Google are making a change to their APIs that requires some Light Blue users to reauthorise their access to Google Calendar.
Anyone who used a version of Light Blue older than Light Blue 8.2.7 (which came out in February 2020) to set up Google Calendar publishing needs to reauthorise it before October 2022. From 3 October 2022, anyone who hasn’t reauthorised Light Blue’s access to their Google account will probably find that Google Calendar features will stop working, including event publishing and scheduling calendar blocking.
What you need to do to keep your Google Calendar features working
Reauthorising Light Blue’s access to your Google account is essentially a case of “switch it off and then switch it back on again”, but there are a few details you need to be aware of to ensure that it carries on working as expected.
We’ve recorded a short video that shows you how to reauthorise your Google account, but if you prefer written instructions then read on!
If you’re not already using Light Blue 2022.1.2, please use the “Check For Updates” command to update to it.
Open Light Blue’s Preferences window and go to the “External Programs” section.
Under the “Google Calendar” heading, click the “Unlink Google Calendar Account” button.
After you’ve un-linked your Google account, the button changes to “Link Google Calendar Account”. Click this button.
Your default web browser will open up and you’ll be asked to log into your Google account and give Light Blue access to Google Calendar.
Once you’ve given Light Blue access to Google Calendar, your web browser will redirect you to Light Blue and the Preferences window will show that you’ve linked your account.
If you were publishing events to Google Calendar, you need to tick the “Publish to Google Calendar” checkbox to turn that on again. In the dialog that appears, you can select the calendar that you were previously using. You do not need to create a new calendar.
If you were using Google Calendar to block availability for online scheduling calendars, please check that the same calendars are still selected under the “Use Google Calendar to block online scheduling availability?” heading.
As always, please let us know if you need any help with any of this.
Friday 2nd April and Monday 5th April 2021 are public holidays in the UK, so we’ll be taking some time away from our desks on those days. Our regular email support will be available until 6pm BST on Thursday 1st April and will resume at 9am on Tuesday 6th April.
We’re going to be carrying out some scheduled maintenance on our website servers this weekend, which is going to lead to some unavoidable downtime for our account management pages and support resources such as our knowledgebase.
However, Light Blue’s online services will be unaffected and you will be able to carry on using all of Light Blue’s features while this takes place.
We’ll be carrying out these updates early on Saturday morning (UK time) to minimise any disruption.
The coronavirus pandemic is affecting all of us in a variety of ways. We’re a small company and the whole Light Blue team is either currently or previously a professional photographer, so we understand the difficulties that you are going through at the moment.
Being able to measure the impact that the pandemic has had on your business certainly isn’t something that you will want to do, however it is helpful if you are applying for some sort of financial assistance for your business.
This guide walks through how to get the details that could help you.
Using charts to get an overview
The benefit of managing your business with Light Blue is that your data’s all in one place, so the information that you need is already here. So you won’t need to spend ages analysing complicated spreadsheets to get an idea of where you stand.
The charts view is your friend, and here are a few different charts that you could load with a couple of clicks and then present as necessary evidence if required.
Note that I’ve got “cumulative totals” turned on and I’m comparing this year to previous years (feel free to go as far back as you feel is appropriate).
To change the data that your chart is displaying, just tweak the options at the top of the screen.
Income,
Enquiries by enquiry date,
Bookings
Planning ahead
As well as taking a look at how things have changed for your business this year, it could be useful for you to take a look at the road ahead so you can take appropriate action.
Identifying bookings at risk of postponement due to the latest restrictions
The lockdown restrictions and rules keep on changing, and in the UK we’ve recently been told that the current restrictions are likely to be in place for six months.
If you’re taking payments for sessions that haven’t happened yet but are at risk of cancelling, there’s a possibility that you may find ourself in a position whereby you need to return some of what’s been paid. We’re not in a position to offer legal advice so if you’re ever in doubt about what you should be doing with regards to cancellations, we recommend consulting an independent legal professional.
