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This has been an eventful week here at P1Wired.  We are very excited to announce that P1Wired is now a part of StudioPlus Software.  Together, our two companies share over 30 years of experience building software applications for the professional photographic industry.  Now, we’re going to use that combined expertise to build exciting new solutions just for you.

Don’t worry, if you’re a current P1Wired user, your software will continue to be supported.  We’re all still here ready and willing to help you with any needs you may have.  In addition, we look forward to combining the expertise of both companies to deliver new product innovations in the near future.  We’re committed to developing the very best solutions for business management, digital workflow, and online solutions to help all clients build a very successful and profitable business.

Make sure you check our FAQ page regarding the acquisition, and keep checking our blog for future updates down the road!  Exciting times!

MailChimp is an online application that allows you to create beautiful marketing campaigns, which is why P1Wired chose to integrate with them rather than creating our own email marketing piece, why reinvent the wheel. Depending on your marketing needs, you can choose a free version or purchase one of their plans.

The free version just got better. The new plan provides for an increase of the number of free emails per month to 6,000 and your list can now contain up to 1,000 email addresses all at no charge.

The new section Reports is another GREAT tool that allows you to analyze your marketing campaigns. You can see how many people opened the email, how many didn’t, how many email address bounced, and if you have links in your marketing email, the click rate. You can see WHO opened and WHO unsubscribed.

I love the fact that I can get an excel spreadsheet that tells me the email addresses that bounced and more importantly, who unsubscribed. It is imperative that if someone unsubscribed you remove their email address from P1Wired, you do not want to email them again. If you don’t remove their address and you email them again, your account with MailChimp can be terminated.

You can also see a click map, which means if you have links in your marketing email, you can view the email with the links showing the percentage of clicks that happened on that link. I find this helpful in determining the best places to put links in a marketing email so that I can optimize my click rate.

Another great tool for analyzing your marketing emails is the new feature that allows you to compare marketing campaigns. This is good because it can provide insight into which email designs are working and which aren’t, or which content works best to attract attention.

For a full list of all the other upgrades to the free version, log into your MailChimp account and you will be greeted with the “What’s New” page. Don’t have an account; follow this link to see some of the new stuff and sign up here.

The next release of P1Wired is right around the corner, and with the new release you’ll get these added benefits, plus more. You can now pre-set the length of your appointments, so if your senior session is typically 15 minutes, you set the length to 15 and it will automatically create the appointment for the allotted time. You can, of course, change it on any given appointment.

You are now able to add negative line items to P1Wired, so if you wish to discount an order or apply a gift card, you can!

In Setup / Products, you can select to view all items, or only active items, making managing your price list even easier. Further, if a price is marked as inactive, you will no longer see it when you’re adding items to orders.

We have added a couple of new buttons from the “More” menu: Schedule and Orders. Schedule will send out emails that were automatically created via workflow, and the Orders button will allow you to quickly look up orders based on a number of different things, from here you can also quickly update the order, whether it’s a delivery date, marking workflow as complete, or taking a payment.

We have also made a change to the dashboard, providing an “at a glance” look at orders that have an outstanding balance. Afraid your staff may see this information? Use Security – General / Roles to limit what staff can see and do.

We also noticed that not everyone uses order dates on orders, and those clients were being missed in Marketing. We have added the flexibility of marketing to clients who have placed an order, with or without an order date.

We’ve also increased the amount of info available from the calendar, both monthly and weekly, so when you roll over an appointment, you can see the type of appointment that’s scheduled, the client, and the start and end times; quickly providing all the important information you need.

We have simplified check entry and adding the chart of accounts the check should be allocated too. Simply type in the first letter of the chart of accounts you want, and it will auto-fill for you.

All these enhancements will be available in your studio’s site by September 15, 2010.

With the latest release of P1Wired, the development team has put a lot of focus on the Calendar and Appointment section. In addition to this, they have also added some modifications to the Workflow area of the application. They added a Workflow button on the main tool bar which gives you quick access to all workflow and you can easily see the status of all open workflow. Employee’s can now be assigned to workflow so you can send an email to the employee when they are assigned work, this ensures they will always be up to date on their assigned tasks.

P1Wired now supports date and phone number formatting, so no matter what format you like or need, P1Wired will format to your specifications. Simply enter whole numbers into the field and P1Wired will do the rest.

The calendar also has some new changes. You can now enter the name of the employee that is adding the appointment, you can mark the appointment confirmed and which employee confirmed it.

The daily, weekly and monthly calendar views have also been updated with a new look. These views will now display the appointment type, the client name, the start and end time of the appointment and the staff member that added the appointment to the schedule.

You can also view individual calendars or multiple calendars by the simple click of a button. Previously, all appointments were displayed on individual calendars and you could only view one calendar at a time. Now, in the daily view, you can view multiple calendars at one time. You can also choose to view all appointments for multiple calendars in a single view. This gives you a comprehensive look at a day, week or month.

We have also added new ways to find a client in P1Wired. Newly added are phone number, email, a client secondary name, reference number, and customer number to name a few. You can search for your clients using any of this information.

Amongst all of these new changes, a new Z reported has been added to provide you with peace of mind. Now your payment transactions can be printed on one report which gives you tight cash control. Credit card swiping of transactions is now supported, providing less room for error when entering information and making the credit card processing interface more seamless. The Contract now prints as a PDF, the Google Calendar interface has been enhanced, text descriptions have been added to the Add buttons and the comments in the appointment window have been increased in size.

All these enhancements will be available in your studio’s site by the end of the week August 21, 2010.

P1Wired just added a new feature to the Category and SubCategory drop-downs on the Add\Edit Customer window.  P1Wired created this feature to simplify the set up associated with new customer data. Currently in P1Wired, when you want to add new customer codes, you go to the setup option, find the tab you are looking for and add your new codes.  We realized this may be too many steps in a photographer’s workflow.

Simple and Easy — with this new feature, just click on the Category combobox, the first value will be [Add New].  Go ahead and select [Add New] and up pops the Add\Edit Category window.  Just add the new code and press the save button, your code gets added and applied to the customer you are adding.  

This new feature should be a big time saver and allow the photographer to add a new code on the fly. This was a great suggestion from one of our users and we will be adding this functionality to all the combo boxes in our next release — scheduled for July 2010.