BOOKS™ Manual

Opening an Account (Add an account command)
    Click on Accounts to access the Accounts menu. Then press A to choose Add an Account. The Add an Account form will appear. Fill in the blanks as you would on a paper form, pressing Tab or Enter after each answer.  Click here for a suggested Office Procedure.

Entering a Prospect
AdvisorTools.com considers Prospects to simply be clients-in-waiting. Thus, you enter a prospect just like you would a client. The Account Number can be letters or numbers, so you can group prospects by starting with a number or special group of

Prompt Entry Pays
You should enter each new account into BOOKS as you open it and each prospect whenever you speak to them the first time. The account screen in BOOKS takes the place of the holding page in the traditional broker's account book.
You will have received basic information on each existing account from your initial Home Office Data diskette from your Home Office if AdvisorTools.com  has a contract with it.  It pays to review this data to make sure that it is up-to-date. Changes of telephone numbers often do not get reported to the New Accounts Department, and therefore are not on the Home Office System.  Two fields that are extremely important to get right are the Accounts Name and Sort Name fields.  See below for a full description.
Edit an Account
Once you have opened an account or received it on your Home Office Data diskette, an address or telephone number may change. Use the Edit an Account command on the Accounts menu to bring up your account list.  Click on the account you wish to change and then click on details. For more detail on Editing an Account, click here.
The Account Name Field
Type in the account name just the way it appears on the customer agreement. In most cases, your account will read something like Robert R. Jones, etc. While that is the way that you would want the account name to look on an address label, you would probably prefer that for screen displays the account be sorted by Jones, not by Robert.

Tracking Clients, Prospects and Accounts continues.
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