Name: How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T19:32:13.899Z
Duration: 58 min 16 s
Description: How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership

Transcript for "How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership": Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's app inheritance webinar. I'm glad you could all join us. What we're gonna cover today is we're gonna go into how you can all go from app inheritance to app ownership. We're gonna give folks another minute or two to funnel in. But while we wait, I'd love if people can give me a little more information about themselves. I'm gonna share a poll right now. I'm curious for those of you who are joining us today, what's your own experience with inheriting a quick based app or suite of apps? Did you maybe inherit a singular app, multiple apps, an entire account? Don't worry if whichever answer you have, there'll absolutely be content here for you today. But this just gives me a good idea of, like, oh, who's joining us, what kind of situations everyone finding themselves, and I can I can tailor content a little bit? And I would give everyone a chance to get settled after lunch. Alright. I'm seeing a lot of inherited my whole account. You're a big cohort this time. Right? It's not that's a little bit more uncommon, but, like, don't worry. I'm here to help you with that too. We'll definitely be covering not just how to inherit an app, but also how to inherit an account and start figuring out, like, who's everybody that I need to talk to with everything that's going on. Alright. So looks like we got a good group of folks who've joined us, so I'll get us rolling. I'll leave the poll up while I do my quick intro. I'm Evan. I'm here from the Quickbase team. I've been with Quickbase for about ten years. I worked with our tech support team, worked with our community, and and now product manager here. So don't worry. I've had a lot of experiences. It'll be very hard to scare me when it comes to to people who need help with inheritance of applications or accounts. I've done it with many people. And there's a lot of things you can do fairly quickly that will get you back up and running, and we'll make sure to cover that. For today, I'm just gonna give you a little housekeeping. You can see there's a chat right next to my window where I'm presenting. Feel free to jump in there and say hi to everybody. You will also see that right above the chat, there's options for documents and q and a. The documents have a ton of links and helpful documents for today's presentation, including the workbook that we're using and this whole, webinar the whole, deck I'm presenting today. So if you'd like to have some of that stuff available for you later as a like, you know, for you to go over at your own time, make sure to jump in the docs and download them. And if you have questions during today's presentation, toss them in the q and a. I'm joined by some awesome people from our community team and our general team overall who are going to help out with answering questions while I'm running through things, and we'll also hit some questions at the end. I also know that we get a really common question of is the webinar recorded? Yes. We are gonna be recording this webinar, and it will be available on demand for everybody after the webinars run. And the documents that I mentioned will also be available. So when you come back here on demand, all the links and things will also be available. Alright. So it looks like we've got a decent number of people joining us, and it looks like we've got a lot of people who responded to our poll. Especially, welcome to everybody who's saying they've inherited their whole account. We'll what we'll do is we'll jump right in and start with our session. So in this session, you're gonna get a clear game plan for taking ownership of your applications or account, learn a little bit more about how you can understand your applications, your users, and Quickbase, get the holistic picture of what you just inherited, and then lastly, some next steps that will help you take your inherited apps further. First, making sure that you've got them all organized and in your mind, and the next sort of, like, what do you do after that? Like, once you've inherited the act and you've gone to ownership, what does it look like to stay there, to stay comfortable and in control? So, when I think about it, I break things down into, like, your first ninety days. Don't worry if it's not your first ninety days. I just think of this as, like, this is the first ninety days of trying to get things under control. Day one through three, really think about getting control of your account. This is for those of you who inherited an account or an app where you really don't know what is it supposed to be doing, is it working the way it's supposed to be. This is where we talk about, like, how do you make sure which of your apps are the most important apps and that they're working so you have time to learn everything else. Day 30 through 60 is getting clear. Now that you've got everything running and you don't have to worry about anything, causing issues under for you, that's when you start talking to everybody on your team, either here at Quickbase, the people you work with here, or the people in your own, company to kinda get an idea of, like, why did we, start building these apps? What are they for? Are people happy with them today, or is would do they need to be have attention now? Sometimes you inherit an app and you're lucky, and it is running just fine, and you only really need to be ready for the future. There's your inherent in that, and people already have some questions or issues because the person who left before you maybe has been gone for months. Maybe the apps just need a little love. Maybe a process has changed. Don't worry. It's done that is not an insurmountable, obstacle. And then getting creative is where you've kind of got things under control. You've started to learn what the apps need, and, then you can also, start to think about, like, what can you do next? What's really common with people who inherited apps is that, the app might be a little dated, and there's a lot of features that come out fairly regularly that all about helping people get more out of their application. And then lastly, we're gonna talk a little bit about the ninety plus days. How do you stay current? How do you stay on top of everything so that you never again feel like you just started over and instead feel like you are kind of, like, always looking on the out looking out for opportunities to make things better? Let's continue on. Alright. So we're gonna start talking right now about day one through 30 or getting control. In this time frame, the real things you wanna think about getting to to know and getting to understanding of is learning your organization's goals and the current challenges that they have, making sure that, you're supporting those goals in the short term. Then you wanna get familiar with your Quickbase account. You wanna look around and see, are you the only admin? Are you the only app builder? Are people accessing your applications? Like, what's going on in the account? And then, you wanna start to identify your top priority apps. This is really important because you may have one to two apps. You may have 10 apps. You may have 50 apps. There's always a smaller number of apps that are the most important. And if you can start there, you can kinda give yourself time to get acclimated. And then we're gonna build your quick based fundamentals. We're gonna make sure that if there's, skills you don't have, you have some resources to start building those skills. And so firstly, we're we're gonna start with your own organization. You might have sat in the driver's seat now and someone said, here's a whole Quickbase account. Here are the keys. You are now in charge. And you might be thinking, like, well, the most important thing for me to learn is all the technology. I need to start figuring out, like, how do these apps work. And that can sometimes trick you into thinking