Use RB Notation to “tag” jobs

RB tags are a handy way to categorize entities. You create labels of searchable keywords or phrases, then “tag” firms, contacts, resources, or locations with those labels to group them together.

For example, if you want to try different marketing approaches with specific contacts or firms, you can tag different entities with your own custom labels for those different marketing campaigns. Then you can search for entities tagged with those labels, generate lists of those entities for your marketing purposes, and even use Tag Manager (in RB9) to print envelopes and labels.

RB tags are for entities only. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also tag jobs with labels to classify them? For example, it would be handy to tag jobs that should be expedited or have a hard deadline so you can easily find them to monitor more closely than standard delivery jobs.

Tag jobs that require extra attention

Good news! RB has Notations — which can be used like Tags to search for and group jobs in results. Notations have been a part of RB for a long time and were originally used by court reporting agencies to classify jobs as Real Time or Video, etc. With the introduction of Tasks in RB9 you can create task types to cover those categories so you might not use the Notation field anymore. Why not use it for “tags” that highlight jobs needing special attention?

Notation is a text field in the Additional pane in jobs. There is also a Notation search field in Jobs (List View), so you could use it combined with a date range from tomorrow into the future to find all upcoming jobs with one of your custom tags, such as EXP (expedite), that require your focus. You can enter multiple tags in a single job’s Notation field, but you can only search one at a time.

You don’t even have to search for specific tags because whatever you enter in Notation fields in individual jobs appears in a Notation column in Jobs (List View) and Tasks (List View) results grids. You can display your lists of jobs/tasks by the Notation column to see all of your tagged jobs within a specified date range at the top of the list.

Notations also appear on Job Printout reports which can help you decide who to assign to these special jobs if you use Job Printout reports as part of your resource assignment process.

Another option

Alternately, you could add these special categories as Task Statuses so they appear in Tasks in Progress results grids, which offers the benefit of displaying due dates. The advantage of using Notation is that because it is entered at the job level, whatever you enter in a job’s Notation field also applies to all of the job’s tasks.

Have questions/need help? Contact OMTI Support for more information.