In today's world, time is money, so you want to keep track of how much time you spend consulting with a client, researching information, or otherwise spending billable time making phone calls. Also, you'll want to keep a record of what you discussed, decisions you made, issues to follow up on, and other important content of your conversation. You can do all this by creating a journal entry from within Contacts. While you type notes to document your conversation, Outlook will record the call length. If you want to, you can also look up previous calls and other journal entries related to that contact.

The following procedure assumes your computer and modem are set up for automatic phone dialing. If they aren't, learn how to do this by typing automatic dialing in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab in the Outlook Help window, and then clicking Search. Also, see Using Outlook to dial local calls that require an area code.

Track a phone call to a contact

1. Open the contact you want to call.
2. On the Actions menu, point to Call Contact, and then click the phone number.
3. To record the start and end time of the call, select the Create new journal entry when starting new call check box.
   If you select this check box, after you start the call, a journal entry opens with the timer running. You can type notes in the text box of the journal entry while you talk.
4. Click Start Call.
5. Pick up the phone handset, and then click Talk.
6. When you are finished, click Pause Timer to stop the clock, and then click Save and Close.
7. Click End Call, and then hang up the phone.

To view the new journal entry for the call, click the Activities tab, and then in the Show list, click Journal.

 Note    If you don't see the entry for the phone call when you click the Activities tab in the contact and then click Journal in the Show list, you might need to change how the contact is filed.