you have to chase after a specific rapport or after a specific, feature when really you wanna make sure that you take a moment and take a breath and, understand what your organization wants from Quickbase. You if you're lucky, there'll be somebody there who can tell you pretty clearly. If you're not, you might have to dig a little bit, but you wanna think about some of the basics. What's our goal for Quickbase? What are our challenges that are currently standing in our way? And most importantly, when it comes to our challenges, what's our goal without Quickbase? So Quickbase and the technology and we you just inheriting it, weren't a problem. Like, what did you want to accomplish for your business? And then lastly, what processes drive your work and how many of them are in Quickbase? Someone might say, hey. We have a coding process that is all in Quickbase. In order for me to successfully make quotes and make sales. I need this app to work. And if that doesn't work, I'm not gonna make my sales goals. And that might be a really big red flag for you about, like, that has to change first. Otherwise, people might say, like, we own we run some processes that are goes go slower. We're not as worried about. That's gonna feed into, you know, like, a little bit about, like, knowing your account as well. So when you're thinking about, like, hey. How do I start to figure out when I have my goals in mind, when I have what I need in mind? Who can help me? And so when you're thinking about meeting your account team, those are the folks here at Quickbase who can help you in the short term with some of your really important questions. You also can explore Quickbase resources. We have a lot of resources available. Our university, which is a online resource for elearning as well as live learnings that you can sign up for in live trainings. Our community where you can chat with other folks just like you to answer ask share questions, and then also our support team who can help you with, like, technical questions as they come up in the moment. And then we wanna also help you review your plan and your usage. So, Quickbase has several different plans available. And like many other companies, certain plans have certain features, and knowing what plan you're on can help you get a picture of what features you should have access to and also get you an idea of how much, your your company is using Quickbase. Did you just inherit an account with 10 users? Did you inherit an account with 60 users? It might feel a little bit different depending on that. Same thing might be true if you are a inherited account where you need more. The the people don't just want Quickbase to work. They want Quickbase to do more. You might have to figure that out. So firstly, talking about meeting your Quickbase team. So here at Quickbase, you'll always have an account executive. That's the person that will help you handle, like, your contract and your renewal. If you just took over the account and one of those things is is looming, like, hey. I have my renewal coming up in three months, they're the person you're gonna wanna keep an eye out for. If, and you can always find them in your admin console, which I'll cover where you can go for that lay a little bit later in this presentation. But, essentially, they are the person that you can talk to about, making sure that you understand, everything about your quickness plan and the pricing and if you have any renewals or anything important coming up. Many of you might also have a customer success manager, that you work with. They're kind they're there to be your app adviser to help you maximize your use of Quickbase. They will also reach out to you at times like renewals to make sure that you're getting the most of Quickbase, you know what you're doing. They can be a really great resource to touch base with. They can also reinforce a lot of what we're talking in here today about learning, about training opportunities. There's our services team. Some of you may already have a service member. You may have inherited a contract with a service team who's there from our side to help you with applications, whether it's building them, enhancing them. They're also available for those of you who are like, I'm I need a lot of help, and it's worthwhile for me to get help. You can look into services as a way to enhance your team and expand it by having some folks from Quickbase help you out. Then there's our technical support. They're available to everybody. They are here to help you with your technical problems and any product issues you run into. They're a fantastic resource. They're, a great place to go if you are having trouble building a report, figuring out how a feature works, and they're there to help point you in the right direction. And then lastly, you have renewal specialists. They come in when, like I mentioned, the renewals working with account executives, they they come in if there's any really big questions and help make sure everything's super smooth when the renewal happens. And you might only hear about from them during your renewal period, whereas an account executive, you can you can you'll hear from them fairly regularly otherwise. So you're probably wondering, how do I learn more about these awesome people? You can do that by going to your admin console. When you're signed in to Quickbase, if you go into the little, you can basically go to your admin console, go to the my apps page, and there's a Quickbase admin option, and you can basically go in and manage your account. Or if you're on our newer UI, which most of you probably should be, if you click on the little waffle menu that appears in the upper left hand corner, you should see an option called admin console. And when you click there, that'll take you to this page. And what's great here is this page will let you know, your account summary. It'll help you review your plan and your usage. It'll tell you are you on a team, are you on a business, are you on enterprise plan, and that will help you figure out what features you have access to. And then your plan usage will help you figure out how many users you have, how many apps you have. And even better, a little bit further down that page, you can find a lot of information about the plan itself and a lot of your help and resources. So you can see things like our help center, our university, community our discussions. They're all available there in that admin console. It's really meant to be sort of like your home base. And that is the place where you can go to sort of get a quick look. And you'll also be able to find information on who your assigned reps are. So if you have a account executive and you don't know their email address because you just took over, in that admin console, you can find that information. So you can reach out to folks. You can get help. You don't have to wait for them to come to you. Further, in that admin console, you'll see, I'll go back to the last image. You can see there's a whole menu on the left here of different options that'll be, full of all choices that are about your account, and one of the ones that's really important to check out is your permissions. So if you go to the permissions on the side, this will help you figure out in your account who's allowed to create apps. There's an option to say anybody can create apps. There's also options to say that only a specific group of people can create apps that I pick and choose. What's helpful there is that'll let you know how many other people are in there making applications and solving problems. What also, as a new admin, I would definitely shake down anybody else, if you haven't yet, who is, who has app building permissions. Because they may know, and they may already be maintaining some of the apps that matter most to you. And you also wanna look for if anyone else has what's called full management rights. There's a little report you'll see with everyone's names who have special permissions. Anyone who's got full management rights is another full account admin just like you, but sometimes people don't know that. We encourage every company to