By Martin Gilliard

Welcome to the April 2017 business update. We make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Here is the Google Analytics report for April.

Nothing much to report on the traffic front, no major effort on any of the sites of late.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

New Mini-League Application

We loaded the players for a local club into the application. They are going to begin trialling our new application during the month of May.

PlanIt-BookIt App

We have a very large club about to trial PlanIt-BookIt so a lot of effort this month has been put into setting them up correctly and making sure everything will work exactly as expected for them.

We also added some new functionality to the app. We’ve now enabled an Admin role from directly withing the booking system. Previously all admin tasks were completed from a separate app – PlanIt Admin. The new functionality allows people who have been assigned admin rights to be able to book and cancel courts on behalf of other people.

We also enabled pricing for both parties in a booking. Meaning a member could play a non-member and simply pay the non-member fee directly online. Previously all charges were based on the membership of the person booking only.

PlanIt-BookIt Events

One of our customers reported major successes from using our event system. They had more bookings than usual and a packed bar full of people watching the event!

New Business

We continue to have quite a lot of interest in our products while still not having focused much effort into Marketing, which I guess is positive.

Had a site visit this month to a prospective customer. They said that they would be very interested as soon as we can get the automated court light switching functionality implemented. We will add it to our to do list!

Built a simple eCommerce web site for another prospective customer and also spent a day training them how to use it. They are very pleased with what we have done so far and so we expect them to be a paying customer shortly.

We had an enquiry to demo PlanIt-BookIt on site at a small squash club. The demo is planned for 15th of May. Will let you know how it went in my next update.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the March 2017 business update. We make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Here is the Google Analytics report for March. Our sign up page for signing up to PlanIt-BookIt is an app in it’s own right and therefore this month we have also added that to our analytics data. This is the one where we really need to see traffic increase and as hopefully sign-ups too.

Nothing of major interest in terms of traffic to report this month. Our cloudapp is having steady daily use by our customers. This site objitec.com is slightly down on last month. The PlanIt-BookIt web sites traffic is down too but haven’t had time for many articles this month. The PlanIt-BookIt app is slightly down but this is no doubt due the squash season coming to an end and the signup page is a new addition this month.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

CloudApp – Costing Module

Spent a day with one of our customers training them how to fully use our costing module.

PlanIt-BookIt Web Site

Wrote a new blog article called squash rules.

New Mini-League Application

This month we created a brand new application for enabling clubs to run their mini leagues for squash, badminton, tennis, etc. on-line. For the techies out there we developed this using C# and MVC.

We’re considering giving this application away for free if you sign up for our news letter. I will post more information later directly on the PlanIt-BookIt web site.

PlanIt-BookIt Events

A couple of our customers have started using the new PlanIt-BookIt events functionality and so far they have been very impressed with the results. One has claimed to receive many more sign-ups to their event than they normally expect as a result.

New Business

There has been a lot of interest in PlanIt-BookIt this month, mainly thanks to a software salesman friend of mine who just picked up the phone and started ringing people – a skill I have yet to master!

We’ve also had a lot of interest from a very large and popular sports and leisure club. They should be going live with our 3 month trial of PlanIt-BookIt this month. So quite positive news.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the February 2017 business update. We make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Here is the Google Analytics report for February. CloudApp is new, its the application that houses our costing module and order diary. We don’t expect a lot of sessions on this as it’s currently only being used by two businesses.

Some positive increases across the 2 key marketing sites, Objitec and PlanIt-BookIt.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

CloudApp – Costing Module

Lots of performance improvements were made to the Cloud App – Costing module this month. There had been no complaints about performance however we did notice that pages took quite a while to load if many assemblies were added. Now all pages load very fast.

We provided an option to delete an entire assembly and we added a tab to show the price changes of items.

Also we developed a full online user guide for the costing module.

CloudApp – Customer Database

We created an online user guide for the customer database module of our CloudApp.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

After requests from our Equestrian customers we have added a full events module onto PlanIt-BookIt. You can read the user guide here.

This is the email that we sent out to our customers via our MailChimp subscription…

Events is now live!

As a PlanIt-BookIt customer you might be pleased to know that you can now use PlanIt-BookIt to manage your club’s events.

