Monday, February 23, 2009

Books on Consignment

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!

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Upgrade from AnyBook and now PUB123

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.