Personal Blog of Mike Bowden

Over the past few days we’ve been toying around with an application called Studiometry. We’re going to use it for a few more weeks before making a decision on purchasing it for our company, but during that time I’ll be putting it through its paces and reporting back here.

So far we’re very pleased with the application, it is a bit confusing at first and seems like there are FAR too many options and that all of it will never bed used. But if your studio needs something that can encompass everything from the start to the end of a project and everywhere in between, Studiometry is really the end all solution. (For the most part) We don’t have to get rid of any of the other software we’re using either, such as Quickbooks. All of the financial information input within Studiometry can be exported and imported into Quickbooks or sent directly to a CPA. (Proffered)

There are a couple of things that put us off about the application, but I’m sure a simple request and a little patience and the developers over at Oranged.net Software will implement them. Currently there isn’t a “review” page, something that shows all of the current to-do’s, what’s coming due, overdue invoices and so on. I’d really like to see something such as this implemented into the application.

The other thing that seems to be missing, or maybe it is just my lack of experience with the application, are split payments. We normally work with clients on an on-going basis on projects that could take month to complete. During which time we normally invoice an average of 4 – 5 times and receive multiple payments during each phase of the project. Currently if we assign a payment to one invoice and it is more than is needed for that invoice, the extra amount can’t be split and placed on another invoice. It simply shows a negative due balance and nothing else can be done with it. This makes things a little harder and we’ll most likely have to manually input split payments to correct the issue, which takes longer for us and causes more work for our CPA.

Other than the above, we’re still very pleased with the application and expect it to be a great addition to our studio. The most interesting portion of the application is that it networks very well within the studio. We run multiple machines, all running different operating systems, virtual machines and so on. Being able to run the application on OS X or Windows is very nice and the fact that they all meld well together, syncing perfectly and work with the native applications for that OS are a big plus for us. We’d still like to see a Linux version, but I’m not sure that will happen anytime soon. Most of our developers prefer Linux, but they also have access to Wine or VMs when needed, so it isn’t a huge problem for us but could be for others.

Useful Links

• Oranged Software Home Page
• Studiometry Home Page
• Studiometry Feature List
• Studiometry Training Videos