It’s easy to create your first event, go to getting started with events to find out more.

The system will be free of all transaction charges until March 31st 2017.

After March 31st there will be a small event booking fee of 3.75%. **

We hope that you will find these new features useful, any feedback or comments please contact us.

Thanks and regards,

The Objitec Team

** minimum charge 25p, maximum £2.50 per entrant, invoiced at the end of each calendar month

After researching pricing of competitor event booking systems 3.75% seemed to be the most competitive. Plus we decided to make events entirely free of transaction charges to customers on our pro version of the product.

PlanIt-BookIt.com Web Site Changes

This month in an attempt to focus a little less on development and more on marketing we made a number of changes to the PlanIt-BookIt.com web site.

We added a working demo of PlanIt-BookIt to the site so that people can try before they buy.

Also, we added a PlanIt-BookIt features page.

The home page now lists many more solution examples for PlanIt-BookIt and a section selling the fact that it can be used on many different devices display sizes – due to it’s automatic resizing functionality.

Plus we made the entire site fully mobile friendly.

New Business

No new business this month.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the first business update of 2017. We make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Here are the Google Analytics reports for both December and January…

Below is the data for December showing a healthy increase on the PlanIt-BookIt site. This site still has poor traffic but not overly concerned about that at the moment.

And the following report is the one for January, lets blame the January blues for a decrease across all sites!

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

CloudApp – Costing Module

Our costing module went live this month – Hooray! This project was much more complex than we expected and took us much longer to complete than what we estimated, so big relief that we have at last got it live.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

We’ve added a sign up link to the front page for new member sign ups.

Multiple members can now share the same email address. When the member logs in with the shared email they can select which person they want to proceed as to make bookings/renew memberships etc. Great for child members who don’t have their own email address.

We’ve added an optional setting to make address details mandatory on new member sign up. Turn this on in the admin portal configuration page.

You now have the option if required to delete expired members.

And last but not least we have created a new PayPal transaction screen in the admin portal to help club treasurers reconcile payments

New Business

No new business this period however we do need to chase a few customers who are nearing the end of their trial periods of PlanIt-BookIt.

By Martin Gilliard

Welcome to another double month addition of our business update. This time I missed last months update due to the shear volume of coding work we have on at the moment. As usual we make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company. Although that said we don’t really bother with the online-booking-system.net web site anymore.

As I missed a month, here are the Google Analytics reports for both October and November…

Below is the data for October showing a slight increase in the traffic to this site and increases to the PlanIt-BookIt web site and application usage.

And the following report is the one for November…

This site is getting little traffic – which I guess is kind of expected given that currently we only publish this report on it. The PlanIt-BookIt site has had another increase and so has the usage of PlanIt-BookIt.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

SalesTalk Is Re-Branded!

During one of our strategy discussions we decided to re-brand our SalesTalk product. So far the product has two distinct areas of functionality. Firstly a call diary and secondly a costing module. The call diary is loosely related to sales and the costing module has no relation to sales. In the future we plan to add further functionality to the product that also has little to do with Sales.

So instead we’ve decided to use quite a generic name of cloudapp but to postfix it with our Objitec company brand. So… all of our apps except for PlanIt-BookIt will be accessed going forward via http://cloudapp.objitec.com. Specific customer functionality will be triggered based on what they have opted in to and this will be determined at the point of sign on.

While the link works immediately we still need to remove the product name and logo from the product itself. It’s on the to do list!

CloudApp Development – Costing Module

A number of changes to our costing module were requested by our kitchen manufacturer customer this period including…

– Changing the wording used for items and templates to components and units. We’ve made this change of terminology so as to be configurable by client.

– One of the big issues we had with the costing module was the costing of edging. Edging is the thin strip of material that (you’ve guessed it) goes around the edge of the chipboard. It’s generally only used on edges that would be visible. So for example a side panel of a kitchen unit may only have edging on the front edge whereas the top panel of a stand-alone unit may have edging on the front and each side.

We initially designed the system so that edging would just have to be manually added to a job, which was not an ideal solution. Edging is dependent on the width and depth dimensions of chipboard. So in order to design a costing system that could be used in other industries and not make something that was only specific to the kitchen industry we decided to introduce the concept of a linked component.

