DashBook

Automating sales orders

2009-05-29T18:12:00.000-05:00

Did I fail to mention that we released DashBook 3.0? I tend to get much more excited about "the next thing," so after the beta, I'm ready to move on. More information about the changes for DashBook v3 are available here.

So that DashBook can calculate royalties or licensing fees, it needs to have events or transactions that cause the calculation. We made the brilliant decision to group these events together in what we call an "order." Amazing, right?

Well, many publishers are not very focused on the individual orders; they just want their royalties calculated. They may not be interested in knowing about orders to know who receives a shipment. They may have no desire for DashBook to handle inventory changes, especially if they are using electronic books (ebooks) or a print on demand (POD) printer.

Well, our upcoming update to DashBook not only handles this issue for publishers not focused on orders, but also helps to automate a time consuming and potentially error prone process. DashBook version 3.1 will add the ability to import the order information directly from the electronic reports that publishers receive from their distributors!

With a simple click - boom! a new order is created, containing all of the products sold and returned, according to the distributor's sales report. Our initial work includes the most popular book distributors used by publishers not handling inventory. Print on demand is led by Lightning Source, and ebooks are spread across Fictionwise, Amazon, and MobiPocket. We also received a sample from All Romance Ebooks (I understand Romance is a pretty big category for ebooks), so we've included them as well.

Please go to our website, www.DashBook.com to read more and request a beta to try this new feature yourself. Our new import is customizable, so you can add your own distributor's report for importing. If you do, please send the map file to us so that we can provide it to others. Or, contact us to create a map or import from your source.

Thanks for helping us make DashBook even more powerful!

Bigger and cheaper Kindle?

2009-05-04T11:58:00.001-05:00

There is not much doubt that a larger Kindle will be announced this Wednesday (http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/04/amazon-press-event-wednesday-may-6th-see-you-and-then-new-kind). By this news alone, one might assume that this device will cost more than the current Kindle 2, which already receives quite a bit of backlash from having a high price.

However, Amazon knows that their price is considered a purchasing barrier. Although I think they've already done a superb job of pricing given that each Kindle includes (currently) unlimited internet access forever, a lower price will surely help sell more.

How can Amazon lower the Kindle's price?
1) Advertising - a larger screen gives more space for ads in addition to content.
2) Subscriptions - Why hasn't a book-of-the-month club offered a subsidized Kindle?

With the New York Times as a partner of this newer Kindle, they have the opportunity to do both, just like they've always done with their print edition.

Personally, I am very comfortable with the size of the current Kindle 2, but wish all my books were e-books on it so that I have access to them at all times (note that I carry an iPhone at all times).

Another rumor is that Kindle will receive support from textbook publishers. If all textbooks needed by students were on this one device, that would make cross campus treks a lot easier!

Version 3 Beta

2009-04-16T11:39:00.001-05:00

We have been testing version 3 both in house and with select customers, and have now opened it up for public review. It shouldn't be many days before this one is ready for release, but we thought we'd give more people a chance to beat it up.

Due to outstanding suggestions, we have made many enhancements to DashBook. Some of the largest changes include:

Vista 32 bit and 64 bit support
Automatic mechanical royalty calculations for the music industry
Expiration dates for handling subscription sales and followups
Expenses tied to individual products, with royalties optionally adjusted
Ability to review and create royalties directly from the products screen
Ability to review order history directly on the customer screen
Option to use PayPal on the subset of authors having PayPal accounts

Please check out our beta (beta link expired; contact us if you wish to be on the cutting edge!). If DashBook does not handle something you need in your business of royalties or licensing, please tell us what you want!

Improved by customers

2009-03-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

While DashBook continues to add new clients, it is also continuing to grow in capabilities as well as ease of use. There is a wonderful synergy between our company and those of our clients.

I love when someone searches out a solution to their problem, usually being overwhelmed with handling all of their royalty or licensing contracts, and discover DashBook. Their excitement in finding an affordable program that they can easily understand is contagious. Almost everyone gives us great compliments. Our most recent quote was "BTW, the ISBN import function is genius. Nice work."

