The Basic Workflow

After you've finished configuring CloudBridal, it helps to understand the general workflow that we encourage in order to successfully use the system. Every store is different, so you might have your own steps, and you may even wish to not use some of these steps at all. CloudBridal is a flexible system, so don't feel compelled to use every single feature. Depending on your product tier, you may not even have access to certain parts of this workflow, and that's totally okay. With that said, a high-level workflow that uses all of CloudBridal's main features is as follows:

1. When a prospective customer is ready to book an appointment, they use the appointment scheduler to request an appointment for an available time slot.
2. You see the customer's appointment request either through the email or through the Pending Appointments section of the appointments calendar, where you confirm their appointment.
3. Prior to their appointment, the customer now has the opportunity to self-register with more personal information, such as their dress preferences, budget, and more. If they choose to self-register, they will become a Prospect, which you can view in the Prospects menu item. Prospects are simply customers that have not yet placed an order with you.
4. On the day of their appointment, you will want to make sure that a Prospect record exists, whether that be through self-registration, creating from an appointment record, or simply by manually creating the prospect record during their appointment. The Prospect record is the single source of truth for all data related to this potential customer.
5. After their initial appointment, your prospect may choose to place an order with your shop. Clicking the New Order button allows you to create the order, at which point the prospect will automatically become aproper Customer record. At this point, you can perform any number of actions on this record, like creating more orders, adding payments, sending SMS messages, and so on.
6. The customer's order starts out in the New status. Chances are, you will need to order their dress from one of your vendors. You can use the Purchase Orders tool to help you track and manage these vendor orders, and this will automatically set the status of the order to Ordered. If you opt-out of the purchase orders tool, you can simply transition the order's status manually.
7. When the customer's order has arrived from the vendor, you can now transition it to the Arrived status either through the purchase order, or manually on the customer's order. At this point, you will likely begin the fittings and alterations process, so you can now create new follow-up appointments with the customer in order to do the fittings. For alterations, you can use the Work Orders tool in order to assign seamstresses to specific customer orders.
8. When the dress is finalized and ready for pickup, you can transition the order to the Work Completed status and coordinate the pickup with the customer.
9. Finally, when the customer picks up their dress, you can now transition the order into the Picked Up status, which finishes up the basic customer workflow.

This workflow is certainly not all-encompassing. There are a lot of other features that CloudBridal offers to improve your experience and efficiency that will be covered in the detailed documentation that follows. Hopefully this simply gives you an idea of what you can expect in general, and you can also see how this may or may not mirror what your current flow is.