add at least two folks as full management admins to help out just in case someone leaves, goes on goes on parental leave, is out sick. You don't wanna be left with nobody who has the, full permissions of the account, especially when it comes time to talk about account, renewals, contracts, things of that nature. And then this will also help you learn how who can get you up to speed. So, basically, when you give your permissions tab, it's like a a quick map to the other people who have a lot of that reason to be busy and active in your account. Sometimes you'll discover, unfortunately, that the other full management admin never knew they were, but then you should involve them, and you should make sure that you have a partner who's helping you out. And I'll give a quick shout out here to, like, if you inherited your account and you're the only person with any responsibility, start thinking about who can be your partner so that you can take a vacation and not worry about someone, blowing up your phone. And then lastly, you or or another next step is you've got a better idea of who could build apps. Let's go and look you can actually go and look in the apps tab to find out what applications you have access, You have active. You'll get a full list of all their names. You'll get a list of everybody who's the app manager. That is the person who originally, when the app was built or at some point during the app's life, sort of took on the ownership of the application. Unfortunately, this changes sometimes. People leave. People lose interest. People change to different departments. But this should be a good idea give you a good idea of who else could you reach out to about apps. And in in cases where you reach out in the app managers, someone who's gone or someone who is, like, I was like, oh, I haven't looked at that app in two years, that might help you identify an app that needs love today. You can also check for things like the app size, how much usage it has, how many users it has. And what's great in here is you can also see there is a section that will tell you if this app is public. What that means is that you are looking to see if any of the applications that you share with the outside world. What typically this is is you might have an application where people could put in work requests. They can put in app job applications if you have an outward facing job application. These apps are often used with customers, partners. If you have suppliers, perhaps, they might use a public facing application. I always put anything that's public facing if I'm new to an account top of the list of priority apps to check on. If, they're really good to make sure they look correct, they're only showing the right information, they're active to the right people. Once you check you can check, you can get a good idea of if you need to say that this is a priority app or you can say like, oh, no. It's good. The app looks good. It's working. Everything's going away as opposed to. And then now that you have some tools to help you prioritize the active folks in your account and the active apps in your account, you can start to break it down and think about which apps have really high usage, which apps have are very big, which apps are have an active or inactive manager, and which ones have that public status. And you can start to make yourself a list. I literally, sometimes when I'm doing this with customers, I'll say, let's sit down and just write a physical list. Get away from the computer put it down on paper and and start to, like, leave myself some space to take notes. And so, like, example here, could be like, I have an asset manager app. It has a higher number of users. But if I talk to Daryl, I might discover, oh, he's super active. He knows exactly what the account needs. He talks to his users regularly. He's just really good to know that I'm here, and I'm the full management admin on the account. And I'm here to support him, and now we have a nice, like, working relationship figured out. But I might look at my order management app and realize that, like, Creed's left the company. He's been gone for, like, six months. And so we have 15 users who are using an app that probably needs a little bit more attention. Start to dig into it, you might discover that there's things that need a lot of love. Similarly, if you talk to if you look at the customer service app you have, you might discover that, like, Kelly, moved out of the department a couple months back. The app is okay, but it's definitely gonna be on your short term list of, like, apps that need some attention. It's fine, but could use some love. And that'll then help you from there. Start to think about these are the apps that are most important to me. One of the things to start thinking about as you identify these applications, if you find yourself with a lot of questions, there is a way to start building a governance core for yourself so that long term, you feel more confident. You feel like you know what's going on. We have this, a set of apps that are help are designed for helping folks get to know their account. I have them listed here. I have more information about them in our docs section in the upper right hand corner. But, essentially, these are a couple of quick based apps that will pull information for your account forward for you. It'll make it easier for you to see all that admin data around how many users do you have, what what accounts are active, what kind of actions are taking place. Also, in your admin console, there's a whole section called audit logs. That too carries a lot has a lot of information about what's actually going on in your account. Who are the active users? What are they doing? It's a little, daunting if it's your first foray into Quickbase to go into the audit logs, but that's also a great thing that you can kinda get some help with and something that you can start to, like, know you will have access to in the future. So this is just kinda thinking about on the account level. I'm in charge. What would I what should I be starting to do in that first thirty days? And it's like, these are some things that are really gonna help you figure out what's going on. Similarly, I've talked a lot about being an account admin looking down at all this stuff. What if you're that person who's inherited a single app or multiple apps? I would say, important for you, you wanna find the person who's the full management account admin. And you wanna make sure that they know you, that they know that you're in charge of an application, and check with them if there's anything super important going on with the account. This is a great opportunity. If they if you do have a full management admin, it's a great opportunity to see if they know a bunch about the goals we were talking about, the users who are involved, the vision they have for the account, especially if you've got company where you have a lot of departments or a lot of people using Quickbase. You kinda wanna know who that folk that person is so you can ask them important questions, and kinda get support that you might need. Now I mentioned it before. This is a lot of stuff, but I always like to come back to it again. If you find yourself having inherited an account, inherited an app, feeling overwhelmed, be aware that Quickbase services do exist out there. There's a kind of thing you can chat with your account executive about if you want feel like you do need some more support. You take a look at your apps and realize, boy, there's a lot in here that needs a lot of love. I could use some help. Services are an option available for every for folks to get a little bit more, like, professional attention. But don't worry. That is not your only option. You have so many resources available to you. As I mentioned, our university has, on demand and instructor led courses, so you can either go at your own pace. Or if you really want a little bit more of a classroom feel, you can sign up for our instructor led classes that are available online. We also have a certification program. It's probably something you're not thinking about in your