Studio Manager Fans

Talking about Studio Manager

Works Great on my iPad

Just to let you know it works great on my iPad. Good work. I’m still using Filemaker 10 with Studio Manager 11.
Ronald Bakowsky
Creative Art+Design
advertising, sales promotion & packaging design studio
Toronto, Canada

Studio Manager custom system is a hit

Thanks! in the nick of time. I have been using the system a lot since we received the last version from you, and am enjoying it immensely.
Tony Wessling
Wessling Creative Group
San Francisco, CA

Upgrade Deal Too Good

We have not purchased the latest Filemaker, yet, but we thought your upgrade deal was too good to pass up.
Chris Thomas
Ten8 Group
St. Louis, MO

Australia: Studio Manager pretty much has it all

I can’t say enough good things about Studio Manager. You get a lot for your money with this. Especially when you consider what you get with the other applications in this category. It does so much and after a few little tweaks to get it working to the style I wanted it to work in, I’m stoked.

Studio Manager pretty much has everything the others have and everything they don’t have too. Once I bought it I kept finding more amd more great features. It’s easy to learn and fairly intuitive once you have used it for a couple of days. The developers are really helpful too.

Over the years that Janet has been working with her clients and responding to their needs like she has responded to mine, her and her team have made an excellent product. I recommend this program for anyone who wants to keep their studio organised and running efficiently.
Marc Norris
Chorus Design
Surry Hills, Australia

England: Studio Manager improves operations

…what a huge difference Studio Manager has made to the running of the studio here: we’re much better organized and at last can keep on top of all the jobs that come in.
Simon Rees
rumba graphic design ltd
Bristol, England, UK

England: Compliments on the Studio Manager 7.5 upgrade

The new version of Studio Manager is fantastic. It pays for itself in no time in extra productivity and reduced admin costs. The best Filemaker product I’ve seen, and easy to set up and use. (December 2005)
Michael Johnson
Fusion Design
Cheltenham, England, UK

From a Filemaker Consultant: My Customer is Delighted

I wanted to let you know that my customer is delighted with Studio Manager… And so am I! It does 90% of what I need right out of the box, the design is the easiest to follow and customize of any similar FileMaker product I have seen. Once I am done with the customization for this customer, I’ll be promoting it to many others. Thanks for your great work and support.
John Winson, Principal
Frontline Group
Beverly, MA
Apple Consultants Network

Rave Version Tracker Review

As hectic as things get in a small agency (over 50 projects going on at a time), Studio Manager allows us to work with ease. Within a week, we are up and running – tracking each detail (i.e. tasks, due dates, deadlines, conversations) for every job – creating estimates, invoices and statements effortlessly, and maintaining and managing our workflow. Timesheets can be linked right to the invoices which saves an incredible amount of time. We were able to rearrange layout of invoices and estimates, change color and fonts to get truly customized look. Estimates and invoices are printed right into pdfs and emailed straight to customers. Studio Manager keeps track of A/P and A/R and integrates all customer information at a glance with handy tabs which toggle info. No more work falling through the cracks for us! – thanks to Studio Manager.
Irene Powers, President
Creative Powers, Inc.
Glenview, IL

I LOVE IT!

I’ve been using Studio Manager for almost a year now and I LOVE IT! I realized an immediate improvement in cash flow due to faster and more accurate estimates/timesheets/invoices, and I don’t lose evenings and a big chunk of my weekend trying to do what I can do in a few minutes everyday with Studio Manager. It has paid for itself many times over. Your place in heaven is assured!

Dana Ingham
danaingham.com
Pennsylvania, PA

Canada: It’s amazing…

It’s been great! It’s amazing how much quicker we’re able to respond to simple things like creating estimates, etc.

Felicia Lo
PlanetFish Design
Vancouver, BC

New Zealand: firm owner tells how Studio Manager has transformed his business

My wife and I started Hart Design five years ago, and as you can imagine we did everything between us, answer the phones, get quotes and letters off, see clients, write up job bags, keep our database up to date, direct photo shoots, visit film houses, talk to printers and produce creative projects on the Mac!

Well as you can imagine this was all very demanding as all I wanted to do was produce great artwork. I embrace new software and spend lots of my spare time looking for software that I think can help me in my business. I stumbled on Studio Manager on the FileMaker Pro site about eighteen months ago now. Immediately I knew this was something worth looking into, I had them send out a demo version, read through the PDF’s and ordered it that day.

