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 BookWriter™ Professional: Contact Management
A customer's value is measured partly in terms of today's purchases and partly in terms of potential, future sales. Aside from repeat buying, every satisfied customer has the potential to refer more customers. The value of these customers can add up quickly and veteran sellers know that customer growth equals survival in rough times.
Thus, good contact management is essential to long-term success. However, though many sellers have customer lists and sales records, they have no easy way of applying the information to profitably pursue after-sale marketing opportunities, such as catalogs, quotes, special offers, etc. Data is often spread out over several programs. One bookseller we recently visited had book records in BookMate™, invoices in Quicken™, customer addresses in Dazzle™ and shipping records in Excel™ — and none of these programs could efficiently talk to one another. Needless to say, a better solution was needed.
BookWriter Professional offers a powerful means of managing customer and contact information. Business contacts are tightly integrated with the Inventory, Accounting and Composition sections of the program. The contact management system uses much the same intuitive approaches to record retrieval and data manipulation as other areas of the program. You can also import and export customer information to work with external programs as required — you get to decide what works best for you.
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CENTRALIZED CONTACT RECORD
The heart of BwPro's contact management system is the multi-level contact record dialogue (shown below). This unified approach is deceptively powerful, providing unparalleled freedom and convenience. Separate contact and ship-to addresses are supported, as well as many freeform fields. Past sales and purchases are available at the touch of a button. You can also instantly send e-mail, visit a contact's web site, or use the Hit List and other features to batch-process documents on demand for multiple customers, grouped by type, geographic location, keywords or any combination of fields.
The General tab contains fields to describe your customers in more detail. This is particularly important when selectively retrieving groups of customers with topics or categories in common. The button in the top left corner performs a USPS Zip+4 lookup and returns a validated address. This information is then automatically placed in the correct fields. The button next to the City/State/Zip fields performs an automatic Zip Code lookup (see Tools & Utilities for additional information). Clicking on the buttons next to the e-mail address field launches your e-mail program and creates a new message with the address already in place. Clicking on the button next to the web site address field automatically launches your browser and goes to the indicated web site.
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The Shipping tab contains a separate Ship To address area (a separate checkbox locks the two addresses together if they are the same). Note that the Shipping Address is used by default to produce a shipping label, whether or not it is different from the contact address (though you can produce a label for either address if they are different).
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The History tab performs any of several different instant look-ups to find related information in which the customer is present. This includes Invoices, Purchase Orders, and/or Wants records. Separate buttons are also provided to immediately produce a new Invoice or Purchase Order, with the customers's Contact and Shipping address, Tax/Resale information (if any) and other data already filled in.
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The Preview tab allows you to produce instant paragraphs, shipping labels, etc. In data entry mode, the Preview pane lets you see how your record will look when it is composed before it is stored. In browse mode, the display updates automatically each time you change to a different record.
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Many of BookWriter's Contact management features are functionally identical to those found in the Inventory and Wants areas. Screen shots of support feature dialogues are not available at the present time, but will be added at the earliest opportunity. Please refer to the Inventory Management feature descriptions for general information about BookWriter's common dialogues, such as Hit Lists, Sorting, etc.
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MORE SCREEN SHOTS
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Inventory Management
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Contact Management
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Wants Management
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Accounting & Reports
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Composition & Production
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Uploading
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Tools & Utilities
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Help & Support
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Last Updated 02-09-06
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Click on any area above to see some sample dialogues. Please note these are PRELIMINARY views of portions of the entire program. Additional features are being added as each area is finalized.
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Try BookWriter Professional without obligation. Download the software and take 30 days to evaluate it.
We think you'll agree it's the most versatile program of its kind available anywhere.
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