first thirty days, but as you start to get more comfortable with Quickbase, it's a way to start, basically, testing your skills and getting your certifications. There's our crew and community networks. They are our, online forums and then regularly run groups that we do based on, like, interests or specific industries in Quickbase. Very great place to talk to other people like you, get advice, get feedback, learn from other people's victories, but also sometimes their failures, and really, like, start to build out your own experiences. And then we often run webinars for all different kinds of topics. We have office hours regularly. We have our online help and support for if you want a little bit of technical help. Think of your online help as the, like, user manual for Quickbase. Everything who that's a feature in Quickbase is in there somewhere. And then lastly, like I mentioned, there's the services and CX support for things like value realization planning where you think about, like, where is my account today? Where do I want my account to be? We could help you start to think out that plan. Now you might be thinking to yourself, like, that's a lot, you know, to to take over. I'm curious. As you're thinking about this right now, how comfortable do you feel using Quickbase? Do you find yourself, like, pretty confident and you just need time to figure it all out, or are you feeling a little bit more like, I'm a little dushed. Don't know Quickbase very well. Alright. So we got the just getting started. Totally fair. It can be a lot to take on. I'm really glad to see there's a lot of folks in here actually saying they feel comfortable with using Quickbase in a day to day. Hopefully, this this change for you will feel a little bit more like a like stretch than it will feel like a little overwhelming. But, you know, there's a lot of awesome opportunities available when taking over an account. It can always feel really scary, but it can also feel like there's a often people can find a couple of small, victories or small opportunities that can help them get momentum and help them get going in those first thirty days. Even just asking the questions of, like, what did we even want out of quick phase? Like, what was our true goal? Were we trying to increase our sales? Were we trying to do a better job managing our work orders? Were we trying to, like, keep a calendar of all our most important events? That can help you get a picture of, like, what's going on. You could start to think about, like, here's what I need needs my attention first, but here's also where we could do more or do things differently. Just because someone did it before, it doesn't mean you have to keep doing it. Alright? And I mentioned university before, and I mentioned that we have on demand courses. There's also some specific courses that are available, like I said, instructor led or live. They're on a bit of a rolling schedules, but I would suggest if you're in your first thirty days and thinking about, like, what can I learn? Where would I start? There's our Galactic Adventures, which is the app building basics that really takes you into building apps and and end user reporting, which is a lot about, like, how can you and also how can you teach your users to build reports for themselves. So that sometimes when they just need a little information, they know how you can enable them, and you can kinda be like, here's the techniques to build yourself reports so that you are working together on reports. Having conversations about how your users use the reports and what kind of information they have is a great way to start learning about what's important in your app. Because your users will tell you, every day I need to pull up phone numbers about all the contacts I have, I need to pull up my most recently avail my my, like, most important work orders, or I have safety reviews I need to do, and I need to make sure that I know which ones are scheduled and where. And then lastly, Suite Connections is learning about relationships. Quickbase at its core is really about how do we relate these tables full of data together, learning about how relationships can take kind of your, knowledge further. And because if these are on a rolling basis, through the Quickbase University, you'll find listings for our trainings. I won't spend too much of my time on that. So we'll move forward into getting clear. That's your first thirty days of being like, what's going on in my account? What's what are apps that are most important? What do I think I need to do to get us up and running? Now I wanna get a little dig a little bit deeper. And so in getting clear, I'm really thinking about I wanna dig deeper into my priority apps. I identified them in the first thirty days. Now I need to figure out what's going on inside, and then I wanna continue my education. Most importantly, I wanna be really thoughtful about my education. When I figure out what's broken or not working in an app, that's the thing I wanna learn if I don't already know it. And so I wanna be able to go into university and say, hey. I don't know how pipelines work. I'm gonna start taking a course on that or looking it up. I don't know how to build map reports. Where can I find a a help article on map reports? Like, you can kinda make yourself a list of, like, what don't I know, and where can I start to learn about it? So firstly, digging deeper to your apps. If you're lucky and you are someone who is a user and maybe you've just taken over an app, you knew it, you might already know. But if you don't, what was the app built to do? The app might have a name that's helpful and tell you what it is. The app might have a name that makes no sense to you. It doesn't seem to fit the process inside of it anymore. Some applications do one thing very well. Some applications do many things very well. There's a lot of, depth and breadth of applications where you might be like, I have a single app that manages a single process, or I might have an app that manages an entire sales and CS team's process where we, take in leads, we manage customers, we reach out to folks on for to have sales conversations, we reach out to folks to have, success conversations. It's great to figure out what the app was built to do, and I always say it's also great to always dig into what the app was built to do first. And if you can get any insight to pieces that might have been added later, that might give you some hints about where things need a little more attention. Then you can kind of dig into, like, how is the app set up? What is the structure of the app itself? And then lastly, how are people using it today? Many times have I taught checked with chatted with customers who started their application for one process and over time has changed to do something else. And that sometimes is the reason why an app is a priority and needs attention is because it's just, the business needs new things and Quickbase needs the Quickbase app needs to change to sort of fit that change. And so one of the best things to do is understand the plan for your organization. Every app solves a problem, but your problems evolve and shows you through applications. One of the things you wanna check out when you get your priority apps is understand if it still meets your needs today. If you're lucky, they'll say yes, and you can have one less thing to worry about. But it'll also help you figure out of your priority apps, where do you need to, like, hone your skills, be ready for change, or where might you need some help. You can do that by talking to people. You could talk to the apps builder if if they're still there. If you've reached out to an app manager and they say, yeah. I'm still running this application. You could say, like, why did you build this app? You could talk to other admins, or you could if you are an app manager or an app admin looking for an account ad ad ad manager, they might be able to tell you, like, why is this useful for us? Like, why did we spend time? How is it working? Similarly, there might be stakeholders in your company. There are other teams, execs who think of