That feels great. However, our excitement doesn't stop after they purchase DashBook. Our users have fantastic ideas on how to further improve our system. Although we will soon be releasing DashBook version 3, the developmental thrill has subsided, though exposing our latest work to the world will be fun. I can't wait to start work on our new list of client-suggested enhancements. Some are so good while being so simple to do, that we should be following up with an update to our not-yet-released v3 pretty quickly.

I love making things better!

Fictionwise bought by Barnes & Noble

2009-03-05T11:48:00.000-06:00

Fictionwise has an FAQ on the deal here: http://www.fictionwise.com/bn.htm and the official press release is here: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com/press_releases/2009_march_5_fictionwise.html

The e-book market is heating up. 2009 will be a great year for this industry. Barnes & Noble is apparently taking e-books seriously now. They don't have much choice, if they want to stay in business. Yes, e-books were only 1% of sales, but their sales growth is exploding.

Now that Amazon has supposedly sold half a million Kindle machines, just released the Kindle 2, and now the Kindle iPhone app, they are poised to take over the ebook industry. We know that they will release Kindle readers for other devices, which proves that they want to own the business of selling e-books. If Amazon decides to make retrieval of free e-books easily done in their Kindle store, they would totally blow away competitors like Stanza while not hurting their sales at all.

The Fictionwise Pendergrast brothers can see the Amazon storm building intensity, and they need serious help to survive it. Good Luck!

Hey, Steve and Scott, how about we work with you on connecting your system with DashBook, so your publishers and authors can easily keep track of their book sales and royalties?

Books on Consignment

2009-02-23T17:51:00.000-06:00

Whether you are trying to keep your books in the local bookstore, or having a national distributor warehouse pallets of books that they sell on your behalf, tracking consignments is easier handled when you have DashBook.

With DashBook, you can use an Advanced order to explain the details of your consignment arrangement. Here are the typical steps in the life of consigned books:
1) You create an advanced order, and mark the items as Consignment. For this order, you will be creating a shipment, but not an invoice. This tells DashBook that these units will be moving from your standard warehouse to the warehouse of your consignee. This is still stock that you own.
2) You receive a report from your distributor indicating that they have sold your books. Now is the time to add an Invoice to your order for the number of units that were sold. This means that the distributor finally owes you for something! Placing this invoice on consigned stock will instruct DashBook to reduce the inventory held at that consignee location. Do not create a shipment for these, as that work is done by your distributor.
3) Any returns can be handled on the Returns tab of your order. Simply tell DashBook how many units are returned for financial credit, and if any of them are physically being returned to your stock as opposed to merely increasing your consignee stock.

That's it! DashBook will allow you to create a special Consignment inventory report that will show you how much of each book is in each location. You can even ask for the details of every sale and return transaction on this report, so you can find out exactly what has happened to your books!

Upgrade from AnyBook and now PUB123

2009-02-05T13:37:00.000-06:00

As usual, we have been very busy improving DashBook. We are now releasing version 2.3 following the v2.2 just a few weeks ago. The enhancements were numerous, but this blog entry will be about our importing data from obsolete and obsolescent systems.

Since DashBook has now grown into the best choice for small book publishers to handle their royalty calculations, we have been getting requests to import from legacy systems. Publishers are moving from the old standards of AnyBook and PUB123/SOHO123 to DashBook, and are asking us to help them in their transition.

Well, we've responded with an automated import of current information and history so that users can now have the best of both worlds -- all of their history within the easy to understand and use DashBook system. Normally it could cost thousands of dollars to migrate history from one system to another, but we are offering it all at no extra charge within our $249 program. As a friend of mine would say with a smirk, "What a bargain!"

We import customer information, product descriptions, and yes, even royalty agreement definitions. Since DashBook can handle the sales channels of PUB123 as well as the breakpoint volume and discount tiering of AnyBook, the conversion was actually simple.

We also import all of the orders from each of these systems, so that you can review the history of your products and customer purchases within DashBook. Doing all of this work did point out a deficiency in DashBook. AnyBook has consignment ability, and one of our converts recorded Promotional copies sent out from consignment. Hmm. We hadn't addressed that in DashBook, but we have it now. You can now mark an order item as Promotional for a Consignment so that it removes those units from the consignee's inventory.

