The 5 main ways businesses use the Notion app
If you’re on the fence or not really sure how Notion can help your business, after consulting dozens of businesses, here are the 5 main ways I have seen businesses use the app.
1. Using the Notion app as a Task Manager
Notion’s databases can become the base for a company-wide task management system.
The properties can be as simple as a status
property, due date
and assignee
. There’s no need to complicate things when we first get started.
Once the database properties are set, we just need to create views according to what we want to show.
For example, do we want to see what everyone within the company is working on? We can create the following view, where each column is one assignee
, and where we group the task by their status
.
Or do we want to create a personal dashboard for each employee so he can see what he needs to get done?
2. Using the Notion app as a CRM
If your business does client work, it’s vital to get your clients organised so you can follow up on deals that haven’t converted yet, or so you can fulfill properly those who did.
Here we can see the different stages systemify’s clients go through separated in columns (which is a basic select property).
If you wanna take it up a notch, you can even plug Notion to an automation tool such as Zapier or Automate.io and change that status
depending on actions they take (eg, they pay you, so they automatically move to Deal Closed
)
3. Using the Notion app as an invoice manager
Just by setting up the correct properties in a database, we can turn Notion into a flexible invoice manager.
In this example we can see this setup a bit more developed, where we’re using also a Months
and Years
database to sum the finances up.
But honestly, just with the Money Movements and Invoices
databases we would already be getting more than 80% of what the more complex version of it would.
Wanna take it up a notch?
Hook this database using Zapier to an online PDF creator such as SignRequest, where you will set some placeholders to then create invoices automatically using the information you have saved in Notion.
4. Using the Notion app as a meeting minutes organiser
Communications are critically important in any business and if we don’t keep them organised we will forget who said what and when.
That’ll cause us to repeat meetings to catch up again and losing time altogether.
But if we build a simple meeting minutes manager in Notion, that problem is solved.
Here we have created two views from the same database. The one on top shows the future meetings, the one below the past ones.
If we want to take it up a notch, we can even link our meetings database to our company-wide task database.
Why? Well, most often than not, the outcome of a meeting is someone having to take some kind of action.
By linking both databases we are able to provide the needed context to the task (aka, where does this task come from?!)
5. Using the Notion app as a content production hub.
Content creation is not easy, and without a system to help us get organised we’re doomed to failure.
The simplest content production system in Notion we can create is just with one single database and with some basic properties such as publishing date
and status
.
And since each item in a database can be opened as a page, we can develop the content (script, caption...) within it.
Here’s an example of the same database displayed both in table and in calendar view (easy to schedule content by dragging items from the left table to the calendar on the right).
If we want to take it up a notch, we can plug this content database with our tasks database and use it for the subtasks each piece of content will entail.
For example, for creating one YouTube video we would have scripting, recording, editing, taking thumbnail, editing thumbnail, publishing...
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