the apps as being really helpful. They could probably tell you, like, what does it solve for them? What does it make better? Back to our previous, mention, if we have a application that we're using for our sales and CX team, I bet you the sales managers and the CX managers have some thoughts and feelings about the process that their team uses every day. And the last thing, you can go to the end users. You can go into your application, look at who's actually using it in the users table, and you can start to reach out to those people and just say, like, how are you using the app? What drives you crazy? What do you like? Most of the time, people are pretty happy to share their experiences in hopes that it will make them better. So one of the first things you can do, jump into whatever application you decide is your priority app. Open it up, and you can look at the roles and users. So, every application will have some number of roles that were built out. We use administrator, participant, and viewer as our, like, bug default standard application roles, but you can customize them to whatever you want, team member, manager, executive, field services manager. Going into an application and looking at the roles is a great way to figure out what what kind of, like, experiences did we expect to be in this application. If you're finding it's just an admin role that you're in and a team member role, great. Those are the only experiences you need to worry about. If you go in there and there's 12 roles, you might start to pick apart, well, what are they what are they being used for? Who's in them? And, what like, why do I why do I care? Like, frankly, I might look at a role and realize no one's in that role. You probably don't need to worry about it right now. But, also, it can help you find good candidates to interview. If you realize that there is a team leader role, you can go into your users table and look for all the people who are in that team leader role. And those are great people, like I mentioned earlier, to grill and be like, hey. You're a team leader using this app. Can you tell me why your team is in here? What are they doing? What can I do to help them? And then you can also use that as an opportunity to find your other admins. So when you look at the names of the roles, those are all customizable, but there's a section that's called, permissions on that roles table. And you'll see that there's basic, which is what most people have. There's sharing, which means I can share the app with other people. There's a last admin responsibility. Anybody else who's in a role that says admin is able to change your application. And I always say this is an important this is important and priority for two reasons. One, great to find another admin and grill them for information. Two, definitely wanna make sure that everyone who's in that admin role should be able to change the application. Sometimes people forget, and they give people permissions that they shouldn't. You don't wanna have, like, every salesperson in your application who is supposed to have very specific and limited view of what records they could see being admins who could change their view whenever they want to. You wanna make sure that, like, anyone else who has the keys, you trust to be able to change the application, and they should be able to change the application. You can always edit these roles to remove those permissions if people shouldn't have them, but I should say you always wanna check with those people first unless you're very sure. And then, you can also check their homepage. So anytime you sign into an application and you land on the dashboard, that is a home page that was customized for your role. Sometimes in the applications, everyone has the exact same dashboard. Sometimes a team member might have one dashboard, an executive has another, the admin has a third. You can use this as, a sneak peek into what those people care about. If you open up the team leader dashboard, you might see a report that's full of, like, my my reps. All the reps on my team, what are they assigned to do? I'm really worried about our open work orders. I'm really worried about, the locations of all of our companies. Every customer has a, address that I can really easily reference. That can help you figure out what they care about. That's also a great conversation starter if you go to somebody and you say, hey. Why do you use the app, and what do you like and don't like? And they go, oh, yeah. Then I'm not very enthusiastic about this conversation. You can be like, hey. I've seen your dashboard. Can we talk a little bit about, like, what should be here? What is the thing that you most wanna see the first second you sign into the application? What matters most? That is kind of like, what's the front page? What's the front page of the app? What's the information that matters most to us on a day to day basis? You wanna think about it as being the place where things that change regularly and need attention go, not the things that stay the same all the time. If, my dashboards are full of, like, the list all report from my table that never changes, it probably doesn't need to be there. And I could probably switch that around and make the app better fast. So thinking about a lot of that stuff. I've talked about some examples. What else can we ask, our users about kind of directly when we get to them? We've we've made a little list of people we wanna interview, and I will, reference that besides my talk track here. That guide that we have, the one that I mentioned, at the very beginning, that is like a workbook for going through, the experience of inheriting an app, has a whole section on figuring out who to talk to, writing that all information down, and doing interviewing with them. But this is just sort of, like, at at the high level, what might I ask? It's what do you do with the app? In your day to day, when you sign in, what are you doing with the application itself? This can give you a perspective on, like, where what part of the apps are they touching versus not? How often do you use it? Is it easy? Why or why not? And what do you wish it could do? I always think of the what do you wish you could do as sort of, like, the list for your future self, unless it's something really urgent. If they're if they say, you know, if I'm supposed to be able to do this, it broke. I really wish I could continue to do that. You might be like, oh, priority. That needs to come first. And so, you know, you start to get all this information. You learn a whole bunch about what they do, how often they use it. There's also a lot of resources you can get right from the application itself. One of those things is, like, checking out the app's structure. So if you're in your application, you hit settings, when you're on that homepage. Go to app management is the name of the little section, and there's an option called show diagram. When you do that, what it will do is it pulls up a diagram of your application. It can look a little crazy, but don't worry. Everything is drag and droppable so you can move it around. But it will show you basically the tables in your application in little lines that show you how they're related. So my example here, I have a projects table. My customers are related to projects. My projects are related to tasks. I also have expenses, documents, time cards, team members. This application is basically showing me how they all kind of nest together. Customers will belong to a project, so a single customer might have multiple projects. Projects will have tasks, expenses, and documents. And then below my tasks table, there's a time card table, and then I have a little team members table that shares the time card table with tasks. I've now learned a ton about that app in just a minute. You could do the same in yours. The way you should think about it is, when it comes to two apps being related, in the example of customers and projects, is that it's that customers is the parent of the projects table, which means that a single customer can have multiple projects, but a single project can only ever belong