Hi

I want to move from our old fashioned way of managing our photography business and team to Zoho One which I am sure will bring major efficiency to the way we work.

Current "High-Level" overview of our business:

I have a team of photographers and we use shared Google Calendars to schedule bookings accordingly as and when clients call or email us. Once a job has been done it is recorded into excel with all the required information. Come month-end all that "information" is recaptured into our stand-alone cloud-based invoicing platform (Freshbooks).

95% of our work is shooting for real estate agents/agencies.

1. Estate agent calls, texts or emails us to make a booking.

2. We allocate the shoot to one of our photographers using Google Calendar after manually identifying who is closest in the area.

3. Once the shoot is done, the photographer sends raw images to us via Dropbox, where my editing team processes the images to polish them and get them ready. These are then delivered to my admin team via dropbox.

4. Admin team delivers images to clients using Dropbox or Google Drive - depending on client preferences.

5. Job is recorded with all information into excel.

6. Month-end, we invoice the respective Office/Brokerage for all jobs completed for their estate agents - a manual process using the information from the spreadsheets

The nature of our business requires bookings to be made manually for many reasons - we cannot automate this aspect.

1. I would like to use the bookings app to manage the bookings for all the photographers, with the benefit that clients will also receive reminder notifications. BUT - can the seller/homeowner also be notified even though they are not "our client"?

2. Completed bookings must transfer into the "invoices" app for easy invoicing without us having to recapture everything again. BUT - estate agent must not get the invoice, this must go to the accounts department of the "Estate Agency/Brokerage" as they pay for the work we render.

3. I am hoping the system will also be able to give me granular insight into who our top clients are, which suburbs we did the most works etc.

As a complete newbie, what apps should I be starting with? I am a bit overwhelmed with all the apps and do not know which ones I should be zoning in on to begin with.

Thanks:-)