We have also greatly improved our Consignment Inventory tracking to be the best in its class, giving you the option of seeing changes as deep as individual orders, or just the totals for each consignee. Frankly, if you have AnyBook and used consignments, you need to import into DashBook if you wish to see accurate consignment inventory levels.

DashBook makes it easy to see how your data will look in a better system. If you wish to migrate to DashBook from a system that we currently do not import, let us know so that we can help you, too.

Tracking music royalties

2008-12-17T14:25:00.000-06:00

We have received a number of questions about tracking royalties on music.

Music royalties can get very complicated, and you can use DashBook to simplify your work. Typically, each song has a multitude of musicians and composers to pay. One person may get a fixed dollar amount for each song, plus a percentage of the sale. Or another gets ten cents each time her artwork is included. Additionally, each royalty receiver may get a different amount based on what happened to that song.

For instance, perhaps the royalty contract dictates that the musician gets a different royalty depending upon whether the song was sold as an electronic download vs. played on the radio. You can quickly see that there are many venues and media types that can be broken out as a special royalty amount or rate.

In DashBook, you can create many different arrangements having the same product and author/musician. If the music media or royalty event is vastly different, you may enter it as a different product. Alternatively, you could use a feature we call Sales Channels. This allows you to make one order that says all items of this order are using a Sales Channel called "MP3 download", whereas another order might be for a Sales Channel of "Radio Plays over 30 seconds". You can have an unlimited number of sales channels. In your royalty agreement, you can list a different royalty percentage for each sales channel. This reduces the number of products that you need to maintain.

Once you have a myriad of options listed, DashBook does allow you to easily see all of the royalty arrangements for either a product/song or a musician/author/royalty rights holder. And of course, view reports showing either totals due or every transaction that resulted in a royalty.

And one of the features I love -- you can go to the Pay Authors screen to see all amounts that are due for all musicians, and mark them paid with a single click if you do not wish to make individual adjustments.

If you have any questions about how to handle your royalty situation, please email us at support@financialsoftworks.com.

Little things in life

2008-10-15T14:50:00.000-05:00

Although big feature additions make exciting software headlines, it is often the little changes that add up to a comfortable and great experience. One of the "little things" we did in version 2 of DashBook is to add "copy" ability to many areas of the program.

As an example, if you already have a royalty agreement with a particular royalty rights holder such as a book author, chances are high that a subsequent royalty agreement for their next work will have many of the same characteristics. So rather than having to create a new agreement, you can now simply copy an existing one, and then alter it. Sure it sounds simple, because its usage is, but when creating software from scratch as we did with version 1, there are so many things to do that some had to be postponed.

Now that we have a lot of the necessities met, these continual refinements and enhancements make DashBook comfortable as well as proficient. Whether you want a big or small change, please let us know so that we can serve you best.

Pay Author Royalties with PayPal

2008-09-30T16:55:00.000-05:00

So, you have your product titles entered into DashBook (perhaps using the book ISBN import from the internet), you've defined the royalty agreements that dictate the amounts accrued to the rights holders upon sales, and you've entered sales. That's all you need to do, right? Well, almost. DashBook does automatically calculate the royalties that accrue, but upon your payment period, you'll need to actually pay your authors. You pay your authors the amount accrued above their payment threshold (no need to send 40 cent checks), then you record the amount paid within DashBook.

One of my favorite new features in version 2 of DashBook is the ability to pay royalties (to authors, musicians, cinematographers, etc.) directly using PayPal. We now have a single screen that shows all of the royalty amounts accrued above the respective holders' thresholds, and all you have to do is click to pay them all, and record those payments.

Yes, there is some setup involved in this. Aside from needing a funded PayPal account, you need to retrieve what is essentially password information from PayPal to enter into DashBook so that it can pay from your account. You'll also need to acquire the paypal account names for each author using this method, or simply use their email address and PayPal will invite them into the system.

