FF&EZ is designed to be used in a variety of situations, from simple documentation of specifications, to the tracking of budgets which can be broken down to the item level, to contracts and proposals, to the creation of purchasing documentation. Your approach to using the system will be influenced by your (and your client's) needs. The pages in this section give you both an overview of how you should approach the program and specific procedures to get you started.

One issue that comes up from time to time is that of doing "miscellaneous" specifications vs. a typical design project. Since FF&EZ is a project-oriented system, setting up a project is a necessity in order to create specifications. But there is really just a minimum amount of information that is needed for this, so this situation is addressed in this section, too.

The approach you use (and of course, you can mix them as needed) will depend on which of the following situations most closely matches that for your project. The two main methods are "worksheet-oriented," focused on quickly building up a list of rooms and their proposed contents and "spec-oriented," where the contents list has been decided earlier in your work or before the project was given to you. The following scenarios will help you decide which approach to pick:

• I have a set of architectural drawings with rough space planning already done. I need to present a list of everything that will be in the project (with or without budgets), but I'm not ready to start product selection yet. 

This situation is best handled by a worksheet-oriented approach, which allows you to quickly build a skeleton of the project that can be presented as an overview (adding budget amounts to each area, room and object as desired). To save time, as you create each object, allow FF&EZ to create matching "placeholder" specs to go with them. Later, when you actually begin selecting products, you will only need to detail those specifications with product information. 

For users interested in maximum efficiency, an advanced approach to this method uses prototypes to reduce data entry, by importing pre-defined rooms and/or objects from a prototype project and adding appropriate budgets where needed (see "Prototype-oriented Data entry" and "Using Master Projects").

• Project planning has just started. This is a project in which we will do a lot of interaction with the occupant of each room (store, office). I need to keep up with the people involved. 

Here you may have to mix approaches. Although you will eventually want to build a skeleton that shows the proposed contents of each space, we are assuming that each space is custom and so you will probably want to add more detail (such as the occupant name and phone) when you create the areas and rooms. In this case, you will want to use the area form and the room form to add the areas and rooms first in a "top-down" approach, then you would add the room contents (objects) later in worksheet-oriented mode. If certain objects are typical in a particular type of room (like a hotel room), you can use the Import option when adding a room to bring in a prototype room instead of creating an empty one.

• I have received a list of everything that is to be a sales quote and my job is simply to create the quote in the system. 

As long as this is a simple quote or one that has just a room or two, this situation is best addressed by a spec-oriented approach in a "sales order" project (see "Sales Orders vs. Design Projects" for a comparison). Since you already know what needs to be in each room, it will be most efficient to simply get this list and start creating specifications, using the Specification List screen's Object tool to create the matching object and place it in a room. In this case "room" may mean an actual room or it may be a room set up to hold the contents of the sales quote.

• I only need to create a few specifications requested by the client.  

As you might guess, this is definitely a spec-oriented situation. The difference between this and the one above is that "a few specifications" implies that this isn't really a "project" in the formal sense. However, since FF&EZ is a project-oriented system, you still have to have some kind of project, at least one area and at least one room. You can create a project like this for each request that comes up, or alternatively, you can keep a single project for this client, in which you create "areas" or "rooms" as needed to represent the request. Then, by using either the Report Form's "Filter" option or the Query tool (on the FF&E Worksheet), you can limit the project reports to just the "room" for the current request. Whether you keep more than one project or just a single one will depend primarily on differences in shipping destinations.