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

Android Marketplace is developer unfriendly

An iPhone app developer recently asked us to enhance DashBook's sales report importing to take advantage of an iTunes sales report feature that shows the country where an app was purchased. Naturally, we obliged. It will be nice to expand our market to the publishers of phone apps, as well as all of the indie music publishers who use iTunes. Developers also need to account for the royalties or splits as they contract out work to various talent. And of course, book sales on the App Store are quite common.

Well, that got my interest up to explore the other app stores. Having used an iPhone for a while now, I believe that Apple's tight grip can kill them. Not allowing a user to choose which apps can continue in the background is absurd. The Android system, on the other hand, is much more open and allows developers to write anything they wish, although publishing pornography is still forbidden.

Thus, the Android is my pick as the best competitor for Apple's iPhone system. So I started to research the Android Marketplace to see if I could find examples of their sales reports. Hmm. I have to pay $25 before I can read details about publishing on the Marketplace? Bizarre. Further research turned up inquiries by developers who are at a loss as to how to account for sales tax on their sales. Do they have to review each individual transaction to determine if U.S. sales tax was charged if the composite transactions report doesn't contain that detail? Wait! The developer is accountable for sales tax? Does Android Marketplace or Google affect the developers' nexus?

Oh, this is pitiful.

Apple's App Store and iTunes Store simplified this for publishers by taking on the role of a reseller, just like the prior online bookstores. If Android Marketplace does not do this, few developers will make the mistake of publishing there more than once.

Beta has begun!

We have now released Dashbook into the world of beta testing. Dashbook is a Windows program that assists publishers with the sales of products such as books by tracking inventory, sales, returns, and royalties. Although there already are programs that do this, Dashbook does it better.

Dashbook was designed from its core as a Windows program, taking advantage of tabs to organize related information to reduce clutter and confusion, and it is infused with the innate ability to communicate through the web thanks to the Microsoft .Net Framework platform.

We have spent a lot of time designing Dashbook to work intuitively for both publishers and authors. Even though we worked closely with an established publisher, Trivium Publishing, we are anxious to get this into the hands of many more to learn how we can further improve our product.

Our site, www.dashbook.com has a sales tab which allows anyone to participate in the beta. Please download it, try it out, and give us feedback so that we can make it better for you.

Thanks!