New ABACUS Gaining Bookseller Fans

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Bookseller response to the new online ABACUS reporting system continues to grow -- and has been extremely positive.

Recently, booksellers touted the new ABACUS on BookWeb.org's Booksellers General Forum and on the e-mail listserve of the New England Booksellers Association (NEBA).

Willard Williams of the Toadstool Bookshops in New Hampshire posted on BookWeb.org's forum " to urge everyone to fill out the ABACUS survey." He noted that "this financial profile is very quick and easy to do, most of the information can come right off your tax return," adding that "even I could do it!"

Bob Sommer of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, also posted a positive ABACUS review on BookWeb.org. "The new [online] format is so much easier to fill out that I did it in under 30 minutes," he wrote.

On the NEBA listserve, Dale Szczeblowski of The Concord Bookshop in Concord, Massachusetts, noted that "the categories are designed so that you can quickly answer them from your year-end financial statements. All reporting is confidential. If you have any questions about the survey, the ABA is quick to respond to your queries."

With the new ABACUS, booksellers can use a simplified survey form, which is now available on the Web at http://www.bookweb.org/docs/abacusform/. From this page, members can download and print a worksheet that can be filled out offline. Once complete, participants can simply return to the Web site and copy the totals from the worksheet into matching fields in the online form. To make the process easier, there are online help boxes for each question. It's estimated that most stores should be able to complete the survey in less than an hour.

Williams, Sommer, and Szczeblowski all stressed the importance of ABACUS to their businesses. Sommer wrote, "We used ABACUS four years ago when we applied for a bank loan. It was crucial. It also helps us to know if we're spending too much on rent or payroll compared to other booksellers." Williams noted that "the little time you spend on it will be greatly repaid in briefer headaches when you are trying to figure out next year's budgets and can apply sales percentages to your expenses in a manner that's consistent with what other bookstores are doing (especially look at how the profitable ones do it)."

If you are interested in participating in the ABACUS survey, click here. For more information, call ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz at (800) 637-0037, ext. 1205 or send an e-mail to [email protected].