Client Manager – an app to manage payments & appointments
by Toni McQuilken
Apr 9, 2012 10:56 AM –
Install
Client Manager allows any person who deals with different clients to keep an organized record of the clients general information, appointments and transactions. Also works as a Freelance Manager, Client Manager and General Business Manager. Track your income as well as your expenses. Keep the information of your clients and providers separated from your regular phone contacts. Find a Contact’s address on Map, Email Contact directly from the application.
Price: Free, $1.50
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Allows you to keep track of multiple contacts, appointment and who has paid invoices!
Cons
- You have to manually add client information – while you can import from your address book, it means you’re now keeping two separate address files for them.
- Adding and managing payments was a bit unwieldy.
- The interface wasn’t the most clear to navigate.
- Like with contacts, appointments are completely separate from anything else, giving you two sets of information to maintain.
Features:
As a freelancer, I was actually pretty excited to be reviewing Client Manager. Anything that would make it easier to keep track of clients, payments and appointments seems like it would be a good thing. But instead, to be honest, I found the app to be unnecessary at best, and a hindrance at worst.
My first, and one of the biggest, gripes with it was that it separates the data from the rest of your device contacts (listed as a feature in the developer’s description, but this can be quite cumbersome in practical use). I use Google Calendar as a way to manage several calendars at once, plus it if I make any changes, it updates in a number of places automatically across all the rest of my devices; meaning I always know I have the most current version. Client Manager, though, keeps its appointments separate, meaning you now have a different, unsynced calendar to keep track of. It was far easier to continue to put the appointments directly into my synced calendar with the custom label I’ve assigned to each client.
Like the calendar, your contacts are separate too. You can import information from your address book, but if you make a change later, either in your main address book or in Client Manager, the changes aren’t synced, again meaning you now have two places you have to remember to update and keep track of.
Okay, so if you’re not going to use it to manage client information or appointments, how does it work for keeping track of invoices and payments? Honestly, not great. I had to search around to figure out how to add a payment, and had to use trial and error a few times to figure out how it wanted me to input the information. Then, trying to pull up a list of current outstanding invoices, I found to be hard to find. You have to know to go through a few different screens to find it, and again, it took me a few tries and some work to discover that.
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Client Manager Add New Contact
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Client Manager Contact List
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Client Manager Finances
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Client Manager Edit Payment History
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Client Manager Options
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Client Manager Add Client
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Client Manager Add Payment
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Client Manager Appointments
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Client Manager Contacts
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Client Manager Finances
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Client Manager First Time
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Client Manager Options
Usefulness:
I actually didn’t find the app useful at all. As I mentioned above, when it wasn’t an outright hindrance to getting my information, such as the not syncing, it was superfluous, since I can track my invoices in PayPal, and see what’s been paid & when it was paid just as easily, and since that’s where the invoices originate from, I don’t have to input the information into a different program, again making for double work.
Ease of Use:
I had a hard time navigating this app. Figuring out even how to add a contact wasn’t obvious. You click on a button to import information, but then you still have to hit “create new client” to start a record. That didn’t make sense to me, and I spent several very frustrating minutes having to re-input my information in several times as buttons I tried didn’t work.
Frequently Used:
I don’t think you’re going to want to use this, much less use it all that often. It just got in the way, and made for extra work, rather than saving any time or money.
Interface:
Most of my issues with ease of use were around poor interface choices. The buttons aren’t named well, and are semi-transparent, which makes them fade into the background as it is. And finding the most important information isn’t obvious – you have to go hunting for it.