Cloud based school booklist software for newsagents helping newsagents win school books business

Months ago my software company launched Booklist, a cloud based school booklist management solution designed to help newsagents more effectively compete against big businesses chasing school book list business. The goal was to provide newsagents a facility through which they can be seen by customers as more up to date and through which they can cut the time it takes to manage booklist orders.

Newsagents have had direct input into the facility as it has been enhanced over the last couple of months.

Using the site, newsagents can:

1. Setup a school.
2. Setup classes in a school and load all the booklist requirements.
3. The booklist items could be loaded by a CSV file. You would record item description, price, supplier and supplier stock cost.
4. You would setup order close dates.
5. Plus you would have the ability to note when an order is ready for collection.
6. The site would allow for you not having stock, thereby adjusting the amount to be collected.
7. Share a link for parents to sign up and add their kid(s) to a class and to either take the whole booklist or select what they want.
8. The site would allocate logins to parents so they would have access to their order.
9. Receive payment from the parents.
10. Alternatively, the site would give the transaction to your Retailer software for payment by the parents in-store.
11. Export a file of all items required to fulfil booklists, by supplier and by school. CSV you could load into Excel.
12. Report on total revenue by school and class.
13. The site would be accessible by desktop, tablet and phone.

In addition to the per year fee there is a small card processing fee, on a cost recovery basis, for payments made online.

Here are the enhancements guided by newsagents:

1. Category Sorting to enable easier management.
2. Picklist production for product picking.
3. Group products by category in the store booklist page.
4. Display the store ABN on the store page, and allow store to edit their ABN from store backend
5. Allow store to adjust the display order of products in the store booklist page
6. Allow store to create different prices to booklist per school
7. Display store contact phone and fax number on the store page
8. Allow store to manually create/update category from the store backend
9. Allow store to manually drag and drop the marker on Google Map to the correct position, if the store location is not showing correctly on Google Map
10. Allow store customer to reset their login password via forgot password page
11. Added validation to Pin Payment API Keys field to indicate store if invalid API details entered
12. Added “Booklist Review” step, before store confirm to create the school booklist.
13. Fixed the website URL from frontend.booklist.com.au to www.booklist.com.au

From this project it is clear there is no one approach to managing school book list sales. The developers at my company and sought to address the most common and commercially viable needs to provide a cost effective solution for newsagents.

To access the preview please follow these instructions.

1. Go to the website: http://www.booklist.com.au.
2. Click on login.
3. Enter user name: demo.
4. Enter password: booklist.
5. Any questions, email help@booklist.com.au

If my first job in a newsagency decades ago I packed school book orders. I remember the manual accounting process well. My hope is this cloud based facility encourages more newsagents back into this area newsagents once owned.