[Sticky] Ultimate Guide To Using SUBERNOVA

Settings

• Currency: You can either type in your desired currency manually, or select from one of the four commonly used currencies. Your currency will be reflected in the app itself and all emails sent to your clients that have the project price in it.
• Timezone: To ensure timely emails sent to you or your clients, setting your timezone is needed. Reminders for projects/milestones deadlines are sent to you at 12am while late invoice emails sent to your clients are at 8am. Schedule emails to your clients are at the date and time that you specify.
• Hourly Rate: Regardless of charging or not by the hour for any project, an hourly rate is crucial for many things eg; calculate a ballpark figure of a project, charge a project by the hour, charge for additional requests out of the previously agreed scope by the hour, charge for maintenance by the hour etc. If you need help calculating your hourly rate, FreelanceSwitch have an excellent calculator to help you. Your hourly rate will work with the “Timer” that is incorporated into every new project item you create.
• Email Reminders: Choose whether you want to receive email reminders for imminent project or milestone deadlines. SUBERNOVA sends email reminders 1 day before and on the very day of your project or milestone deadlines. This will ensure you won’t miss any important tasks or deadline.
• Show Archives: Toggling this option will show or hide items that you’ve archived, be it projects or clients. Milestones marked as “Done” are considered archives.
• Prowl API Key: If you have an iPhone, you can get push notifications to your iPhone for any events that happen in SUBERNOVA. Read more here.
• Invoice Reminder Message: You can set SUBERNOVA to automatically send email reminders to your clients with unpaid invoices. Email reminders are sent every 30, 60 and 90 days to your clients until you get paid. Once you do, set the project item as “Paid” and SUBERNOVA will stop bugging your client. You can read more about how this works here. You can set your custom email message that goes with every reminder sent to your client. You can optionally use HTML tags and inline CSS in your message.
• Email signature: Professional freelancers won’t send emails without a proper signature. Here, you can set your custom email signature, optionally style it up with HTML and inline CSS. This email signature will be appended at the end of every email sent to your client, be it late invoice payment reminders, or the optional “thank you” emails for invoices paid. Again, this article will tell you more about the “thank you” email feature.

Once you’ve got your Settings setup, you are ready to use SUBERNOVA to it’s fullest.

Clients

Logically you can’t possibly have a project to work on without having a client. So the first step you need to take is to add your first client. Adding a client only requires 3 simple input, your client’s name, the contact person’s name and email. When SUBERNOVA sends emails to your client, it needs an email address to send to and also address your client by his/her name, hence the requirement for the 3 bits of data.

Once a client is added. You can optionally give star rating to your clients depending on how well behaved they are of course. :) The client items will also show you how many projects you have with them and the total revenue you’ve made from them. Clicking on the client will review the projects in details with the ability to edit your client’s details.

At anytime you wish to delete a client, do keep in mind that all related projects, milestones and links will be automatically deleted as well, so proceed with caution.

Projects

Once you have a client, you should have a project, start by adding a new project for the client. You can set the deadline of every project and SUBERNOVA will send you email reminders on the eve and on the very day of every project deadline. You can optionally turn off email reminders in your Settings – email reminders is turned on by default.

Adding a project is a straightforward process:

• Enter the project’s name
• Select a client whom your project belongs to
• Set the base price (you can set it at zero if you’re planning to use the timer to charge this project by the hour)
• Set the start date (you enter enter dates in natural human language, like tomorrow, today, this thursday, next week, 25 april etc)
• Set the deadline (deadline of your project)
• Set a description

Once all fields are entered, you’ll see a new item added to the Projects section.

(the above project item image is split into two for easier viewing)

For every project item, you can view at a glance:

• Who is the client
• What is the project name
• How many milestones are needed to complete the project
• Timeline in the form of a progress bar
• Number of days left to deadline
• Whether the project is quoted, invoiced or paid
• Price of the project
• Timer to charge by the hour

This overview is especially useful if you have multiple projects to handle as it will let you view your overall status at a glance.

Clicking on a project will show you more details and options:

• Edit the project details (project name, client, price, dates and description)
• Manually adjust the additional time calculated by the timer
• View the total additional price (this figure is derived from the timer calculated time multiplied by your hourly rate)
• Grand total cost of the project
• Milestones associated with this project
• Easily access links related to this project

Before you decide to delete a project, note that all milestones and links associated with this project will be automatically deleted, so once again, please proceed with caution.

The most useful feature under the Projects section is setting up automatic email reminders for late invoice payments, view the article for more in depth explanation of this feature.

Milestones

Once you have a project, you can assign milestones to it. Creating milestones is a useful way of breaking down your big project into smaller chunks. Set a deadline for every milestone and have SUBERNOVA remind you via email on the eve and on the day of every milestone deadline. If you turn off email reminders in you Settings, you’ll not receive any reminders.

You can also treat milestones as “To-Dos / Tasks”, to remind you that certain tasks for a project needs to be done either by today or anytime in the future.

(the above milestone item image is split into two for easier viewing)

The milestones view is automatically sorted by the number of days you have left for each of them. By setting a milestone as “Done”, the milestone will no longer appear in your milestones view the next time you visit it nor will any reminders be further sent to you about it’s imminent deadline. If you want to see all your completed milestones, it’s possible by checking “Show Archives?” in your Settings.

Links

Every project usually comes with links related to it, eg. the link of the client’s website, the link to accessing the hosting control panel, links that you have found during your research for a project, links sent to you by your clients asking you to take some reference from these sites when building their website etc, the possibilities are endless.

Links usually don’t have a place to go, yes you can store it on your browser’s bookmark folder etc but storing them in a centralized location associated with your projects rids of all the mess and future headaches of having to find them.

Once you have created a link, the link will be attached to your project, the next time you view a project item from the projects section, you can access any links related to that project easily.

If you have any questions regarding using SUBERNOVA, feel free to comment or send us an email via the contact form.