Solutions for Galleries and Dealers

Opening a new art gallery or other art or antiques business? Looking to upgrade your existing business management software? Read on for some important points to consider.

what kind of system does An art or antiques business need?

The most important tool for an art or antiques business is a relational-database information management software system. A quality relational-database system saves untold amounts of staff time by recording, automatically cross-linking, tracking essential information in one easily accessible place, with no need to enter any information more than once. A quality system generates concise and comprehensive reports, documents, and labels, and is able to easily share information with other applications, a Web site, and, if desired, customers, vendors, or partners. With this kind of system, users can quickly and automatically perform tasks that were once complicated and time-consuming, including many that before were not even possible.

WHY A QUALITY SYSTEM?

No matter how you look at it, art and antiques businesses run on huge amounts of detailed and interrelated inventory, contact, and other business information. How accurately this information is recorded, clearly it is organized, and efficiently it works together to automate information management tasks is all critical to success. System performance is so important to gallery operations that the system utilized should be the best available: well proven, comprehensively supported, and designed specifically for complete fine art or antiques gallery management.

WHAT does A QUALITY SYSTEM DO?

A good system integrates contacts, inventory, transactions and accounting. It automates as many information tasks as possible: recording and tracking works, managing contacts and mailings, generating labels, lists, and reports, creating transactions and invoices… pretty much everything imaginable, in the most efficient manner, and in ways particular to the industry's accepted best practices. The 'relational' capacity of the database means that related records (artist-artwork-invoice-buyer) are only a click away, and any mistakes made in repeated names or terms only need to be corrected once to update the entire system. Often-used pre-filtered lists ('available Warhol Prints', 'New York Clients') can be saved to a drop-down selection. A quality system also ties a business together by successfully integrating other business-critical software packages such as QuickBooks Pro, email programs, and a gallery's website and iPads.

Does a better system mean a better business?

What business could not be made better by better management? And as few businesses rely more heavily on related information than do art and antiques galleries, information management is a crucial activity in these and like businesses. In considering an information management system, one thing is for sure: the better designed, more powerful, and more integrated a system, the more successful a business can be. As such, it does not seem too much to say that establishing stability, increasing efficiency, and enhancing the power of information are critical factors in the level of success of a new or established art or antiques business. In any event, this is definitely not the place to cut corners or try to 'do it yourself'.

So what is in a quality system?

• Robust software technology to make it strong, stable, flexible, and powerful
• Comprehensive features that are useful and efficient, built by true software developers and refined over many years by the industry's leaders
• Intelligent, elegant, and sophisticated software design to make it intuitive and efficient
• Deep company and staff experience in gallery management, computers, and software programming
• A large base of successful users proving the system's quality and ensuring its long-term future viability

Click on the above links to find out how Artsystems Pro leads the way in each and every category, and why the vast majority of galleries — large and small, new and established - who use a gallery management software system use Artsystems GalleryPro. For more details on the new revolutionary upgrade to GalleryPro, Pro 2011, visit the Pro 2011 product page.

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