Blinkbid Help

Want to skip the hubbub and bang out a bid fast. Well you're in the right spot. Follow these steps and you'll have an estimate built in a flash.

Personalities are an easy way to manage different types, locations, or entities of businesses. For example, if a photographer shoots advertising during the week, and sells art prints on the weekend, he/she can keep the different businesses separate by using different personalities. Personalities are also a great way to manage multiple artists if you are an agent. Since a personality maintains its own item catalog, logo and preferences, it's easy to see how segmenting your types of jobs, or different locations where you conduct business, or managing different artists is a powerful feature.

Multiple personalities is a good thing.

If you have a personality that has everything you already need and you'd like to use it as a starting point duplicating the personality will save you gobs of time.

Maybe starting the photography business that focussed only on mangroves wasn't the best business move in the world. Say goodbye to the personality and all the jobs associated with it in a click.

You're an agent and you have a personality for each one of your talent that you represent. But what about you? Where's the business love for the home office? It's right here. Set up and agent personality so you can easily create an invoice for your commission fees directly from a job that you've been working on for one of your people.

You've got goods and services to put on a bid, here's where you keep 'em organized. You can store prices, download other categories and share your catalog with other people.

Blinkbid is dedicated to providing item catalogs to all creative genres in as many languages as possible. If the item catalog you need is not available, please contact us. We'll work with you to create one at no charge to you. If you need an item catalog in a different language than we offer, let us know and we'll get it done.

Where we show you how to set default tax options for your invoices so the government can get paid even though they were no where near your set lending a hand.

Isn't awesome when your clients are willing to wire transfer your money to you. Here's where you put in all your bank details that will print on your document.

You're no pushover. Tell your client that there are a few conditions for you to move forward with your bid. For example if the client kills the job the day before it starts, it's not a free ride.

Tell your client, it was a great time on the set, but now it's time to settle up.

Although the Blinkbid Usage license builder is a fabulous tool, you may have a more complicated operation that requires some high priced lawyer banter.

A very long legal document to protect yourself and annoy your client.

The Document Appearance window enables the user significant control over the the various sections of a Estimate or Invoice.

The list manager give you access to the many lists that Blinkbid utilizes like groups and usage license criteria.

Blinkbid has a myriad of global options like fonts and which email client to sue which can make your life easier and make using BB a bit more personal and efficient.

Manage contacts and clients within the Blinkbid interface. Contacts may be created from within Blinkbid or imported from an external source. The Address Book also contains a Portfolio Tracker application.

Blinkbid supports the vCard standard for importing contacts from other address books so you can bring al your old friends to the party.

Seek the people you wish to find so that you may work with them.

Sometimes you gotta group the people you work with so you can keep everyone organized. I mean you wouldn't want your rugby clients getting mixed up with your knitting circle people.

Blinkbid has a nice feature that lets you easily track your portfolios.

Blinkbid can print labels, export an email list or export a vCard of all or selected contacts. To get started navigate to the Address Book in the sidebar and then click on the Expanded View button. You'll encounter the phrase Visible Contacts which means the contacts that are showing at the time you export. For example you can choose a group from the drop down menu and only the contacts of that group will be visible. The same goes if you do an Advance Find on a city etc.

Think of a job as a folder that contains all the elements of the job you're producing. The Overview has the description of the job as well as the contact information and is where you can link to external documents that are associated with the job. The Estimate section has the bid for the job along with all the revisions. The Production section is a workspace to produce the job, and finally the Invoice is what you send to the client to get paid. All these elements make up the job.

In which we tell you how to easily create a new job so than you can send a bid, get a gig, get rich and take the entire Blinkbid crew out for drinks.

Find that gig, open it.

All the wonderful things that happen in the Overview window of a job.

A usage license is what you use to define what the client can and cannot do with your creative work.

All the terms you set up in the preferences are automatically entered into the job, not you can change things at the job level.

It all starts here with the bid or the estimate. Now get crackin' and get yourself a gig. You work hard, you deserve it.

You would be shocked at what goes into a line item. But they are the building blocks of your bid, and we make it easy to manage.

Do you really want the client to see how big your crew is at the top of your bid, or maybe it might be better to tuck the masseuse a little lower in the misc category.

Templates are a fantastic tool to jump start the bidding of any new job. If you are working on a massive, complicated estimate, you might want to consider saving it as template for future use.

The client wants the numbers one way, then another, then they want the partly cloudy Thursday bid. Blinkbid enables you to create and track multiple revision of the same estimate.

Sharing a job with a colleague who also uses Blinkbid is a nice way to make new friends, and then save them a lot of time so they don't have to re-enter an entire bid to work with you.

The bid consultant is pricing suggestion guide based on real life data that updates automatically from our server. We currently have a bid consultant for photography, with graphic design on the way. Soon we'll have the date consultant, but we're still gathering data for that one.

You ever have one of those moments when you know you need to add something to your catalog, but you don't want to stop working on what your doing? So do we.

There are times, especially for agents, when your artist will use a category that doesn't quite work with how you would like to present the bid. Blinkbid give you a fast way to convert those categories to one that exists in your item catalog.

Hey there buddy, how about a little moolah up front to get things going. You need a what?

Yee haw, you got the gig. Now the real fun begins.

We also have a video which demostrates the production mod here.

My favorite part, getting paid.

Blinkbid enables you as the agent to easily create an invoice for your commission fees to submit to your talent.

It's not Bloomberg, but you can get a nice snapshot of how much money you're making.

If your clients are late with the loot, let them know. It's a good thing.

Blinkbid has an easy to use Quickbooks export function. While there are some strict set up standards you’ll have to observe, it only takes a few minutes to get going.

First off you need to know how Blinkbid categorizes your invoices. Each invoice is separated into three categories: Fees, Production, and Markup. All the categories are considered income to Quickbooks with the Fees and Markup seen as pure income and the Production items seen as reimbursable income.

Categorizing your invoice line items this way follows the above the line/below the line paradigm of fees and production expenses. It also alleviates having a myriad of different line items all over your Quickbooks file which can get confusing.