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Just a Personal Point of View
On the Road to Customer Tracking Software
16-Jan-2006      by Susan Pichotta

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Part 6
Product: REGKEEPER

The RegKeeper install was quick and to the point, although I think there was some startup info on one of the install screens that I was supposed to read. Please don't tell me how to use the software at the beginning of the install process, because at that point, I'm installing, not using.

When I run the software, I get a neat looking window with a couple of blank browse boxes on it and a list of totals on the right. Nice icons, up to date interface. Empty lists, though, and no wizard or startup tip or anything to give me a clue. They do have a nice Overview in the help and a Quick Start, so points for that.

The first thing they say I need to do is set up my service provider. They have SWREG listed already, although the address information is out of date. I'll leave it as is for this test.

Next I'm supposed to set up my products in their product database, but it says I can do that on the fly, when they process orders. Cool! Then I'm supposed to set up my email options, but I won't be sending emails from this, so I'll ignore it.

So, I go to import orders. I am a happy camper, it imports directly from my Pocomail mailboxes. It lets me add products during the import, although it takes a few clicks. It seemed to work. Now I have some real data in there to look at.

Uh-oh. It does things wierd, it takes the order total, then works backwards to see how much you'll get paid after fees, taxes, etc. are deducted from the total, based on their own calculations. Bad, bad, bad, because they're not calculating EU VAT at all. One Roma icons order shows me earning more than I charge for them. Maybe I need to change some setup things somewhere (why don't they have it right?). Or maybe it just doesn't work.

Also, while they have nice little totals in a box on the side, and you can select the time period for those totals, the "This week" total appears to be exactly same as the "All" total, and the "Last week" column is all zeroes. Wait, I see the problem there. All the dates showing are today, the day I imported the orders, rather than the actual day of the order.

Hmph. If none of my other choices turn out very well, I'll come back to this one and see if I can figure out the problems. Until then, onward.