Good A & D Bound Book Software??

[tenpercentfirearms]

e-mail me. ad@tenpercentfirearms.com

[kpmp4ever93]

A&D book software

I would love to see this Excel Spreed sheet you did up! I am new to the FFL business and have tried some software and its POS stuff so far. Excel appears to be the way to go. If you can shoot me over a copy or where to e mail I would appreciate it!

[tenpercentfirearms]

ad@tenpercentfirearms.com and I will send you a clean copy.

[docplez]

Firearms Record Pro

I own a small gun shop in Nevada and received Firearms Record Pro v2.0 from Brownells two days ago to try and get away from pen and ink A&D. Paid full price of $105.20 (with shipping) it's now on sale for $69.99 but not worth a dime in my opinion. Have had nothing but problems and errors trying to install on computers with XP, Vista and Windows 7. Finally managed to install on Vista machine but it still doesn't work right ... if you open and close the program and attempt to reopen it won't recognize user name / password. I don't see any reason to even enter data I may never get back. Support team at software manufacturer says it's all of my computers faults not their software. They never once said "try this or try that" ... just that all my computers are having problems. Haven't heard anything back from Brownells but they also said "neither we nor Brownells refunds for software due to piracy issues." Why would anyone pirate software that doesn't work? If they don't refund I'll just quit buying from Brownells and make sure everyone gun shop owner I deal with knows not to buy this software. Wish I'd have read this forum before ....

So is anyone using anything that actually works? I used to just use my own Excel but latest ATF Rul. 2008-2 has made that obsolete in a number of ways.

[Serpentine]

I own a small gun shop in Nevada and received Firearms Record Pro v2.0 from Brownells two days ago to try and get away from pen and ink A&D. Paid full price of $105.20 (with shipping) it's now on sale for $69.99 but not worth a dime in my opinion. Have had nothing but problems and errors trying to install on computers with XP, Vista and Windows 7. Finally managed to install on Vista machine but it still doesn't work right ... if you open and close the program and attempt to reopen it won't recognize user name / password. I don't see any reason to even enter data I may never get back. Support team at software manufacturer says it's all of my computers faults not their software. They never once said "try this or try that" ... just that all my computers are having problems. Haven't heard anything back from Brownells but they also said "neither we nor Brownells refunds for software due to piracy issues." Why would anyone pirate software that doesn't work? If they don't refund I'll just quit buying from Brownells and make sure everyone gun shop owner I deal with knows not to buy this software. Wish I'd have read this forum before ....

So is anyone using anything that actually works? I used to just use my own Excel but latest ATF Rul. 2008-2 has made that obsolete in a number of ways.

We are still using the pen and ink method, but it would be great to have a software program to save time and to assure best accuracy.

What do you think about contacting some of the larger distributors and asking what inventory software system they are using? Perhaps some have written their own code, but possibly they are using third party software that would work for dealers as well?

We should continue to work on this collectively as a 'committee' effort to reach a good, solid, supported solution, even if it may cost a few dollars more than going with a piece-meal or start-up software package.

I'll make a few calls to some distributors this week when I have some time.



.

[Serpentine]

I left inquiry messages with with our major distributor reps. Will follow up here on any information I receive.

Also, this company RK Enterprises (http://www.rkffl.com/) has been a godsend for helping FFL's understand the laws and be in compliance with ATF and DOJ. I will speak to Bob tomorrow and see what his input is on this.


.

[docplez]

Thanks ... I've seen a few after searching on the net but no one seems to have a review. Also most all are fairly pricey but given the cost of developing and writing code and security concerns, keeping up with the changes in operating systems (MS Vista, MS XP, MS 7, MAC, Linux, etc), and given the fact they won't sell millions of copies I can understand.

One issue I have noticed after my problems with Firearms Records Pro is now Excel doesn't work and I get ODBC errors (Open Data Base Connectivity). Doesn't make sense as they use SQL 2005 but who knows what that software did to my computers. Oh well ... back to pen and ink for now I guess.