Creating custom reports in Light Blue can help to provide the necessary figures in order to manage the potential financial exposure to cancelations of future bookings. That’s a three step process:
1) Find the right records
Use the query tool to search for all of your shoots that are booked over the next 6 months (for example, you can choose another period if you wish).
2) View the list
Then view the results in the List View and customise that view (Window > Customise List View) to show the information that you’re most interested in.
3) Save a custom report
Finally, save the query and list view settings as a custom report so you can view the most up to date information again in the future with a few clicks.
Forecasting your potential income
Getting a clear picture of when you’re going to receive income is very important and helpful at the best of times, but during this unprecedented period of uncertainty your businesses ability to forecast its income is essential.
No forecasting model is going to be iron clad, but the ability for you to look ahead will allow you to remove some of the guesswork from this situation and help you to make some informed decisions.
The money coming in to your business is just one part of the equation and even with a reduction in work you will still encounter a certain amount of fixed costs necessary for keeping the business going.
If you’ve been recording your businesses expenditure within Light Blue then it’s fairly quick to get a picture of the fixed costs that you’ve incurred this year. It may also be helpful to look at the figures for last year in order to establish a trend.
Using the query tool, search for purchases that haven’t been linked to shoots and also haven’t been categorised in a way that indicates that they’re a cost of sales. The advanced options allow you to be more precise in your search.
Then you can customise the list view to show the columns that are most relevant to you, and group the purchases by year so that you can compare this years fixed costs to those of previous years.
Need more help?
We’re always ready and willing to support our customers if they need help with things like this. Send an email to support@lightbluesoftware.com or schedule a free 1:1 call via the help page.
Your business is constantly evolving as you introduce changes and improvements, investing time now in order to enjoy benefits well into the future.
Let’s explore a few ways that Light Blue can make your business easier to run and to be more effective.
Light Blue is a flexible and powerful tool that offers a great deal of value to photographers. Read on to discover a few of the ways that it could help you.
1. Email templates
Keeping in touch with your clients is important, but it doesn’t have to take ages! Light Blue’s email and text message templates save you time and mean that you don’t forget to say the important things. There’s no need to type the same messages out again and again, and our powerful mail-merge tags automatically personalise your messages with the relevant details.
Email templates are useful because they can save you a lot of time sending out standard responses to your clients’ queries, help you to use consistent wording, and present yourself with a professional image. You can use email templates whenever you create an email to a client from Light Blue, and you can also use them in workflows to send automated messages to your clients: for example, to remind them about a booking.
When you’ve only got one or two shoots to worry about, it’s easy to remember all of the important things that you need to do. However, once you’re at the stage where you’re dealing with multiple jobs that are all at different stages, keeping track of what needs to be done next can be a headache!
Whether or not you’ve planned it that way, every successful photography business has a series of steps that you need to go through to make sure that you’re delivering the best possible service to your clients. Light Blue’s powerful workflows can add a list of tasks and automated messages based around the date of the shoot, so we can remind you when you need to do something and important emails and text messages will get sent automatically.
Receiving new enquiries is great because it means that your marketing’s working well and people want to work with you! If you install one of Light Blue’s contact forms on your website, all of the useful details of your new enquiry will flow straight into Light Blue – no need to type anything into your database. Your client can get an immediate, automated reply, and you can follow it up with a personalised email or text message template as soon as you’ve checked your availability.
In order for you to deliver memorable pictures and outstanding service to your clients, you need to have the right information. Sending questionnaires to your clients is a great way to capture the important details. Light Blue’s forms can be sent out as a questionnaire from a shoot record and will update your records with the details that you need. Your clients are essentially doing your admin for you, while you appear to be really thorough & organised. There’s no limit to the number of different forms that you can use, so you’re free to ask the right questions at the right times.
Converting enquiries into paid bookings is great, but it’s even better when the booking process is effortless for both you and your client.