to one customer. That helps keep things really smooth so that that way every project's related to a customer. And you can learn a lot about that when you look at the structure of your application by just looking at the little arrows. The the arrow always points to the child table or the table that is, the many. So, like, the one is the customer, the many is the projects. And then there's some instances like tasks and teams that share time cards. That means that a task a time card always belongs to a task and a team member, but they could have multiples of that. That's a little more complicated, but it's a it's a great thing to know about. Because some of those times, those those join tables that sit in the middle are the ones where a lot of it, like, the day to day information is happening. So I always pay extra attention to any of these joins that kind of seem to bring a bunch of information together. That's where people are often storing really important information. And then once you have that down, like, do you kinda go beyond the just the relationship diagram? You might sit down and list out each table and then start to look through the tables and know, what are the fields that matter most? What are you consistently passing down? For example, in the customers to projects example, I might have on my customer table the customer name, their title, their phone number, their email, a bunch of other information about them. When I have it related to the projects table, what am I passing from customers to projects? I'm probably passing their name down so I can see that, like, Janice is the person who asked for this project to happen. Steve is the person who asked for this project to happen. That lets me know that, like, a customer name is how I identify people. It should also probably be the thing that my team members identify. If I say, like, hey. How do you figure out who a project belongs to? They should be able to say, oh, there's a customer name field. It tells me the right information. If they say, like, I don't know. It's really hard to see. That might give you a reason to look into, like, is the relationship built poor pill poorly built, or is there something that's not showing up correctly? And you can start to map how data flows between your table. So this is a really simple example where customers have projects. I've seen examples that maybe go a couple layers deep where customers have projects that have tasks that have subtasks. I may pass that customer's name all the way down because I don't wanna repeat that. I don't wanna be manually writing Steve's name on every single table. I want the relationship to do all that heavy lifting for me. That'll help you start to figure out, like, how does my data flow, where is it going, and who is it for, as you talk to people. And then you can start to diagram things out yourself if you'd like. So, the example we have, the the realm diagram that exists in your app is handy, but it's very simple. I many times, if I if I find myself in need of a way to visualize my workflows and, like, think about them, but also start planning changes to them, I will make a diagram. And I will write down, like, for my customer's table, these are the most important fields. For my project's table, these are the most important fields. And if I have a relationship, what am I passing down? How far does my customer's name go? And I might even write in, like, what's the field that matters? So, like, related customer, related project, related related team member. And from there, I can start to figure out, like, these are the fields I most wanna not accidentally delete, make changes to break. They're also the ones that maybe if someone says, like, hey. I'm really confused. I'm on our expenses table, and I can tell what project an expense belongs to. But I spent have to spend a lot of time going up to the projects table to figure out the customer that relates to you so I can bill correctly. You could be like, oh, I should be passing the customer name all the way down. And you can rebuild that relationship, or you can add that field to your relationship. And now when someone looks at your expenses, they'll be able to see it's for Steve. It's for our, like, security review project. It's for Pam. It is for our, like, site site safety project. That'll help you figure out like, when people say something's missing, that'll help you walk backwards and figure out where it goes. Also, this is kind of where you could go if someone tells you you need to add something. Hey. It's really great that we track expenses. It's really great that we're tracking documents related to our projects. We would like to start tracking, you know, the materials that we use. Separate from expenses, there's stuff we use for our own supplies. You might make a materials usage table, and you might go in and say, like, every time that we, you know, use stuff, I'm I'm not logging it. You can draw the little lines, imagine that it's part of your diagram, and now you sort of have a plan of how you would break it down. And you can start asking yourself those questions of, like, do I need to see the customer name for every material usage? Do I care? Do I not care? That's what's gonna help you visualize your data. You can also if it seems silly, but you can sometimes cut the these diagrams up and move things around and and, like, redraw your lines if you need to figure out how you wanna change it. And then, you know, what doesn't always show up on these diagrams, but it's really important, is that we have a number of, like, integration and automation capabilities that help you move data around, but it might not be obvious to you if you inherited the app where they are. Same thing when you're in your application, if you go into your app settings, there's a section called connection central. This will allow you to see pipelines and connected tables. Pipelines are our service that allows folks to automate and integrate, either automate what's happening in Quickbase. So for example, every time I close a project, I want you to go over and do something in another table. Or every time I, mark something as high priority, I want you to create a record that will track that high priority project. There's a lot of different things you can do to automate a project, both changing, and or creating records or deleting records even. And then it also allows you to integrate, which means it allows you to pull or send data from other services. So I'm I wanna pull emails in from Outlook if there are certain things. I want to trigger a change in Salesforce every time. Perhaps I'm tracking my leads in Quickbase, but I'm tracking my customers in Salesforce. Every time I close a lead as a new customer, I need that information to automatically be sent to Salesforce, or maybe I need it to go both ways. These things are really powerful. They can be hard to find if you don't know that they're there and your business is running on them. So you go into customer cent connection central, you can start to see those things. And there will basically be options to look at pipelines and connected tables. Pipelines go both ways, run automations, connected tables instead are a, older feature that's still really powerful where you pull information just the one way. So you say, hey. I have a, a Google Doc or Google Drive where I'm keeping a bunch of CSVs that come in. They're just full of information. Maybe it's a list of, like, contacts I wanna reach out to, or maybe it's a list of, like, materials that we're using, sales records. I want you this connected table to regularly go out once a day. Find it if there's any new files in my Google Doc and or Google Drive, and copy them over into Quickbase and make some records. Those are really helpful. They just just just go the one way. This will basically help you get a control on if there's if there's anything here, what needs attention, what's working, what's not. Because you can also see if there's error messages, like last time it ran, did it run successfully, did it run-in success unsuccessfully. Often, if you find things that are running