PayPal charges a maximum of $1 for each payment, which is not much more than the cost of a stamp and envelope. What do we charge for this service? Nothing! All customers of any DashBook version above the free Lite version get this service free of charge.

How's that for making your royalty payments easier?

DashBook Version 2 Released

2008-09-25T11:53:00.000-05:00

We actually released DashBook version 2 a few weeks ago, but with the subsequent activities of Hurricane Ike, we have had our hands a bit full here in Houston, TX.

Here is a quick list of improvements made in DashBook:
http://www.dashbook.com/ver2.html

I will make a few more posts that cover some of these enhancements.

Although DashBook is normally set to automatically retrieve updates, we have not set version 1 to automatically update to version 2 at this time.

If you would like to get the latest version, please visit our site at www.DashBook.com.

Royalty Calculations for your Enterprise

2008-09-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

We will release DashBook version 2 soon, and one of the advances we made was supporting SQL Server in a new level of DashBook. Although DashBook was designed to handle multiple users, we had not finished our quality assurance testing of multiuser when version 1 was shipped, so we did not offer a multiuser version for sale.

So in addition to our inexpensive single-user license of DashBook, we will now have two additional levels. Multiuser will allow multiple simultaneous users to communicate with the DashBook database as it resides in a Microsoft Access database, while our Enterprise license allows multiple users to access the DashBook database on a SQL Server.

We were very pleased to see that even for a single user, running the database on SQL Server can result in a much faster system. Unfortunately, SQL statements are not very compatible between Access and SQL, but we've done the work so that not only will DashBook be able to process your data in either, but all of our included reports now have dual SQL statements so that any report will automatically use the correct SQL for your given database.

Now DashBook can handle businesses from small startup through large enterprise!

Free Software

2008-07-08T12:03:00.001-05:00

Yes, one can use DashBook to keep track of product sales, returns, inventory, and clients totally for free. All that is required after the initial 30 day trial period is to register to let us know that you are out there. DashBook Lite (the free version) is perfect for anyone not requiring automatic royalty calculations, so DashBook can be used for free whether you are a self-publisher or are selling goods on eBay. Tracking sales and printing invoices are part of every business, not just the book business.

So, why would anyone pay for DashBook? At this time, the only features not included for free is the automatic calculation of royalties and payments thereof. All reports, even the ability to customize reports, are available. The next version of DashBook will include the ability to not only record payments to authors, but to actually send them money!

By giving away DashBook Lite for free, we are providing a much better system to people as an alternative to trying to track sales with a spreadsheet. Our plan is that the many self-publishers and authors who use the free version of DashBook will expand their business to include the need to easily handle royalties. Once you experience how easy and straightforward DashBook is, you will be happy to continue using it for a small fee.

What's next?

2008-05-15T17:02:00.001-05:00

It has been over a month since the last blog entry, and we've been busy. Last week we released an update to DashBook that improves a few different areas of the program.

To assist new users of DashBook who already have many published books, the New Product button will now present a screen where you can paste in a list of ISBNs, and DashBook will retrieve the book titles and authors from the internet. If you have hundreds of book titles, this greatly speeds setting up the program for use. The only other things needed is to enter the retail price for each, and setup royalties for each combination of product and contributor.

When you have royalties for many products and contributors that overlap (multiple authors per title, and/or multiple titles per author), this next feature comes in handy! The Royalty Agreement screen now has grouping for viewing purposes. This does not affect the calculations, but does help to manage agreements when you have hundreds to track. You can group by product, which then shows all of the products on the left side of the screen, and for each product, the right side of the screen shows all of the royalty recipients for that product. There is even a Summary tab that allows you to see and edit all of the simple percentages for each author.

Similarly, you can change your view to "by author," and you will have a list of authors on the left, where each author presents a summary of the royalty agreements for this author along with percentages. This gives a nice overview of all of the projects you have with a contributor.

Another new feature enhances the value of customized reporting. DashBook uses hyperlink text to quickly show reports during input, like on the Order page. You can now right-click on a report hyperlink to edit which report it shows, as well as setting the parameters for the report. If a report asks for a choice where your answer never changes, you can preset your answer to not be bothered with the question. If you create your own version of a report, you can now setup the hyperlink to call your own customized report.

