Improved by customers

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!

Pay Author Royalties with PayPal

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?

Royalty Calculations for your Enterprise

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!

Dashbook has a website!

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.