The image of the screen where you can add linked components is below. This shows a top panel with 3 strips of edging that are dependent on the base component and additionally the side edging is a different type of edging than the edging at the front of the panel.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

And in terms of changes to PlanIt-BookIt…

– We had a customer contact us who was having issues in terms of taking membership renewal payments via PayPal. After checking the log of the payment notification that was sent from PayPal back to our site we noticed that they had their email in PayPal with a capital first letter and not in our system – so we were rejecting it as an incorrect payment. We’ve now sorted out the casing going forward and so shouldn’t experience this issue again.

– Our new member sign up process had got some old school validation messages as can be seen in the image below…

So we updated it to a more modern footer validation message block…

– We also added a link on the front page of PlanIt-BookIt for new member sign-up. We’d had some feedback from our customers requesting for this to be more obvious to prospective members. Not the greatest of image grabs below, but it’s good enough for you to get the idea!

– We also enabled customers to optionally have terms of membership which have to be read and accepted before sign up…

– The bulk of the development has been completed for enabling events within PlanIt-BookIt. The event can be viewed and signed up for online both by members and non-members and can be paid for via PayPal.

Other

We installed office 365 so that we can now access our emails, etc. even from customer computers. Wasn’t the easiest of things to set up!

New Business

We’ve had one sign up of our two month trial of PlanIt-BookIt memberships this period and we have also had an enquiry about us writing a booking system specifically for the executive car hire market. And then additionally we have had a request from a charity who run a children’s adventure playground for a system that can record kids in and out of the park. So looks like we’re going to continue to be busy, which has to be a good thing!

By Martin Gilliard

Thanks to an excellent holiday abroad with friends in California, I missed last months update. So all is back to normal this month with our September update. As usual we make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

As I missed a month here are the Google Analytics reports for both August and September…

Below is the data for August with quite a healthy spike in traffic for this Objitec site. Click on the image to view it full screen with better clarity.

Traffic for our online-booking-system.net site is down but we are seriously considering dropping this site completely. We originally purchased the domain thinking it would assist us with getting more traffic for the “online booking system” keyword – but after more thought it just complicates things and we don’t really want our potential customers to have to flick between a number of different product sites.

The traffic for planit-bookit.com has kept relatively the same.

The traffic for the PlanIt-BookIt application itself is down 7% but we can attribute this to less people playing squash during the summer months.

Below is the analytics traffic report for September…

With quite a poor result for this site – hopefully it will improve again soon.

Once again I’m not to bothered about the online-booking-system.net site as we will likely drop it from our portfolio and the PlanIt-BookIt site and app have relatively stable traffic throughout September.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

SalesTalk Development

A number of changes and improvements were made to our SalesTalk application this period, including:

• Lots of form validation to ensure the entry of correct data
• Disabled the tab that shows the items within a template if it’s a brand new template
• Improved the change password functionality so as to pop up a modal requesting your old password before a new one can be created

• Enabled deletion of a template if no items exist within the template
• Created a link to allocate the next available customer number
• Implemented paging on the customer list as this was loading slow for customers with many of their own customers
• Dormant customers that no longer make orders can now be flagged as inactive. You have a choice of viewing active or inactive customers from the customer list. However the call diary only shows active customers
• We also made a few cosmetic changes to SaleTalk for example not displaying the pipe symbol that separates an item from it’s variant if no variant exists

PlanIt-BookIt Development

In terms of improvements to PlanIt-BookIt this month we enabled the message that is displayed to members as their membership is close to expiring to be specific to each client if required. We did the same for expired membership messages too.

We had a request from some members to turn the members directory list off so we’ve made this into a plugin that is configurable by client.

Also this month we started development of an event booking module. Most of our riding school customers had been requesting this functionality to manage the horse riding competitions and events that they put on each month. Plus it could also be used for booking squash or tennis competitions so it seemed like a good thing to implement. We’re haven’t fully decided how to charge for this yet. We’re considering a small transaction based fee.

The Cloud Fell Out Of The Sky!