The development of DashBook is progressing swiftly. Our next set of improvements coming in a couple of months will put DashBook in a new league!

We have arrived!

2008-04-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

Well, today we have released DashBook version 1 as a product, ready to be utilized in production for publishers around the globe. The program is on the internet for download, our website has been revised and augmented with a shopping cart, and we are ready to accept credit card payment. You can see it here: http://www.dashbook.com/

A press release is in the works, and we'll have a lot to do in the marketing department now. But frankly, development is where my heart is. I am very excited about working on the enhancements that will go into the next version of DashBook that will make it even more powerful and easier to use.

Our latest revisions to version 1 include much speed improvement on the Order form, particularly as it relates to royalty calculation results. While working with one of our excellent beta testers who discovered a very odd way to trick our program, we realized that having over a dozen royalty recipients per product on an order with many such products caused the program to move too slowly from order to order. The user was not complaining about the speed, because he felt that his usage of selling music with complex royalties was beyond DashBook's intended scope, so he was happy that it worked as well as it did. We, however, were not satisfied until we improved it. Now, everyone's order display time is faster. Bonus.

Aside from that speed issue, we discovered that our program updates were not correctly replacing the report templates. This means that many users did not get to see a lot of our latest advances. Worse, their old templates may have failed completely due to incompatibilities with our latest program. Fortunately, that has been resolved, and version 1 will be installing all new report templates in addition to the program code improvements.

In reference to the royalties on music, we have been seeing an increase in downloads from people who are in the music business. I would like to speak with more people in that industry to ensure that DashBook is handling music well. I can imagine someone selling songs on iTunes and needing to account for the royalties to the musicians and other artists involved. Having to keep track of all of those dimes that could add up to millions would be a lot of work without good software. We want to help!

Almost the end of Beta

2008-03-14T14:10:00.000-05:00

We are getting very close to DashBook version 1 now, with today's beta release. While we may put out another beta before the end, this one has the last of major feature changes.

The brunt of effort in this beta was in the reporting area, where we have massive change. First and foremost is the transformation in the report viewing process. In earlier versions, one would choose a particular report, perhaps interact with a window of questions (parameters), and then see the report which could be printed. In this version, choosing the Reports toolbar icon or All Reports from the menu brings one to a listing of reports just as the toolbar did before. However, in this new version, each time a report name on the left side of the screen is clicked, the report automatically draws on the right side of the screen. As one changes the parameters above the report, the report automatically redraws to reflect those choices. The difference in user experience is amazing!

The reports have also undergone major change in presentation, using stylesheets to add needed character. In addition, many reports now have additional parameters such as start and stop date ranges, along with customization switches to turn aspects of the reports on and off. Many of our report additions and adjustments were based on the feedback from the publishers in our beta program, so we are very thankful to all our critics. To round out our complete package, a few utilitarian reports for printing envelopes and labels have also been added. With the addition and completion of reports, we have included more hyperlinks within the input areas of the program, such as the ability to print an invoice and envelope directly from an order.

Now that we have completed the major changes to the reports, we have finished the major enhancements to DashBook itself. We will be making a few corrections and refinements in the reports as well as other areas, but the feature set is now complete.

Along with the program code changes, this beta updates our help documentation system, so that discovering how to use DashBook has never been easier. Most areas of the program are now linked such that hitting the F1 key will bring up the help section for that screen. There are a few more screens needing documentation, and due to all of the modifications in the program, the help will undergo a lot of revision this month to synchronize with the final released version.

All of these improvements will soon be packaged together as our premier product – DashBook version 1. We are excited about releasing this product to assist all of the book publishers who have needed a tool that catered to their business. As we will soon begin work on our next version, we look forward to many more suggestions for improvement and new capabilities.

DashBook improved for Bookstores

2008-01-10T16:52:00.000-06:00

Although our original focus for DashBook was to provide a quality software tool for small publishers, of course, we wish to help a larger audience. One of our beta testers has an interest in using DashBook rather than Intuit's QuickBooks in a small bookstore.

