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Filippo,

I'll be setting up client access to a shared FM DB running on a desktop Mac in a few days, though not using iOS. The host will be set up to allow the client to add/delete records, but not alter the structure, which is how I believe access from iOS will work. You can also run the DB stand alone on iOS, but to sync data you need to go through the pain of iTunes. Programming and layouts for the host can't be done from iOS. The DT app has layouts for the iPhone and iPad included in the sample invoicing/product/customer samples, though I haven't used them.

Some handy stuff for us is being able to store images in the DB. Relational DBs can pull customer info into invoices, paid/unpaid invoices, drop down menus to drop items into invoices giving unit price lookups that can be overridden on the invoice, layouts can be tailored for printing, different from what's on the screen. I'll be looking into adding an estimate option. I would also want to add a supplier table, so I could search for an item and see who I've bought it from in the past, cost, etc.

FM Go is free and FM Pro 12 has a free 30-day trial. If you do the D/L, let me know if it doesn't include the invoicing/customer list/product-service lists.

http://www.filemaker.com/support/downloads/

Here's some info from the FM site on what's what.

http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/d ... _id/10087/

Pat

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Luthier's Journal looks fantastic. I wish they had a version for Mac.

So this software salesperson dies and ends up in a purgatory of sorts where he is greeted by a guy sitting at a desk in front of two prominent doors. The guy at the desk tells our software salesman that today they are running a special offering where he, the software salesman, will have the choice of door number one or door number two and as such he may select where he is going to spend eternity.

What's special about todays event is that the software salesman is being afforded the opportunity to open each door and look in before selecting where he will spend eternity.

The salesman opens the first door and looks in. What he sees is what looks like a huge New Years Eve party complete with tons of folks all having a great time. Beautiful women, live band, abundant refreshments, food, lots of smiling faces - a really good time!

So our hero the salesman moves to door number two and peeks in. Inside he sees clear blue skies, a sunny beautiful day, white fluffy clouds with lots of folks standing and floating around on the clouds. The folks are dressed in white, have halos on their heads, and white feathery wings on their backs.... The place looks as peaceful as can be and everyone inside this door looks at peace with themselves and they have smiles on their faces.

So our hero shuts that door and when asked which door he will choose he picks door number one.... After entering door number one, the party, the door immediately disappears from view and instead our hero finds himself shackled in irons to a vertical rock face and everywhere there are fires burning around him and he can see and hear many others also shackled to rock faces screaming in agony....

Just then a ten foot tall figure begins approaching our hero who is shackled to the rock face. This figure is colored red, has horns, a pitch fork and looks as if he is going to do great harm to our hero. Our hero the salesman begins to yell and says "hey wait - this isn't the place that I selected where there was a party happening, beautiful women, lots to eat and drink, and a live band."

Just then the ten foot tall red dude says to the software salesman "oh that - that was our demo....."

As someone who sold and licensed enterprise software for nearly three decades I'm unfortunately no stranger to what may, I say may... happen with the licensing organization while attempting to roll-out the new solution/software. You may hear comments such as "you sold us an elephant to run on a mouse" or "this stuff is running us not us running it..."

Anyway I thought that I would jump in here because this is timely for us as well in that we are in the selection process for some software for our biz too. We flirt with six figures in terms of annual biz and none of us are inclined to waste time using or maintaining software.

Where I think that I can add value to the discussion here, or I would not have jumped in...., is something that I learned yesterday. In interviewing prospective book keepers we were told that everyone knows quick books, everyone being book keepers that is. And that if we select other, lesser known software packages we will be hard pressed to find a book keeper or even the year end tax assistance CPA who is fluent in anything but Quick Books.

I've also learned along the way that the inventory capability of Quick Books is where most folks struggle as noted prior in John's excellent comments.

Our process model is greet the client, assess the instrument, excrete a written estimate with a copy for the client that also serves as their receipt for placing their instrument in our care. Upon completion of the job we need to produce an invoice, accept payment (using IPads with Square...) and then do it all over again with the next client.

We are considering Quick Books in the cloud because I live an hour away and this would provide me access to our books where ever I am. We are also considering Quick Books because a great book keeper is not easy to find and we believe that we have found one but she only knows Quick Books. We are also considering not licensing the inventory capability in so much as we really don't sell anything and see strings, fret wire, pots, etc. as consumables. Most of all we are a small business and attempting to automate processes that may be accomplished manually faster by we bags of mostly water, human beings. If the software solution does no better than we can do quickly with say an inventory why go there?

We want to be in the Lutherie biz and not in the learning/using software biz so much so that I even investigated simply using paper but was shot down by CPAs and book keepers.

Although I am no fan of Quick Books by any means for us it may be a necessary evil in that it's platform agnostic (the cloud version) and we all are Mac fans, it won't screw us over when we select a book keeper or CPA, it's basically the standard of the industry, and without the inventory capability it's pretty easy to produce an estimate, receipt, and later an invoice and cheaper - a word that I'm attracted to.

Hope this helps. And.... our hero the software sales man got a reprieve and instead of being shackled to that rock face these days he's living the dream being part of a busy, well respected, Lutherie practice that has a healthy mix of perfectionists who do great work!

The area that Quickbooks really falls flat on it's face is tracking COGS. In order to do it, you need to have an inventory of EVERY part. What you'd like to be able to do is update cost as you put the part into the invoice. There's no reasonable way to do that in Quickbooks. The one that I linked to has that feature, and that's why I'll be using that until I finish writing my own. So I will be able to type in something like "Strings", or even just "Parts", type my cost and type my price. That's what guys like us need. I understand why Quickbooks does it the way it does, but it just doesn't work for the kinds of things we do because we don't generally stock every part on the planet for every guitar.

Just tracking strings is practically impossible. I buy the bulk packs and use strings as I need them. How do I track that in Quickbooks? Enter every stinking string? Just say screw it and when I use one string charge for a whole pack? Say screw it and just don't track COGS on strings? With the higher levels of Quickbooks, you COULD track individual strings if you really wanted to, and then combine them into packs, but it costs a fortune and it's still not particularly convenient.

String trees, pots, nuts, saddles, frets, etc. Every last screw needs to be inventoried or you can't track COGS unless you simply pretend that you buy everything for each job and forget about keeping things in inventory. To do that, you need to make a purchase order, and then you need to PAY that purchase order from some account. That's a PITA too, and the accounting still won't be right because things you legitimately keep in inventory won't ever show up as inventory. You'll have hundreds or thousands of dollars in expenditures that are not tracked because they've never been entered and you'll have to track all of that by hand anyway, completely defeating the purpose of Quickbooks. It basically turns into a fancy contact manager and invoice creator.

Anyhow, that's just my experience trying to make it work for our repair work. It's nightmarish, and you'd think there's a simple way around it but after 2 years of banging my head against the wall, and many hundreds of dollars spent on various versions and tech support with them and my CPA on the phone, I decided to cut my losses and toss it in the trash. The Mac version has bugs too. Not sure if they fixed this yet, but doing a simple refund/return completely screws up the books...it doesn't do the entries properly. Maybe that's fixed now, but it's shocking that such a simple and common task was ever a problem in the first place.