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Computers should help, not hinder a business. |
Before we developed BookAccents, we too were investigation buying a software package to use in our newly acquired business of bookselling. Prior to starting in the book business, we developed other software packages as the majority overall business. I initially felt that it would be far more efficient to purchase and install a currently available "off the shelf" package.
The were several problems associated with virtually all of the products that we investigated.
First and foremost, most products are generic
Point of Sale or General Accounting packages that were partially specialized
for bookselling. Why
is this bad? It
is bad because I like to work with tools specifically designed to accomplish
definitively defined tasks. Allow
me to make a simplistic comparison.
Because of the consulting work that I do, it is often necessary to perform calculations relating to interest rates, leases, etc. Yes, it is possible to do these calculations with a generic calculator, but there are several calculators that have these business functions built in, using single key strokes. These are not very expensive, so I own a few. I invariably take the time to find one of my Business Analyst Calculators when it comes time to do this type of work. Therefore I wanted a software package that was specialized too.
Second, you can easily
become enslaved
to your computer. I
see that most independent bookstores are relatively small businesses.
Most cannot
afford to pay an employee that is dedicated
to perform back office function. Most
software developers are not cognisant of this fact, and load their software
with enormous overheads.
All I want to do on a daily basis is buy and sell books. Every year, I have to belly up to the bar and make good with the IRS. Yes, I like to know how we are doing, but I don't need minute details daily. I have a gut feel for what is going on, and can produce reports to confirm this.
I do not need an employee making superfluous entries into my accounting system 8 hours per day. I wanted a bookselling tool that takes advantage of other very good and expensive software like Quick Books. Why pay for software that duplicates a world standard software package? Every accounting practice on this planet will accept data from Quick Books as input to perform your accounting. Even when you employ the services of a good accountant, you need to have a basic understand of how modern accrual accounting works. See Tony’s Five Minute Accounting Course. Here is really what you need to negotiate yearly with the IRS:
A total of your cash receipts (Deposits Slips and Credit Card).
The IRS could care less about a detailed listing of the books that you sold.
You need a sales tax report for your State Governor.
A list of your expenses:
Be sure you understand items that can be expensed and items that are capitalized. If in doubt, check with an accountant.
You can be conservative or aggressive. Work with your accountant.
A list of your Accounts Receivables.
This is the money owed to you
A list of Accounts Payable.
The money that you owe others. (Not the balance of your long-term loans.)
An inventory listing.
You might need to be able to justify this with a detailed listing.
Depreciation Information
This is a job for your accountant.
OK!.... Now you can spend as little or as much time producing as much information as you want. How precise of a person are you? Precision can cost your business a lot of time and (therefore) money. How much additional profits will you make with a daily detailed accounting report? If you feel that this will increase your bottom line profitability, be sure to do so. I have, however, found that over the years you need to determine the factors over which you have control, and focus on them. On the others? Don't sweat the small stuff.
Don't overlook the very powerful capabilities available through some of the nation's largest banks who provide great Internet Banking Software. http://www.bankofamerica.com/smallbusiness/accountaccess/index.cfm?template=acct_baonline.cfm
An account like this will provide all of the information and control of your Accounts Payable needed to run your business successfully. You can also easily transfer this information into accounting software such as Quick Books. But the point is this. It is not necessary, nor necessarily advantageous that your Bookselling Software support proprietary Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable software because these capabilities are available at low or no cost to you.
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So far as Inventory Control.... With BookAccents Software:
What could be more straight forward?
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During my quest to buy off the shelf Bookseller software, I visited businesses using our competitors software products. Good grief! It seems that the computer is just in the way at some of these book stores.
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Computers should help, not hinder a business. |
Our bottom line philosophy when designing software is this: Require as little human interference as possible. Make the software do the thinking. With BookAccents simple acts such as scanning books for trading and printing labels provides virtually all of the human interaction necessary to manage your inventory.
The Third factor is the initial and on-going costs of ownership. Buyer Beware! The ISBN subscription cost and on-going maintenance and support fees can be enormous.
The Forth factor is that we are a trading bookstore, and have an enormous Internet business. Yes, some of the other packages claimed that they allowed trading of books, and managing books on the Internet.
Because trading books
is by far the most important part of our business, trading books with
the computer had to be an integral of part of the software. This
shouldn't be an afterthought that was added to appease a new prospect.
This is
the part of our business that could take the most time, and involve the
most amount of training of new employees.
We implemented the
trading part of BookAccents long
before we designed the Point of Sale portion. We
had about fourteen thousand books when we opened our doors. They
had to all be labeled and priced before we could sell them. (We
treated the initial inventory of used books as though they had been traded.)
As our business developed,
we discover selling on Amazon.com and half.com. We
initially loaded the seller's database manually, but soon found that this
was to be a huge task if we were to continue in this fashion.
We implement a totally automatic Internet feature, some of which is available to you. See. Internet Sales.
The Fifth factor is ease
of installation, training and use. Having
a software package doesn't do you any good unless you can quickly teach
a new employee how to use it effectively.
We designed BookAccents in such a way that it is not only easily learned, but your new employees do not need to be book experts. We have taken most of the human and memory factor out of book buying trading and selling.
Lets face it... it
is not a secret... Windows application packages are generally very unstable
and unreliable. The
Sixth factor is that we were not
convinced that the competitors' packages were robust and reliable.
We have seven
computers accessing and updating our BookAccents
Databases every day with virtually no problems. A
few problems cannot be avoided, but they are minimal.
We use this software ourselves to sell an enormous amount of books daily. Because we know about the pane involved with software crashes (first hand), we have made every attempt to build reliability in, as we developed our package.
The Seventh factor. How confident is the software manufacturer that his product if the right product for you?
