DashBook Pro Version 5.1

We are pleased (and relieved) to announce the release of DashBook version 5.1!  We have been working on this one since prior to the release of v5.0 in the spring, and thank you for all of your help.  Many of our clients have worked intimately with us, and have been enjoying some of these changes already.

What's new?  Many things, but here are some highlights:

The biggest change for v5.1 is better support for multi-users.  With this came very significant internal changes, one of which results in really fast order deletion, as an example.

Another huge addition is that you can now have default royalty arrangements, so simply linking a royalty holder to a product can automatically connect a default royalty, saving time.

Our optional QuickBooks Integration Module has major additions.  It now has an ability to start with an empty QuickBooks company file and batch create all of the DashBook products into it. You can now retrieve QuickBooks customers and products to create those within DashBook, and directly batch import a range of QuickBooks invoices to create corresponding DashBook orders.  As before, these communicate directly with QuickBooks, so no need for interim disk files.

With the improvements in multi-user functionality, we are also presenting new multi-user pricing.  You can now upgrade to a multi-user system in smaller bites, so now is a great time to add an extra user to your system.

We have done a lot of work to make DashBook better, but there are always more things to do.  We are available to customize your system for the perfect solution for you (add a feature, customize a report, make anything faster, etc.), which is how many of these changes came into being.  Although our list of ideas seem infinite, we like your direction.

Thank you very much for your support!

Cheers,
The DashBook Team
www.DashBook.com

DashBook Royalty Pro version 5

DashBook version 5 has been released!

Here is most of an email sent to our customers:

Good Day:

We are proud to announce DashBook version 5.  It has been a long time since version 4.0, but we made many improvements to v4 over its life from v4.0 through v4.5.

Version 5 will save you more time.  It loads faster so that you can get to work sooner, and many screens open and operate faster.  The royalty calculation is faster as well.  The report window - not so much, yet.

New for DashBook version 5 is our optional QuickBooks Integration Module.  This is an optional add-on to DashBook for communicating directly with QuickBooks - no interim importing or exporting files.  For this first release, DashBook can create an order directly into your company file as an invoice.  Since DashBook already imports your distributor and vendor sales into a DashBook order, you can now get that into QB without duplicating effort.  Go from double-entry to zero entry!

Another huge change is the introduction of a new entity - a Title property.  Each product now belongs to a title, and if you were recording payments to a product before, you'll record payments to a title in version 5.  This will make it much easier to handle product variations.  You can keep each product separate, with its own format, pricing, and royalty structure, then record payments to the title as a whole.  Of course, each product could be a separate title, so there is no loss in functionality either.  A win-win.

Have you been annoyed that your royalty holders have to all be called an author/artist?  This has been remedied in v5.  The Setup->Contacts->Contact Types now has a Royalty attribute so that any contact type can participate in royalties.  You can create a contact that is just an illustrator, editor, songwriter, etc., and not have to pretend that they are something else.  All contacts that can receive royalties will be available to connect to products and royalty arrangements.

Version 5 also starts down a complex road to simplify your work further.  We've added a feature to download sales reports directly from vendor sites.  This is difficult work for us, because as you can imagine, no two websites are the same.  To start, we include:  All Romance, BooksOnBoard, and BookStrand.  You can not only have DashBook login and download your sales report, but also kick-off the import for you as well.  We'd love to include more of these, but they are expensive to implement.  Feel free to throw us incentives!

The above are some of the largest changes, but we've done a lot of tweaking as well.  Imports have continued to be improved (more setup importing, import a net price while retail is zero).  MasterShare fractions for music.  Fractional sales quantities along with a new service invoice.  Upload a single royalty holder's report to Box or Google Docs.  Combine all royalty reports into a single PDF.  A new Products and Royalties Checklist report for finding products that are missing royalty connections.  Royalty Detail by Title report.  ONIX report work-in-progress.  Royalty Summary report from the Pay Royalties screen.  Better search field on Product screen....

Yes, a lot of improvements.  And of course, we expect more improvements in the upcoming weeks and months.

Please order your upgrade now.

This is a limited time price discount on upgrading.  Feel free to buy the upgrade today and wait until later to install the new version (you will receive a new registration key and download instructions after purchase).

If you would like to upgrade to our network version, please contact us.

With your upgrade to version 5, you will continue to receive superlative support.  In order to keep our costs and your prices down, version 4 support is being discontinued.

Thank you for supporting us so that we can keep helping you!

Sincerely,

The DashBook Team

www.DashBook.com

Tough times for publishing?

The official letter has now gone out that Ron Watters is discontinuing support of his popular AnyBook royalty software system.  In this letter, he states that he has experienced an economic downturn for the past few years from which they have not been able to recover.  Graciously, he proffers DashBook as a good alternative to AnyBook, and notes that AnyBook data can be imported by DashBook to help with the transition.

A few years ago, Publishers Assistant aka pubAssist discontinued selling their royalty system, although they will provide support for an ongoing fee.  They said that the world has changed, and offering a $1495 software solution is no longer accepted.

How has DashBook been doing?  During this time, we've been growing, perhaps to the detriment of our competitors.  We have no desire to put other products or companies out of business, but we have a strong desire and push to create the best royalty accounting system available, and at an affordable cost.  At only $495, DashBook bests the others in price in addition to the extra benefits to the publisher of its advanced features and functionality.

Our DashBook version 4.5 is the best software available for companies not willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a royalty solution.  In fact, in many facets, DashBook is better than some of those as well, and we're not finished with our ongoing improvements.

Sales of DashBook have been growing, as have the businesses of many of our publishing clients.  The publishing world has been going through massive changes, but nimble companies can make the best of a situation.  For instance, E-book sales are skyrocketing!

This means that many more publishers now have to deal with multiple formats of their titles.  To make this even easier, we will soon introduce DashBook version 5 that builds upon the success of version 4.

We're here, and we're growing stronger to help you even better!