We had a big issue for just one day this period when the Microsoft Azure cloud database failed. You can read all about it here – Global DNS outage hits Microsoft Azure customers

Luckily Microsoft managed to fix the issues and our customers were only down for a few hours – still it took quite some apologizing and back pedaling after I’d told most that the cloud is highly robust and reliable and never fails. I will learn!

Azure Cloud Database

On a similar note this month we also experimented with different versions of Azure cloud databases.

Our SalesTalk product runs off of an Azure cloud based database and works great however our PlanIt-BookIt product which is much more database intensive runs off of a database that we manage ourselves and which sits on a cloud based server. Moving to a fully cloud managed database would move the backup responsibility from us to Microsoft.

Our tests concluded though that without paying quite a bit more in cloud hosting fees the performance would reduce if we moved over, so for now we plan to continue as is.

Equestrian Blog Articles

This month, thanks to our guest author Jan Birley we published the following two equestrian articles…

Creating a system for riding clubs

Encouraging riding club volunteers

Continued Learning

I have enrolled myself on the following free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  from Edinburgh university Introduction to Marketing: Tools to Set Enterprises Apart. So far I’ve only completed the material for week 1 and it’s a 6 week course but so far it’s proving to be very useful and interesting.

This month I also read the following book which is excellent. Marketing to Win: How Small Businesses Can Do More With Less by Jacqueline Biggs. Each chapter explains marketing ideas and concepts and then concludes with a set of action items to complete. I’ve started on one or two of the action items, the rest I have added to a to do list within Google Keep.

I’ve also started following a number of content marketing and blogging experts to try and gain more advice on how best to market our software products online.

For example I’m finding the information put forward by Dan Norris to be very useful and interesting. Dan is a serial entrepreneur who’s first success was creating a service company that provides 24/7 WordPress support to small businesses. He’s since started another project – a crowd funded Australian micro brewery. All fascinating stuff. I have since read one of his books, which I highly recommend… Content Machine: Use Content Marketing to Build a 7-figure Business With Zero Advertising

I’m also finding some of the information provided by Neil Patel to be very interesting. In his blog he covers all aspects of content marketing in great detail.

Plus I have started reading some of the articles published by Darren from problogger.

Mail Chimp and SumoMe

As a result of all my efforts reading blogs and studying online courses, etc. I keep hearing about different tools that are available to assist with the process of content marketing. One is Mail Chimp which I briefly touched up in my July business report update and the other is SumoMe.

SumoMe is a suite of tools that are used to help grow traffic to your business. I’m not fully sure what they all do yet however that said I have installed most of the free versions that are available and have already had some success in terms of receiving an actionable customer lead. I plan to learn more about what these tools can do for me over the next few weeks and to see what benefits you get from the paid, professional versions of the tools. I have read that the paid version of the product you can get to link directly with Mail Chimp.

I have signed up for Mail Chimp but I haven’t fully read up on what it can exactly do yet in terms of email marketing. If you’d like to be one of the first to sign up to my MailChimp driven email list you can do so below…

Subscribe to our newsletter below:

[mc4wp_form id=”4342″]

New Business

No new business this week, although as I mentioned earlier we have had a customer enquiry in relation to our PlanIt-BookIt product.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the New Look July 2016 Objitec business metrics and progress report. We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Once again little effort on content marketing this month, however we intend to ramp our marketing efforts up sometime after the summer holidays, so watch this space. Our google analytics traffic report is detailed below.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Our New Look Site

As you may have noticed we have changed the look of this web site. The new look incorporates our new company logo. Hope you like it. All feedback welcome in the comments section below.

Direct Debit Payments

So far we are very pleased with the service that we are getting from gocardless. Monthly payments are now going directly into our bank account and the gocardless dashboard is very informative. Plus you get emails informing you of exactly when a payment has been made. All this and with a much better rate than PayPal.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

A number of behind the scenes development activities were undertaken on PlanIt-BookIt admin this month, including

• a different way for managing the downloads of members, contacts and invoices.
• logging any exceptions in our audit database table
• Added a new recipient column to the database
• Allowing zero priced membership types

In the admin section of the system we had a request from a customer to enable emails to selected individuals rather than just groups. Done! You can now select one or more individuals to send your communication to…

Also we enabled club bookings such as competitions or coaching sessions to be created directly from withing the admin module. Prior to this change we were making these entries on behalf of our customers directly in the system.