As DashBook was designed for a small publisher with few titles, as expected, it failed miserably! She had over 4000 titles, with nearly the same number of authors. DashBook choked! Well, I've actually gotten ahead of myself. To facilitate this bookstore's transition to DashBook, we wrote a new import utility to import all of her products and corresponding authors from her existing Yahoo! Small Business store. Yahoo! has a nice facility to export their catalog.xml file once you've generated your storefront.

So, rather than having to type in thousands of entries, she simply imported the books (gifts, etc.) directly into a new DashBook database. It was during our testing before releasing this incremental feature that we saw how devastating the existence of thousands of products was to the DashBook interface speed. Fortunately, this slowdown was readily rectified so that working with thousands of titles is as fast as working with a handful.

More good news is that now DashBook's screens for Orders, Products, etc. are much faster when handling just a few titles as well. Everybody wins!

So, why did this customer choose DashBook over QuickBooks? Obviously, DashBook is focused on the idiosyncrasies of selling books. For her, this means that she can easily look up her products by author name - something she could not get QuickBooks to do. She also much preferred the way that DashBook handles sale discounts during the Order process.

Because she gave us great feedback, we were able to help her in implementing a superior system for her sales and inventory tracking needs. What would you like us to do for you?

Beta has begun!

2007-11-14T15:39:00.000-06:00

We have now released Dashbook into the world of beta testing. Dashbook is a Windows program that assists publishers with the sales of products such as books by tracking inventory, sales, returns, and royalties. Although there already are programs that do this, Dashbook does it better.

Dashbook was designed from its core as a Windows program, taking advantage of tabs to organize related information to reduce clutter and confusion, and it is infused with the innate ability to communicate through the web thanks to the Microsoft .Net Framework platform.

We have spent a lot of time designing Dashbook to work intuitively for both publishers and authors. Even though we worked closely with an established publisher, Trivium Publishing, we are anxious to get this into the hands of many more to learn how we can further improve our product.

Our site, www.dashbook.com has a sales tab which allows anyone to participate in the beta. Please download it, try it out, and give us feedback so that we can make it better for you.

Thanks!

Setup Wizard

2007-11-12T15:02:00.000-06:00

We've been working on a Setup Wizard to assist in getting started. The Wizard will prompt for publisher information (name, address, etc.), then information for each book, and if you are using royalties, each author and royalty definition.

Once that information is entered, sales can begin!

Of course, more books, authors, etc. can be entered (and edited) after this initialization. The Wizard is more of a good prompting tool to get the basic information in the program.

Dashbook has a website!

2007-10-29T16:10:00.000-05:00

We now have a website for our program, www.dashbook.com. Although we also have download availability from our new site, we are still refining the program before launching our beta.

The home page of our website has a snapshot of our Dashboard, which is basically a view of key performance indicators. At this time, our Dashboard shows four reports or charts:

Payments Due (Customers, amounts, and due dates)
Aging Receivables (as a pie chart)
Best Sellers YTD (pie chart of what's hot)
Re-Order Notice (inventory chart)

Obviously a Best Sellers chart has little value to a single product publisher, and would be too cramped for a book publisher of over a hundred titles. There is no doubt that customizations will become important.

For our beta version, this Dashboard has no user interface to change which reports are shown. However, the information for the Dashboard is contained in an html file which savvy users can customize.

In the beginning

2007-09-17T16:24:00.000-05:00

It has been just over a year since we started working on DashBook. Our technical writer alerted us to the absence of quality software for small book publishers, as the program that seemed to have the largest audience looks like it was ported from DOS while continually cramming more cryptic information onto the screens.

Creating new software takes quite a bit of time - at least it does for us. We have gone through a number of iterations of improvements across many areas of the program. As one might imagine, the section for entering orders is of prime importance. I am very proud of the simplification that we managed there, while retaining the ability for more complex orders.

This is an exciting time for us, as we will be entering our beta test period soon. On one track we have the development of our initial website for introducing the product and downloading the beta, while on the other we begin the excitement anew with ideas of our product direction and new features and capabilities.

It has been fun so far, and about to get intense!