info can be really helpful to filter the central ‘Notes’ DataGrid to only see Notes relevant to your team
A drop-down box where we can set whether the note is still active or if it is closed now is a good way to keep track of open and closed issues

Common Uses for Notes

Here are the most common ways that other training companies & departments use Notes to improve their processes within their accessplanit platform:

Logging the reason for updates, such as changes to Courses and Opportunities
If an important change is made to an Opportunity, such as an alternative rate offered, or a Course, such as a date or venue change, an administrator can very quickly edit that Opportunity or Course and save the change. What this edit does not help with, is letting the rest of the team know why this change was made!

For example, for an upcoming in-house course, a key contact has contacted you and asked you to send a different trainer this time as they did not like the previous trainer's style. Logging this as a Note against the Course once you have changed the trainer gives your team visibility of why this update has happened and could prevent the original trainer from being switched back mistakenly by another administrator!

Logging a Note against the Course explaining why the Course has been updated, gives your team real-time visibility of that information. Keeping them informed the next time they need to speak to the customer or delegates so that they can better support them, and make better decisions.

While this information could be shared in an email, your Note doesn't have the risk of being lost in an inbox! Notes are reliably stored directly against the object that you are looking at (the Course or the Opportunity), they are more collaborative, transparent, and permanent than emails.
Sharing Delegate information with your admin team and your trainers
A lot can change between a new customer registering with you, to them booking onto a course, to them finally attending your course.

Having a location where you can log any additional or different needs, any positive or negative experiences they may have had in the lead up to the course, which can be shared with other administrators and (possibly more importantly!) their trainer, can be invaluable for providing excellent customer service.
Quickly log information against Delegates
Notes like the above can be logged very quickly against delegates to capture any extra information, these Notes are then available to your team and the trainer(s) for that course.
To get even more value out of this feature, you can also allow your trainers to add their own notes to communicate any updates back to you and your team!

To decide which of your trainers can access delegate-based notes, edit those notes, and add their own, simply 'Edit' each trainer resource and select which options that trainer should have within their 'My Teaching' options.
Staying on top of your poor & late payers
The best way to stay on top of poor and late payers is through organisation and auditing! Utilising your platform's Workflows to automate the first few emails out to late payers, reiterating your bank details, and reissuing their invoice, is a great first step. This provides your customers with easy access to invoice and payment information, without any admin from yourself!

However, once you need to get involved, having a central location to log the progress you are making with your customer can make a world of difference with your admin overhead.

This is where Notes allow your team to log and keep track of when the customer was chased and by what method, what their response was / why payment hasn't been received when the expected payment is.
Giving the rest of your team visibility of the progress being made, an audit trail of your interactions, and avoiding two people chasing up the same customer.
Add your own Note Types of 'Chasing Payment' or 'Finance' to better categorise, filter and report on your notes.
Manage complaints
The way that you handle a complaint can make or break the long-term relationship that you have with that customer.

Having a central location to log the initial complaint and the progress/actions that your team have completed can make a big difference to the final outcome. This reliable location gives you an all-in-one view for following the progress made so far, actioning the next steps, keeping the customer in the loop, and avoiding two people completing the same action.

Although hopefully, you won't have to log too many!
Notes are an excellent way of quickly recording important information, which can then be accessed by the rest of your team - for better, transparent, collaborative working.

Create your own Note Type of 'Complaint' to better categorise, filter and report on your notes.

Where to find Notes

From the Main Navigation Menu, select ‘Notes’
This will open the Notes DataGrid

Find the item in your platform (for example, the Delegate or the Course)
Right-click the item in its DataGrid to view its context menu options
Select the ‘Notes’ context menu option
You will be taken to the Notes DataGrid specifically for this item

Note Management

Learn how to create and manage Notes in your platform:

Add a Note to a Course

Add a Note to a Course Template

Workflows with Note Actions

Importing Notes

Learn how to import Notes into your platform:

Imports Overview

How To: Import Notes

FAQ’s

It is possible to see when a Note was updated by adding the 'Date Updated' column into your Notes Datagrid.

Yes! There is a column available to add to your Notes DataGrid called 'Note', this will display the plain text version of your Note on your DataGrid. The plain text version means that any formatting that is included in the Note (such as bold text, colours, and images) will be ignored in the DataGrid.

There is no character limit for Notes, the biggest Note that we have ever seen was 80,000 characters! However, we strongly recommend sticking to under 1,000 characters per note so that you can include your Note content in your DataGrid without causing your DataGrid to be stretched.

It is not possible to undo the Delete action for Notes, therefore only Notes that should be removed forever should be deleted.

It is possible to add a Note Type called 'Archived', which old Notes can be logged against and then pre-filtered out of your DataGrids.

Yes!, Tasks can be added to Notes, especially when there is an action that needs to be done

Right-click on the Note from the DataGrid and select ‘Tasks (Add)’ from the context menu

Knowledge Base