successfully, it's a good opportunity to look and see if the user who they who owns them, basically, the person who built that, is it the person that left? Is it the person who, you replaced? You might just need some help getting those things taken over, transferred to a new person, or rebuilt, if it's really important to you. But this is basically your way of knowing, like, what is what what is everything plugged into? And when you're in this, I recommend there's a section of lessons here. I won't read them out. You can reference that later. We're gonna move on to the get creative phase. So now you've know a ton, perhaps too much. Now it's time to think about, like, aligning on your ideal state. You you know where things are. You know what's the priority. What do you want things to be like? What needs to change? What needs to update? And how what do you need to learn? And so from here, you can think a lot about, like, work with your users to shape the future. Ask yourself, how would you make this easier to use? You probably have some ideas. They probably have some ideas. What tasks could be automated? You might discover that nothing is automated in your application, but there's a lot of things you could automate to make it simple. Hey. Every time a new project gets added, I wish an email would just go out automatically to the team to say, like, Steve, you're assigned a new project. You should pay attention to it. You can do that with Bookbase, and that can make a manual process or someone waiting around to be told something's assigned to them automatic. Simple. And then what changes would truly delight you? That one's always a little bit harder sometimes. The the truly delightful changes might take a little more work, but they could be really valuable. And so, one thing you can do, collect feedback the simple way. We we have an app for feedback. You might be surprised to learn. You it's in our Quickbase exchange. The app exchange, there's a feedback application. You can use this to collect information and feedback from your users at scale. So, like, after you're done with those interviews, after you're done actually chatting with people, you can say, hey. When things come up in the future, there's an application. You just jump in there. You open it up. You let drop me a note, and I can check it once a month and see if there's things I need to do. And then you wanna make sure, know, depending on your app stage, think about what you're using. Like I mentioned with automation and integration, are you using any pipelines or none? Are your dashboards really helpful, or are they, like, really static and boring? Have you checked out our AI at all? Especially as a new user, there's a lot of AI features now available to help you build reports, build applications, build pipelines so you can have automated workflows with less actual hassle, and then reports. Are there things that would be really helpful to see? Charts, graphs, different slices of your data that you could be using reports for? I love to do things like, should I be seeing all my tasks by their status? Should I be seeing all the companies by the state that they're in? Should I there's a lot of ways you can, like, cut your data up so that it's easier for you to consume. Build me a report that only shows me, like, my active projects because I really don't care about the ones that are done. I need to stay focused on the ones that are here and now. Put it on my dashboard. And even better, send an email every time I get assigned a new active, project. And then, you know, easy to think about all the changes you wanna make. If you're feeling nervous about making those changes, there's a couple ways to edit with a greater confidence. You can make a copy of the application and make changes there first, make sure they work, make sure things look good. You could try a solution versioning. I have a link in the docs for that. It is basically a feature that lets you put a snapshot, just the structure of the app, not the data, and make little make changes. And then if you need to revert back, you can basically say, like, oh, I made a big mistake there. Let me roll back. It just doesn't do data. You their sandbox is a feature where you can test and change things in our sandbox. And then lastly, services. Again, if you feel like you're really overwhelmed with the prospect of doing this yourself, there's people out there that can help for sure. And then lastly, you wanna think about comparing your ideal state versus your current state. You may decide, hey. I wanna stay with the state that I'm in right now for a while just because it's working, and I've got a lot of other things on my plate. Many of us aren't Quickbase admins twenty four seven. We are you know, we have other jobs to balance in our normal forty hour work week. So we wanna think about, like, diagram your ideal state, compare it to today, and then start thinking about what you want to do. And spot any gaps, spook out creeps, mix or mixed like, missed needs. And then start giving yourself a little timeline. Say, like, this is what I wanna do now. This is what I wanna do later. And then there lastly, like, kind of with that, when you take make that list and you look at your ideal state and your current state, you may discover that you're in an important decision. Do I keep what I have right now, or do I start fresh? Many people have chased after applications that are just old and have realized that they they don't have everything that they need. So sometimes, like, it's a it's a tough question to ask, but ask yourself after I've learned all these things about these apps, could I just rebuild this? Would it be easier to rebuild with help? Would it be easier to start over again? Or is it or, like, alternatively, you might might decide that, hey. This app, people are frustrated with it, but the changes I could make are very simple. I wanna stay where I am. And then lastly, in our ninety plus days, staying current. So if this is all about just, like, maintaining your processes, staying informed, sharpening your skills, think about building a culture of continuous improvement. Subscribe to our release notes. Join the crew that I mentioned and start chatting with other folks. Think about, attending some of our future webinars. Like, hopefully, I'll see you here again in ninety days, and you'll feel really feeling good, you'll be wanting to know about whatever we're talking about next. Set of cadence to review your apps. I do, my priority apps once a month, take a look at. My non priority apps, I use look at once a quarter. I gather user end user feedback. I document what I've learned. And then just keep thinking about little changes you can make to your app. There's the big changes you plan for where you wanna give yourself a bunch of time. Those are little things you can do so fast that you may just makes you happy. Build a new report for your users. Make a few changes to a field. Add new options to a drop down. All those things can be done fairly consistently. If you keep your hand in, you're kind of always making little adjustments and changes instead of having to make one big one. And then, lastly, like, now what? So you do wanna think about all these things. I would say, like, download the inherited app workbook that we have, here on the documents. Use university, think about getting certified, review your apps, and just start, like, digging into what, you're really excited about. And so thank you everyone for staying with us, for a very long little session that we did here. I did a lot of talking. So I'm gonna jump into the q and a. And I see right in the chat yes. So, Art, the document the this deck is available under the doc section. It will also be available, in the email we do as follow-up that you'll get. And so let's see. I got a great question for where would I go to see which reports are not being used or are redundant? That is a awesome question. So, when you go into your table, go to the table that has the report that you're interested in, hit settings, and there's a reports section. You can see a list of all of your reports. This