Confirm bookings with ease by sending contracts from Light Blue. It’s easy to present pricing options to your client, gather additional details, have them agree to your terms and conditions, and even take payment for a booking fee or session fee in one nice, simple flow!
One of the great advantages of using Light Blue is that all of the information that you need is in one place. That data can tell you a lot about how your business is doing, and help you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
That’s where Light Blue’s reporting features are invaluable, allowing you to use everything you’ve entered into it to give you an overview of how your business is performing and where you need to focus your efforts so that you can hit your goals.
You don’t need to spend ages collating the data, there’s no need to be copying and pasting things, formatting spreadsheets or setting up complicated pivot tables in Excel!
Reports & queries pull up your live data, so you’re always seeing the most up to date information.
Although we’re still hard at work here in the Light Blue bunker this week, we thought we should take some time out to let you know when we’ll be available to help anyone who’s going to be busy over the Christmas and New Year period.
Whether you’re a wedding photographer who’s looking forward to dealing with all of the new enquiries that tend to come in after Christmas, or just someone who’s using Light Blue to maintain their ‘Naughty or Nice’ list, we’re here to help. We’re going to be taking a bit of a break though, so we won’t be answering emails quite as quickly as normal between Christmas and New Year.
We’ll be offering our normal email support hours until Monday 23 December.
We’ll be offering limited email support on Tuesday 24 December.
There’ll be no email support available on the UK holidays of 25 & 26 December.
We’ll be offering limited email support 27, 30, and 31 December.
There will be no email support available on the bank holiday of Wednesday 1 January.
Normal email support will resume on Thursday 2 January.
We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of our customers a restful and enjoyable Christmas, and best wishes for a successful and prosperous 2020; thank you so much for choosing Light Blue.
We’re going to be carrying out some scheduled maintenance on our website servers this weekend, which is going to lead to some unavoidable downtime for our account management pages and support resources such as our knowledgebase and video tutorials.
However, Light Blue’s online services will be unaffected and you will be able to carry on using all of Light Blue’s features while this takes place.
We’ll be carrying out these updates early on Saturday morning (UK time) to minimise any disruption.
We’re going to be carrying out some scheduled maintenance on our website servers this weekend, which is going to lead to some unavoidable downtime for our account management pages.
However, Light Blue’s online services will be unaffected and you will be able to carry on using all of Light Blue’s features while this takes place.
We’ll be carrying out these updates early on Saturday and Sunday mornings (UK time) to minimise any disruption.
Google are updating their security rules for apps that send emails via Gmail (and G Suite) and we’ve been keeping up to date with their changes to make sure that you’ll be able to continue to send emails from Light Blue via your Gmail account.
The new security rules mean that you might need to add your Gmail account to Light Blue again. You can easily tell if you need to do this:
If you use more than one email account with Light Blue, select your Gmail account from the list.
If your Gmail account is affected by Google security change, a red warning will appear underneath the popup menu that you choose your email account from.
We’ve recorded a short video that shows you what you need to do to remove your Gmail account from Light Blue and add it again. This will walk you through the steps that you need to take:
Google’s deadline for switching over to the new way of sending emails via Gmail is 21 June.
As always, if you need any help with any aspect of using Light Blue, get in touch with us via email and we’ll be delighted to help.
Reading Time: 2minutesWe hope that 2019 is going to be full of happiness and success for all of our customers, and that enquiries have been coming in thick and fast over the Christmas and New Year period.
Light Blue is full of tools that can help you respond to and follow up on those enquiries, quickly confirm bookings with your new clients, and get your invoices paid quickly. We’d love to help you get the most out of those tools!
We also offer one-to-one training via screen-sharing software, which allows us to offer personalised help to make sure that you’re getting the most out of Light Blue. Whether you need a hand with setting up a particular feature, or want to ask our advice about how to approach a particular situation, we’ve got experience of working with thousands of photographers around the world.
We’re offering all of our customers a free 30 minute screen-sharing session. All you need to do is book your one-to-one session by the end of February!
