I'm looking for a way to consolidate my categories. There are too many and I think with the careful consolidation, I can make better use of Daylite.

You can see a list of my categories here

Some categories are for managing the business (we produce videos and interactive media) and some are to manage sales and opportunities. It may be helpful to know the rationale behind each of these categories:

Agency - we do quite a bit of work with agencies. They're clients and also on our "to call list
Billing - mostly for tasks, things that need to billed
Business - general business stuff (order supplies, meet with accountant)
Carpet One Dubs/Custom - this is a specific type of job we do for a client. I suppose it could just be a Job In Progress with a custom keyword
Client - all of our current and past clients
Creative Club - individuals that I know through the group and also for appointments and monthly meetings.
Deadline/Milestone - Project-oriented. A specific item that has to be hit on that date. A delivery date for a DVD, for example
Dubs/Compression - a dub job, copies of DVDs or CDs
Edit - when we're in the edit suite
Election '08 - that one will disappear soon
Exhibitrac List - a list we purchased for cold calls
Heartwood Sync - this was created by Daylite. I'm still a bit unclear on how this works. I assume it's related to the checkbox in the contact's detail screen (for syncing)
IMUG - Contacts for an industry group (video-related)
Jobs in Progress - once we start a new project
Media - Our media list for PR (newspapers, tv stations, magazines, etc.)
Meeting - For appointments when meeting with clients and potential clients
Misc. - the catch-all
Networking/Marketing - Events I attend, lunches, and also contacts that I've met through networking
NHBSR - I'm on the board of this group. Contacts and also events
Personal - everything and everyone to do with my personal life. People and events
Potential and the various permutations – people I've identified as potential clients. I created a "contacted" category for people I need to follow up with and a "Dead" category for people that don't need our services or haven't expressed interest.
Production Company - that will change to a Resource with a keyword
Referral - People who have been referred to us.
Resource - bit catch-all. All crew (videographers, makeup, grips, etc.), partners and vendors that we use for jobs
Sales/Lead - I've begun to use this more often for anything that I've identified as an opportunity
Shoot/VO - for appointments. Anytime we have a shoot or a voicoever scheduled
Someone to Know - people I've met who may not be a potential client, but are important people in the area and are good sources of information or referrals.

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Most of these categories were ported over from Now-Up-to-Date, which has a very different approach to categories and keywords.

I'd welcome suggestions on how to consolidate these categories. Not really looking for a "how to" physically do this, more of a philosophical approach for how to use the tool more effectively to run the business.

Thanks,
Chris

There are Groups, to which contacts can be members of multiple groups.

There are keywords or tags that i have never used.

I use a print and design template but a lot of categories that have been preset do not pertain to our business. I need to consolidate as well because I really like the color system. However, there are so many categories now it is hard to differentiate between the color dots at a glance because they are becoming too similar.

Sean Carter

I suggest to most of my customers that they take a two level approach, using Categories and Keywords.

Make Category the initial high level relationship you have with the contact. Some of mine are:

Suspect
Prospect
Customer
Personal
Business (I'll never sell to them and vice versa)
Vendor

Then use Keywords to define in more detail. For example I have:

Daylite
FileMaker
MoneyWorks
General Mac

This way, if a contact is a customer for both Daylite and FileMaker, I can see this at a glance. I can also use Smart Lists to find all my customers, all my Daylite Customers, all my FileMaker customers, and all my customers who are both Daylite and FileMaker customers.

Hope this helps,