SuccessWare
SuccessWare is professional studio management software that offers extensive tracking, pricing and planning facilities, with good privacy and security features to prevent unauthorized access.
SuccessWare's tracking features are really comprehensive: the vendor lists more than a dozen pages of them, too numerous to list here. They come under the following categories: client tracking, direct mail, financial tracking, inquiries, orders, prospects, reporting, scheduling, session tracking, to-do lists, and vendor tracking.
Pricing features are similarly extensive, ensuring that the studio prices its products accurately, always taking account of the cost of doing business. For example, it takes in costs from suppliers' lists and automatically suggests updates to your prices when suppliers increase their charges. It also has great flexibility, enabling similar products to be sold at different prices in different markets.
Business planning is the third strand of SuccessWare, enabling the photographer to put together business plans in support of bank loans and lines of credit. It has powerful cash-flow forecasting, creates a monthly capital budget, and keeps a full record of income received from all sources. For the long-term it creates a Five-Year Plan, showing projected sales growth, indicating the break-even point, and helping you to form a marketing plan for each product line. With SuccessWare, the photographer soon gets to know how many sessions the studio needs each month to make a profit.
Comment
It has always been the policy of SuccessWare to stick to the business aspects of running a studio, rather than get involved with the photographic workflow. Its tracking, pricing and planning features are well-conceived and cover all bases, while recent versions prepare standard balance sheets showing assets, liabilities, and net worth -- if you like, a "snapshot" of your business position.
Users report that SuccessWare works well for them and is not too difficult to learn, despite its scope.
Tech info
- OS: Windows 2000 onwards; MacOS X 10.2 or later
- Price level: (Single user) $1,500; (up to 3 users) $2,500 (both approx.) Leasing terms available from approx. $50/mo
SuccessWare
SuccessWare, Inc. was founded in 1995 to help studio owners manage their businesses more efficiently and profitably. It released SuccessWare, the product, in 1997. Today, it is used in hundreds of studios across the United States and Canada. It won Professional Photographer magazine's Hot One Award for the 6th time in 2009.
From the same vendor:
- Success Tracking, Success Pricing, and Success Planning applications in SuccessWare
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