Hart Design now has a team of five, and Studio Manager is the hub of our business. All our quotes are created with ease as all our services are entered into the system along with our charge out rates. What once used to be a typing frenzy is now a click of a few keys. All our quotes are sent from our Mac so there is no printing them out first. We run a paperless office.

All our designers have their own log on numbers and so produce timesheets that are current to the job they are working on at the time. I can see at a glance how many hours has been spent on any project in the studio and by whom. The designers don’t have to spend time writing on job bag covers etc.

As the production manager I can write in the tasks for each designer for the day, they can visit their task area, see what they have on and get straight into it. This stops a lot of those unnecessary meetings. In turn, as the jobs are completed, each designer types “Finished” in the tasks column and I can see at a glance what is ready to be charged.

The feedback is so important too, are we over what we quoted? etc, I can easily go back to similar jobs and see what we quoted before, then go into that job to see how it was tackled last time. Who did the job, how long it took, which suppliers we used and how much they charged, the list goes on.

Down here in New Zealand you have to get on or sink, it is a very small market, Auckland only has a million people so how efficiently you work plays a very big roll in staying in business. Since I installed Studio Manger our lives have changed and I’m not exaggerating. I have more time now to spend with my clients, working on solutions rather than running around like a headless chicken from one crisis to another.

Everything is measured, every minute of every day is accounted for and costed for, I can go off and do other things, come back and know exactly what’s happening in the studio without interrupting a single person.

As far as implementation and support, we do it all, that’s the kiwi way!!!
Mark Hart, Creative Director
Hart Design Ltd
New Zealand

Why UK design firm likes Studio Manager best

I spent two weeks looking at every database I could find, some were design oriented and some were not. The big problem with most was they were made for America and were not customizable. Some were outrageously expensive. Some were way too complicated. Some were too simple and without enough detail. Some had ugly windows that were impossible to read. Some were too hard to enter data. Some were not user friendly in finding data. For me yours was the best of all the software I looked at.
Gary Kurtz, Kemistry
London, UK

Studio Manager works as well for tiny startups as it does for established studios.

We are a 2 person design firm. We just started using the latest version of Studio Manager and we are very pleased with it. We are still learning the new features that Janet has added. Our implementation period was about 4 days. My partner and I did all the implementation. Had we needed any help I would have asked Janet to help.

I have worked with a customized version of a previous Studio Manager version at my old place of employment, a 12 person design/advertising firm. The customized version of Studio Manager was a life saver at keeping track of job costs, client and vendor correspondence, and of time put into projects.

I did a lot of research at Xeno, my old place of employment, looking for software that would allow us to manage our projects and communication database. I found that although several claimed to do the things that Studio Manager does, their interface was not user friendly and intuitive as SM. We needed to implement a system that everyone in the office would use without any hassle. It worked so well that when my partner and I set up our own design firm, I called Janet to purchase Studio Manager for us.

I would not hesitate in recommending Studio Manager.
Mirna Rivera
Thirteen Squared Studio
San Francisco, CA

Canada: Studio Manager beats Control Freak hands down

Thank you a million times! If I don’t order within 30 days, bill the pants off me! Because it will mean I’m not on plan for implementation, and I deserve it! You were up against a product called “Control Freak” which you’ve probably heard of, but YOU WIN hands down, both from an “inner workings” perspective and “GUI elegance” perspective.
Don Gilroy, VP – Creative Director
Breezeway Communications, Inc
Toronto, ON

Photography Studio that customized Studio Manager

Let me say that Studio Manager is an impressive piece of work. That project gave me a chance to see how good database development should look. It was a very intense FileMaker workshop, and it gave me ideas that I might never have thought of otherwise.

We are a photography studio, not a design agency, so we have added lots of customized features to your solution, and more are in the works. If we were not already experienced with FileMaker development, Studio Manager might not have worked out for us. It is from that perspective that I wrote my review [see below]. The manual is well written though, and solution is robust, and bug free (as far as I could tell). It should be a great product for its intended audience without modifications.

His Review posted on Version Tracker:

Studio Manager is a testament to the flexibility of FileMaker Pro. It is also a remarkable example of good database/user interface design. We looked at other systems for our studio, some costing over $40K. Most needed dedicated hardware, an NT server, or some other proprietary setup. Studio Manager allowed us to use our existing FileMaker Server, with no added hardware investment. It would have worked for us right “out of the box” but we were able to use our FileMaker experience to make extensive modifications. There will never be a need for a support contract, because it’s easy to make changes ourselves. The background scripts were elegantly written and easy to understand and customize. After a relatively small investment in cash and time, it has become an integral part of our studio workflow.
Jon Oplinger
Howell, Ltd

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