Squash coaches who were using the system to book courts in order to coach their students were complaining about the restriction in the system in terms of it only allowing one booking per person per day. We removed this restriction for all coaches.

SalesTalk Development

This month we got the costing module finished to a point where we were able to demo it to our customer.

We entered some real costing data for a kitchen cabinet and then resized the cabinets. All costs were as expected.

As a result our customer was really pleased with what we had done and except for a number of minor changes are looking to go live sometime in September, after the school holidays.

Marketing

We are very aware that we need to focus more on marketing our products and services. We haven’t done much in this area yet for two reasons…

1. We’ve had so much development work to do for our existing customers which will also be good for the future of our products
2. We all love coding a little too much!

However that said we’ve decided that we are going to ramp up our marketing efforts, probably starting sometime in September, given lots of summer holidays are planned for August.

As a first step we’ve been looking at using email marketing clients. We had a quick look at the following:

• Mailchimp
• Convertkit
• ActiveCampaign
• InfusionSoft
• SendLane

I quite liked the look of SendLane but for now we are going to go with Mailchimp as it’s free up until the point that you have 1000 subscribers. After that point we can reassess.

We’ve also toyed with the idea of creating our own. Because at the end of the day it’s just software and that’s what we’re great at!

New Business

We went live with one new customer this month but we also had a customer that didn’t want to proceed beyond our trial period. We asked for feedback as to why but none was given. I guess you can’t win them all!

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the June 2016 Objitec business metrics and progress report. We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Little effort on content marketing this month. Our google analytics traffic report is detailed below.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Our Objitec Logo

We were in need of a company logo so we made use of the excellent fiverr site and got one designed for us for five quid!

This is what the designer provided us with…

Which we were all very pleased with.

Direct Debit Payments

This month we went live on gocardless with a few customers. Meaning monthly payments for these customers will automatically enter our bank account without any further effort from us or our customers.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

Due to us going live with direct debit for some of our customers we built an invoicing module which automatically generates an invoice for our services. Our customers can simply log into their admin module to view / print invoices.

Part of an example invoice:

This month we also coded PlanIt-BookIt to prevent people with expired memberships from viewing the members directory and from viewing or making any further bookings.

We also enabled admin’s to determine which membership types can be selected for renewing online. We did this to prevent people from changing their membership type to any of the other membership types – for example you wouldn’t want a standard member to change their membership to some discounted membership role such as say a club that has a reduced rate longstanding member.

Now that membership can be renewed online some of our customers requested to be able to view a list of members that had expired in the last 30 days so we added that to the admin module.

SalesTalk Development

With SalesTalk we completed a number of cosmetic changes requested by one of our customers and we added templates for the costing module.

The idea being that if you add a template to a job then all the items associated with that template will automatically be added to the job.

The screen below shows where you can add items to a template…

The final costing module is going to be able to re-cost jobs by adjusting the sizes of the boxes being made. For this reason items are specified with a width, depth or height dependent attribute.

New Business

Nothing much to note in terms of new business this month, however we do have a very small business that might be joining us as a customer next month.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the May 2016 Objitec business metrics and progress report.We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Once again we’ve had little time this month to focus on traffic and therefore as you can see from the chart below there’s nothing major to report in terms of increases in traffic.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

Due to on-boarding a number of new equestrian customers this week we wrote a routine to take riding club members from the standard British Riding Club spreadsheet and import into PlanIt-BookIt.

This routine has been successfully used to import member lists from our new customers.

We have enabled administrators to optionally delete members who do not renew and have provided them with visibility to the notes recorded by members.

SalesTalk Development

This month we made a number of changes to the customer maintenance section of SalesTalk. From the orders tab you are now able to Add, Delete and Update past orders.

You can also then get the system to calculate the expected order date based on up to the last 5 orders in the system or you can use your judgement / knowledge to enter when you think the expected order date will be.

