One Naming Change That Organized a Whole Year of Projects

By Christine Lopez, M.Ed., Student Loan Planning Strategist and founder of Student Loan Defense, 17hats Ambassador. Adapted from her feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey.

Christine Lopez wants her time going into helping borrowers understand their student loans and building repayment strategies that fit their lives. Not into renaming projects, sending the same contracts, or trying to recall which administrative step comes next.

So she asked herself a question that’s worth stealing whatever you do for a living. If I have to solve the same administrative problem over and over, can I build something that solves it once?

What came out of that is an annual client system assembled from parts you already have: Online Scheduling, Projects, Workflows, Tags, and the piece almost nobody thinks about, which is what you name your services.

Name the service for the year, not the appointment

Most people name a scheduling service after the appointment. Free Consultation. Discovery Call. Fifteen-Minute Chat. It’s the obvious choice and it’s why the rest of the system never falls into place.

Christine names hers after the year and the revenue stream instead.

Her client journey starts with a Free 15-Minute Student Loan Review Call, which is her discovery call. But the scheduling service isn’t called that. It’s called 2026 Student Loan Services.

When someone books, Online Scheduling creates a new Project, and the scheduling service name becomes the Project name automatically.

So every lead who comes through that service starts inside her annual naming convention without her renaming a thing.

The client-facing side stays perfectly clear, which is the part people worry about. The booking page, the confirmation email, the day-before reminder and the same-day reminder all identify the appointment as a Free 15-Minute Student Loan Review Call. The client sees an appointment. Her system sees a year.

Tags do the counting

That same scheduling service applies a 2026 tag to both the Contact and the Project through the confirmation settings.

Which means she can query contacts or projects by that tag to see how many new leads came in that year. No spreadsheet, no manual tally, no trying to remember whether the person from March was new or a returning client.

She layers other tags on top to identify different types of borrowers and services, giving her another way to segment who she’s working with.

One booking now creates the project, sets up the annual organization, and tracks the lead, all from a single client action.

The paid step happens on its own

If a borrower decides to move forward after the free review, the next service is the Strategy Consultation, and that wording means something specific in her system. It’s the paid one.

The confirmation settings on that service trigger her Contract Workflow, so the right agreement goes out automatically when the paid consultation is booked.

She no longer has to remember whether a particular client’s contract went out. It did.

Then she hit the problem every system hits

What happens when a client needs another appointment as a continuation of the original consultation?

They shouldn’t be charged again. They don’t need a second copy of a contract they already signed. And this is the moment most people abandon the automation and go back to handling things manually, which is how systems quietly die.

She made a second scheduling service instead.

Strategy Consultation means paid, with the contract workflow attached. Strategy Consult means no additional fee and no new contract.

The naming difference is small enough to look like a typo and clear enough that she knows immediately which path she’s on. The exception gets its own lane rather than breaking the rule.

Each year gets its own record

Through the year she keeps the client’s notes, emails, files and to-dos inside that year’s Student Loan Services project.

When the client reaches another annual service or recertification cycle, she creates the next year’s project. 2026 Student Loan Services. 2027 Student Loan Services.

Because a contact can hold multiple projects, she uses the project dropdown to move between years and look back at what happened previously.

The result is clean annual separation without losing the history, which is the trade-off most filing approaches force on you. Either everything is in one sprawling record or it’s split up and you can’t find last year’s notes.

The January reset

Before this, she was changing project names one client at a time.

Now, at the start of a new year, she updates the scheduling service from 2026 to 2027 Student Loan Services and updates her annual tag.

One annual update replaces a year of repetitive renaming and tagging. That’s the whole maintenance burden.

Where else this fits

Any business with clients on a repeating cycle can use the same structure. A bookkeeper with annual tax clients. A wedding planner booking the same corporate gala each year. A tutor working school year to school year. A consultant on annual retainers. A landscape designer with seasonal maintenance work.

The useful part isn’t the keystrokes saved, which are real but modest. It’s having a system that knows what should happen next, with workflows guiding each client down the right path at the right time, so the thinking happens once rather than every time.

Questions

How should you name client projects?
After the year and the revenue stream rather than the appointment. When the scheduling service carries that name, every project it creates inherits it.

Can online scheduling create projects automatically?
Yes. In 17hats a scheduling service can create a project on booking, name it after the service, apply tags, and trigger a workflow, all from the client clicking a time slot.

What do you do about follow-up appointments you shouldn’t charge for?
Build a second scheduling service with a slightly different name and different confirmation settings, so the exception lives inside the system rather than forcing you out of it.

Have a look at your scheduling services. If any of them is named after the appointment rather than the work, that’s the thing to change, and it takes about two minutes.

Christine recommends the 17hats Tag Tracker downloadable in the Marketplace for keeping tags organized once you start relying on them.

Online Scheduling, Projects, Tags and Workflows all come with your account, so a single booking can do all four jobs at once. Start a free 7-day trial.

About the author

Christine Lopez, M.Ed., is a Student Loan Planning Strategist and founder of Student Loan Defense. She helps federal student loan borrowers understand their repayment and forgiveness options and develop personalized strategies for managing their loans. Known for simplifying complex student loan rules into clear, actionable steps, Christine combines education, strategy, and individualized support.

Connect with Christine at StudentLoanDefense.org.

This article is adapted from Christine’s feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey, 17hats’ magazine for solo business owners. Read the full issue here.