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.

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