DashBook version 5 has been released!
Here is most of an email sent to our customers:
Good Day:
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
