Scoggins Endorses: www.phonesheet.com

I've mentioned this in passing a few times over the past couple of months, but I want to haul out the megaphone to promote a friend's product:  www.phonesheet.com.  If you make or receive more than a handful of phone calls a day, you're going to want to sign up for this service.  And if you do, be sure to enter the promo code "scoggins" -- you'll get 10% off the already-so-low-you-won't-believe-it monthly fees.

Those of you already working in the entertainment business will know exactly what the site is/does just from the name.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, phonesheets are the tools everyone in Hollywood uses to keep track of incoming and outgoing phone calls.  Back when I started as an assistant at ICM, the old school paper-based phonesheets were just getting converted over to electronic (usually FileMaker Pro-based) versions.  Lots of us assistants still had to keep track of calls with pen and paper and various colors of highlighters, believe it or not -- hundreds of marks and codes per day indicating "left words" and "returns" and so on.  (Ah, the joy of call dumping at the end of the day so your boss could start the next day's phonesheet with a clean sheet of paper.)

One of the guys who designed and built those FileMaker Pro phonesheets was Jan Zands, who earlier this year launched his new service.  www.phonesheet.com is the supercharged, web-based version of your now-old school desktop-based phonesheets.  I've been beta-testing it for the past six months or so, and it's totally badass.  Here are some of the things I love about it:

1. Since it's web-based, you can access your phonesheet wherever you are.
2. More than one person can access a given phonesheet simultaneously (no charge for additional users of a given phonesheet), which means my assistant can update it for me as well.
3. Its color-coding is completely intuitive (watch the demo video on the site to see the thought process behind it): red = incoming calls I need to return, blue = calls I've made/returned, green = outbound calls I want to make.
4. If your contact list is in Outlook or Entourage, it's easy to upload your whole address book.

PLUS...there's a mobile version of the service for Blackberries called Phonesheet2Go that's a game-changer (the iPhone version is already in the works; in the meantime, you can access your phonesheet with your iPhone through Safari).  Every call I make or receive gets logged right there on my phone and automatically syncs with the web-based version.

There's a lot more to love about www.phonesheet.com than just the above, but you should check out the demo yourself.  Regardless, the pricing is pretty perfect:  $6.95/month (when you sign up for 6 months; $9.95/month otherwise), plus $2.95/month if you use the mobile version.  Again, if you enter "scoggins" as the promo code you'll get 10% off those prices for the first year.  And there's absolutely no downside thanks to the 30-day free trial they're currently offering.

Bottom line, whether you're working in Hollywood or not, if any part of your day is spent working the phones, you've at least got to check this thing out.  Trust me, you'll thank me later.

Comments

[Miranda]

Phonesheet.com has been great for our office. And their support staff is always accessible and willing to help you troubleshoot any of your operator errors!