Save this for sure, Thank you Michael, don lemoine ----- Original Message ----- From: jsmith3109 at aol.com To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 9:53:55 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [pianotech] Piano software for Mac Very nice! I am impressed. J. Smith ,Illinois -----Original Message----- From: Michael Musial <neeper99 at hotmail.com> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 7:23 pm Subject: [pianotech] Piano software for Mac Hello I posted this a while ago, but it might interest some who have not seen it. ----------------------- I use Filemaker Pro 9 as a flat file database on my Mac. For each customer I have the usual info plus a place to have a photo of each piano. I take a picture with my cell phone of every piano I tune, and send it to my Macbook using bluetooth. I can then import it into my customers file with one click on my laptop.That whole process takes about one minute. I have over 1500 customers in my database, so a picture can help a lot to remind me who the customer may be. Like any good database I can search for any combo of information.. like "Kawai RX-2s last tuned 1 year ago in Anytown..." I carry my laptop in my toolkit and enter the customers info onsite. This works best for me. I try to keep this system as simple as possible. I make invoices by hand, and track my income through my appointment book/ledger. If you buy Filemaker online you get a productivity package that includes some invoice templates that you can modify if you want. I use a postcard system to remind my customers of their next time for a tuning. I can export the relevant info each month into a mail-merge file, open it up in another program on my Mac called SOHO Labels and Envelopes and print my "last date tuned" info and customer address on my custom postcards. When I schedule an appointment for an existing customer that is in my database, I made a simple script the will copy all the needed information to the clipboard. I then simply paste that info into iCal. Scripts are very easy to make with Filemaker. I am willing to share an empty template of this database if anyone wants a starting place from which to design their own in Filemaker. Mine could be fancier but it works for me.. someday I may tweak it some more :) Is anyone else willing to share their Filemaker template? I would not expect someone with a very sophisticated setup to share theirs, but being able to look at some other basic database methods would be interesting. I made a simple web page with a screenshot of my database and a sample merged postcard.. http://neesium.com/database/ Filemaker's Bento is a nice, simple program worth trying first. It is a heck of a lot cheaper but limited in its flexibility. http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/overview.html?homepage=bento_overview =0 A Michael Musial RPT Vacaville, CA Quick access to Windows Live and your favorite MSN content with Internet Explorer 8. = Great Deals on Dell 15" Laptops - Starting at $479 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090327/9f9a9d16/attachment.html>
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