The customer orders page is shown below…

Below is the update orders modal pop up…

The add is very similar except the values aren’t pre-populated.

Customer Payments

We have been accepting customer payments via PayPal invoicing. Which is OK and I mean OK! – i.e. it’s not great.

One of the drawbacks with accepting payments this way is that we have to recreate the invoice each month and our customers have to login to PayPal and pay the invoice each month too. So a little effort required from both parties. This is clearly not going to work as we get more and more customers.

Therefore we’ve signed up with a third party direct debit company called GoCardless. This service enables us to issue monthly direct debits. Our customers can cancel at anytime but until that point there is no further effort required. The payments will automatically happen at a specified point each month.

In terms of invoicing our customers we are in the process of building an automated invoicing system to send out invoices to our customers each month.

Social Media

We added the following default post to Objitec’s twitter account…

New Business

This month three new customers signed up with us! All three were equestrian centers looking to use planit-bookit’s club membership and management functionality.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the April 2016 Objitec business metrics and progress report.We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

Advertising

I host a couple of hobby sites in my spare time. Leadership and development for all things related to leadership / personal development and innovation-creativity a site where you can learn more about the innovation process and the input to innovation which is creativity. This site also includes articles on ideas and inventions too.

Both sites have Google Adsense adverts with the income going towards helping me to fund the hosting costs.

However we decided that it would be a good idea to include one of our own adverts for PlanIt-BookIt on the sites.

So I got to work creating a simple banner ad using the excellent Canva tool.

The results of my efforts are the ad displayed above and to the left. We’ve placed it in a prominent position in the left column of every page on my hobby sites.

When we get to the point where we are fully happy with the sign up process we will also start to invest some money in FaceBook advertising. Which appears to be the one that gives you most bang for the buck from the articles I’ve read online recently.

Traffic is looking healthy this month even though there’s has been no new content activity on any of the sites. This site is seeing a large increase in traffic and so are the two product marketing sites.

Change Of Strategy

We’re in the early stages of planning a change in strategy for the company. There’s a lot of competition out there in terms of booking systems, even though most are far inferior to ours! Also our two new, recent customers have requested bespoke software development projects from us. Therefore we have decided to offer a software development service to any small – medium sized business for almost any database type project.

The idea is that we will create a sign up page where our customers can select a small medium or large software project. Examples of each will be provided on the sign up page. Depending on the size of the project customers will pay somewhere between £24.99 and £399.99 per month for the use of the system with a minimum 3 month term.

A £24.99 project would be say a request for a simple customer database or order diary. £99.99 a month would also include additional, more complex functionality say a costing calculator for example. The top end pricing could cater for requirements that include user roles, invoicing and stock control for example.

Customers would provide us with a brief description of their project details on sign up, at which point we would get back to them with a monthly cost for the project. The customer would have continued access to the software while ever they pay the monthly fee. Other than the 3 month minimum term there would be no contract.

We will however still continue to offer PlanIt-BookIt as a booking system for any businesses that take bookings. The bespoke software offering is an additional service we intend to provide and where we intend to be focusing the majority of our efforts.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements. We’ve dropped a few metrics this month which weren’t adding much value. May drop more in the future as we focus more of our efforts on the Objitec brand.

PlanIt-BookIt Development

This month we went live with enabling members to renew their membership online via PayPal.

We also added member export functionality which enables members to be exported and styled as per a predefined template for organisations that have a requirement to submit membership details to a governing body such as the BRC (British Riding Club).

Additionally…

1. You can setup events (like competitions) in admin

2. You can enter scores for members for the event in admin

3. Members can view event scores in PlanIt-BookIt

4. Members can view rankings based on events (only if your match rankings is disabled) in PlanIt-BookIt.

SalesTalk Development

We added plugins to SalesTalk so that customers can select which functionality they require in the application.

We added an optional customer number and an organisation name along with principal name, contact number and email fields.

We improved the search functionality when searching for customers.

Outstanding calls in the call diary are now highlighted in pink.

We also enabled users of the system to add last order details and expected order dates into the system for when they are setting up existing customers for the first time.

New Business

We’ve had a kitchen manufacturing company request a job costing module from us. We intend to work on this project throughout May.