Summary
Acumen Book is an affordable royalty software solution for book publishers looking for a totally integrated system that is about half the cost of competitive integrated solutions. Acumen offers integrated royalties, accounting, sales, inventory, marketing and title information management in one solution. You can purchase optional add-on solutions for text book marketing, e-commerce, subscriptions, digital distribution, warehouse management, and more.
The royalty functionality offers;
- On-line view of Royalty Earnings detail, Royalty Payments, and Royalty Payable information for any title, author, and/or time period is readily accessible.
- Royalty checks can be created automatically by a click of a button.
- Seamless, automatic updating of Royalty files is based on Invoice, Credit Memo, Check, Voucher and Adjustment transactions.
- Up to the minute earnings information is always available.
- Royalties can be tracked on a cash or accrual basis. ACUMEN’s powerful “Royalty Fix” function enables you to recalculate the royalties for any title from any point in time. This not only updates all relevant royalty records, but the general ledger as well.
- Royalty Advances are tracked and can be viewed on-line.
- Earnings against Advances are tracked and can be viewed on-line or printed.
Our View
Book publishers with revenue of $2M to $30M should evaluate the Acumen software if they are looking for an intergrated ERP solution. It’s used by about 180+ publishers, many of whom switched to Acumen from competitive solutions.
Advantage 1. Acumen is affordable
It costs about 50% less than competitive solutions. Prices start at about $20K, which is less than most competitive stand-alone and hosted solutions.
Advantage 2. Acumen is focused on ecommerce & digital publishing.
Acumen’s management has focused their software development on eccommerce and digital publishing. Clients can purchase a turn-key website that is seemslessly integrated with their software. They offer an integrated digital publishing distribution solution service that makes offering Adobe DRM protected content affordable.
Advantage 3. Acumen users we speak to like their customer service.
Advantage 4. Acumen has a large client base of 180+ publishers.
More publishers with sales of $1M to $20M use Acumen than any other single solution; including Cats Pajamas, Elan, CisPub and Bookworks.
Disadvantage 1. Acumen does not use an industry standard reporting solution.
Whereas many competitors use Crystal Reports, Acumen uses a lesser known product called Super Reports.
Software Cost
Why does Acumen cost less than other integrated royalty software solutions; for small to medium sized publishers? When we compare costs they often come in at 30% to 50% less.
We believe that there are two reasons for this;
a. Marketing. Historically Cyberwolf; the developers of Acumen, have relied on word of mouth and on-line software demos to close sales. They do not have a sales staff that travels around the country visiting prospects. They do not spend a lot of money on marketing. This allows keeps their overhead expenses low.
b. Implementation. Many competitors will charge you 50% to 200% of the software cost to implement an ERP solution. These companies send people to your location to analyze your requirements, convert your data, implement the software and train your staff. Cyberwolf, the developers of Acumen does not do this.
Cyberwolf implementation specialists guide you through the implementation and train your staff via telephone an on-line screen-sharing. They provide you with a very detailed implementation manual. This means that instead of spending 400 to 1200+ hours on an implementation, their staff spends 40 to 100 hours on an implementation.