is really helpful because sometimes, reports will be hidden, and they won't automatically jump out at you. If you go into the, table settings and then into the reports section, you'll see everything. And what you can start to look through there is, like, what reports do you have? What are they named? Are they relevant? Are they repetitive? You can also use what I mentioned, with audit logs. So in every application now, you can go in and there's an audit log section under your if you go into the app settings, you can see audit logs, and you can see there what stuff have people recently. So you can kinda do a quick a quick view of, like, in the last week, what have people been doing, and one of the things it tracks is opening reports. So you can get an idea of, like, is this report being used regularly? Is this something that I can do, make changes to? It can be a little tricky because it's not as obvious as some of the other things. Like, you can see as rec or as records are added, you can see as records are deleted. Reports can be a little more static. I would say don't worry too much about about needing to get rid of reports unless you're really cluttered because the reports are just a view of your data. So if you see that there is, like, a value to them potentially, like, people might reference these once a month, once a quarter, they don't really take up that much room in your application and don't change everything. But if you see that you have a ton, I would say, like, that's where prioritization can be really helpful. You can say you can look at dashboards and see what are on dashboards because those are probably reports that are really important. It's almost a better way to start. Like, I wanna start with the dashboard because that's where people go every day, and then I would say app home pages. So whatever, report loads first when you open up that that table, that is the report that is set for multiple people probably. Check that out. Similarly, when you look at reports and charts, there's a section you'll see that's, like, table home page. That will tell you what apps are assigned to every role in your account. So, like, I as an admin might only have one view. My sales team might have another. Those ones are probably important reports. Reports that aren't used anywhere, they might be less important. And so that's a little something that you might be able to think about, you know, moving towards to help you figure out what reports you are using, which reports need attention. It can it can be easy as an ambitious app builder to make a lot of reports, and the person who came before you might have built a lot. I would say, like, yeah, that's how you can start to winnow it down and see which application which reports are in your really important places and start with them. And make sure that they look they look good good, have good, data. And I would say, like, little things that are, like, really, delighters with those reports is, like, are they organized well? Are they sorting and grouping helpfully? Are they color coded in a way that makes it easy to read your data? Like, if they're all if every field's on every report, you should change that report. You should always try to make that the the priority should be the most important field. It should always be the things that are on the report when you have the window open. If you have to scroll to the right to find them, ask yourself if you should be moving things around. And if there are fields that always stay the same and aren't very exciting, get them off the report. Remove them. Make the report slimmer. 900 out of 10, people read what's on their screen. Anything that's to the right or the they will only go looking for it if they need to, and they will always be mildly frustrated that they had to go look for it. So I would say, like, definitely think about, about that. And I see that there are some questions about, active developer community for, like, Slack or Discord, or is there recommendations for forum for technical troubleshooting? So I would say the number one thing I recommend is the community at quickbase.com is our own community that has existed since I've been with the company in one form or another. We've moved specific hosts, but we've it's been the same, like, core group of folks in the whole time. You can find a ton of Quickbase history and conversations there. You could also engage folks there anytime you want. That is also where our team runs our cruise, which is our, like, virtual meetups where we get together and talk about, like, specific things. You might have one for admins. You might have one for pipelines. We will run these kind of, like, regular meetings where we chat a little bit more. Those are great places to learn and, meet other quick based folks if you'd like to learn from other builders. There's a lot to be gained from seeing how other people do the work that you're trying to do from a different perspective, especially if you can find folks who are sort of in your same industries. That's a great place to, like, drum up ideas, bounce ideas off of each other. They probably are looking for people to talk to just as much as you are. Because for many folks, they feel like they're the one or two admin at their company who thinks about Quickbase. Everyone else is thinking about something else. Don't worry. There's a whole bunch of people out there who also share the same anxieties and concerns you have around, the applications, reports, pipelines. So there's people you can chat with about it. I know that there's a Stack Overflow. I know it's a little bit smaller and not as not as actively used. It's a little bit more about the folks who use, like, our API, I believe, which is a little more complex. Yeah. So that is a quick overview of how you can start going from app inheritance to app ownership. I I covered a lot today, but do not feel overwhelmed. If you start doing some of these things and using the workbook, you will start to chip away at the work. And before you know it, you'll be feeling way more confident, way more in control, and you will start to know, importantly, what questions you wanna go look for, what answers do you need, and how can you get them. I mentioned before earlier that events and webinars are a great way to get to know more about Quickbase. We run those virtually for everybody. This year, we're also hosting Empower. Empower is our live, in person customer conference that we do. It is the most Quickbase days of the year, as one of my co works like to call them. Will be in Houston, Texas this year on May, and we have early bird pricing still available through January 31 for Empower. It is a place to come to learn, all about new releases, take trainings, meet other people. Like, there's probably some folks in our audience who already have been to Empower before and can speak to what it's like to be in a room full of people who are thinking about talking about Quickbase. It's a very different experience for being a solo person at a company, and we always love to have folks join us. If you're new, but maybe your company isn't, ask around. Maybe someone from your company is already going or already thinking about going. And what's also great is you can keep we will be doing our keynote where we talk about all the awesome exciting stuff that's happening in kind of in the spring for our product, that will be virtually available as well. So keep your eyes out in the future for invite to that if you don't end up going to if you don't end up going to physical Empower. You can still get the scoop on all the good stuff. Alright. And so I think just about to wrap up there. So I wanna thank everybody for taking the time to join us. I know that was a lot of information. I look forward to having you join me for future webinars. Like I said, keep your eyes open. We will have other stuff coming up. I believe our next one is we are doing a 2026 road map look ahead to get a sneak peek of our product, what product has coming at the end of the month. So definitely check out quickbase.com/events, and we'll see you in the future. Thank you, everybody.