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.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tracking music royalties
We have received a number of questions about tracking royalties on music.
Music royalties can get very complicated, and you can use DashBook to simplify your work. Typically, each song has a multitude of musicians and composers to pay. One person may get a fixed dollar amount for each song, plus a percentage of the sale. Or another gets ten cents each time her artwork is included. Additionally, each royalty receiver may get a different amount based on what happened to that song.
For instance, perhaps the royalty contract dictates that the musician gets a different royalty depending upon whether the song was sold as an electronic download vs. played on the radio. You can quickly see that there are many venues and media types that can be broken out as a special royalty amount or rate.
In DashBook, you can create many different arrangements having the same product and author/musician. If the music media or royalty event is vastly different, you may enter it as a different product. Alternatively, you could use a feature we call Sales Channels. This allows you to make one order that says all items of this order are using a Sales Channel called "MP3 download", whereas another order might be for a Sales Channel of "Radio Plays over 30 seconds". You can have an unlimited number of sales channels. In your royalty agreement, you can list a different royalty percentage for each sales channel. This reduces the number of products that you need to maintain.
Once you have a myriad of options listed, DashBook does allow you to easily see all of the royalty arrangements for either a product/song or a musician/author/royalty rights holder. And of course, view reports showing either totals due or every transaction that resulted in a royalty.
And one of the features I love -- you can go to the Pay Authors screen to see all amounts that are due for all musicians, and mark them paid with a single click if you do not wish to make individual adjustments.
If you have any questions about how to handle your royalty situation, please email us at support@financialsoftworks.com.
Music royalties can get very complicated, and you can use DashBook to simplify your work. Typically, each song has a multitude of musicians and composers to pay. One person may get a fixed dollar amount for each song, plus a percentage of the sale. Or another gets ten cents each time her artwork is included. Additionally, each royalty receiver may get a different amount based on what happened to that song.
For instance, perhaps the royalty contract dictates that the musician gets a different royalty depending upon whether the song was sold as an electronic download vs. played on the radio. You can quickly see that there are many venues and media types that can be broken out as a special royalty amount or rate.
In DashBook, you can create many different arrangements having the same product and author/musician. If the music media or royalty event is vastly different, you may enter it as a different product. Alternatively, you could use a feature we call Sales Channels. This allows you to make one order that says all items of this order are using a Sales Channel called "MP3 download", whereas another order might be for a Sales Channel of "Radio Plays over 30 seconds". You can have an unlimited number of sales channels. In your royalty agreement, you can list a different royalty percentage for each sales channel. This reduces the number of products that you need to maintain.
Once you have a myriad of options listed, DashBook does allow you to easily see all of the royalty arrangements for either a product/song or a musician/author/royalty rights holder. And of course, view reports showing either totals due or every transaction that resulted in a royalty.
And one of the features I love -- you can go to the Pay Authors screen to see all amounts that are due for all musicians, and mark them paid with a single click if you do not wish to make individual adjustments.
If you have any questions about how to handle your royalty situation, please email us at support@financialsoftworks.com.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Little things in life
Although big feature additions make exciting software headlines, it is often the little changes that add up to a comfortable and great experience. One of the "little things" we did in version 2 of DashBook is to add "copy" ability to many areas of the program.
As an example, if you already have a royalty agreement with a particular royalty rights holder such as a book author, chances are high that a subsequent royalty agreement for their next work will have many of the same characteristics. So rather than having to create a new agreement, you can now simply copy an existing one, and then alter it. Sure it sounds simple, because its usage is, but when creating software from scratch as we did with version 1, there are so many things to do that some had to be postponed.
Now that we have a lot of the necessities met, these continual refinements and enhancements make DashBook comfortable as well as proficient. Whether you want a big or small change, please let us know so that we can serve you best.
As an example, if you already have a royalty agreement with a particular royalty rights holder such as a book author, chances are high that a subsequent royalty agreement for their next work will have many of the same characteristics. So rather than having to create a new agreement, you can now simply copy an existing one, and then alter it. Sure it sounds simple, because its usage is, but when creating software from scratch as we did with version 1, there are so many things to do that some had to be postponed.
Now that we have a lot of the necessities met, these continual refinements and enhancements make DashBook comfortable as well as proficient. Whether you want a big or small change, please let us know so that we can serve you best.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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?
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?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
DashBook Version 2 Released
We actually released DashBook version 2 a few weeks ago, but with the subsequent activities of Hurricane Ike, we have had our hands a bit full here in Houston, TX.
Here is a quick list of improvements made in DashBook:
http://www.dashbook.com/ver2.html
I will make a few more posts that cover some of these enhancements.
Although DashBook is normally set to automatically retrieve updates, we have not set version 1 to automatically update to version 2 at this time.
If you would like to get the latest version, please visit our site at www.DashBook.com.
Here is a quick list of improvements made in DashBook:
http://www.dashbook.com/ver2.html
I will make a few more posts that cover some of these enhancements.
Although DashBook is normally set to automatically retrieve updates, we have not set version 1 to automatically update to version 2 at this time.
If you would like to get the latest version, please visit our site at www.DashBook.com.
Monday, September 8, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Free Software
Yes, one can use DashBook to keep track of product sales, returns, inventory, and clients totally for free. All that is required after the initial 30 day trial period is to register to let us know that you are out there. DashBook Lite (the free version) is perfect for anyone not requiring automatic royalty calculations, so DashBook can be used for free whether you are a self-publisher or are selling goods on eBay. Tracking sales and printing invoices are part of every business, not just the book business.
So, why would anyone pay for DashBook? At this time, the only features not included for free is the automatic calculation of royalties and payments thereof. All reports, even the ability to customize reports, are available. The next version of DashBook will include the ability to not only record payments to authors, but to actually send them money!
By giving away DashBook Lite for free, we are providing a much better system to people as an alternative to trying to track sales with a spreadsheet. Our plan is that the many self-publishers and authors who use the free version of DashBook will expand their business to include the need to easily handle royalties. Once you experience how easy and straightforward DashBook is, you will be happy to continue using it for a small fee.
So, why would anyone pay for DashBook? At this time, the only features not included for free is the automatic calculation of royalties and payments thereof. All reports, even the ability to customize reports, are available. The next version of DashBook will include the ability to not only record payments to authors, but to actually send them money!
By giving away DashBook Lite for free, we are providing a much better system to people as an alternative to trying to track sales with a spreadsheet. Our plan is that the many self-publishers and authors who use the free version of DashBook will expand their business to include the need to easily handle royalties. Once you experience how easy and straightforward DashBook is, you will be happy to continue using it for a small fee.
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