[djbooya]

I own a small gun shop in Nevada and received Firearms Record Pro v2.0 from Brownells two days ago to try and get away from pen and ink A&D. Paid full price of $105.20 (with shipping) it's now on sale for $69.99 but not worth a dime in my opinion. Have had nothing but problems and errors trying to install on computers with XP, Vista and Windows 7. Finally managed to install on Vista machine but it still doesn't work right ... if you open and close the program and attempt to reopen it won't recognize user name / password. I don't see any reason to even enter data I may never get back. Support team at software manufacturer says it's all of my computers faults not their software. They never once said "try this or try that" ... just that all my computers are having problems. Haven't heard anything back from Brownells but they also said "neither we nor Brownells refunds for software due to piracy issues." Why would anyone pirate software that doesn't work? If they don't refund I'll just quit buying from Brownells and make sure everyone gun shop owner I deal with knows not to buy this software. Wish I'd have read this forum before ....

So is anyone using anything that actually works? I used to just use my own Excel but latest ATF Rul. 2008-2 has made that obsolete in a number of ways.

How was using a spreadsheet made obsolete by Ruling 2008-2?

[TripleT]

I've been using Wes's excel spreadsheet for at least six months after talking to my ATF contact who thought it looked great...

Not sure why somebody would think they couldn't use excel.

Heck, I have modified versions for a repair log, personal inventory as well as a high cap mag log.

I love excel...

[dirtyJ]

My question about just using an excel type log is if all the special things the ATF used to require for electronic logs still apply. Are we required to print it out daily, or is that just good practice etc?

[tenpercentfirearms]

If you are going to solely use software, you no longer must apply for a variance, however, your software must comply with this document.

http://www.atf.gov/regulations-rulings/rulings/atf-rulings/atf-ruling-2008-2.pdf

So Excel does not meet the ATF approval because there is no audit trail and it clearly fails #1.

So we only use Excel to print out our AD pages as we go. So officially, I am still on paper, but it is printed paper. It makes the records look nice and clean. I can also use my Excel file as back up should my paper copies get destroyed. More importantly I can use it to search my records and find guns by serial number immediately and know what page they are on in the bound book.

If you are still writing everything out by hand to start, stop! Go to Excel. Now when we sign guns out, we do it by hand and we also go back and manually type them in as well. This actually isn't so bad for three reasons. First, if you sit in front of the computer as you are signing guns out of the book, you can easily find what page they are on by searching for the serial number. No more flipping through pages looking for a gun. This actually is worth its weight in gold. Second, by then inputting the information in manually, you can also instantly know without having to look at the book who purchased a firearm. And finally, if you need to go back and reprint out some sheets for some reason, the data is there and ready to go.

I have been audited using this system and as TripleT stated he has also been audited using this system. Both sets of auditors (they were different) seemed rather happy with the set up. My auditors liked it because I just copy the main tab at the bottom during our audit. In effect I now have a brand new copy of the book to sort it how I please. So I sort it by deposition date, then by manufacturer and serial number and print out the pages with no deposition. I hand that to the auditor and as the other auditor reads out manufacturer and serial numbers, she checks them off. Makes an audit go through real quick. The easier you can make it on your auditors, the better in my opinion.

When the audit is all through, I just delete that new tab at the bottom I made and I am good to go. Just remember if you find mistakes as they go, you will need to fix them on the original tab that is still there, not the audit copy.

More importantly, we got nailed for having a bunch of missing guns. Well actually, 47 missing guns. However, they weren't missing, we just were failing to double check the deposition process. Using my POS software during the audit, I was finding these errors in less than a minute and get the bound book updated. Still the auditors still ding us for each one, so that is no good. In the end it is just a failure to log out, still a frowned upon situation.

So now we are going to to trimester audits in house. We use the same process the ATF uses. And we can do an audit in a day using the Excel print outs. We had to audit about 500-600 guns on our last audit. I also have a new tab at the bottom that tracks my audits too.

Best of all it was free and I am sending out free copies from ad@tenpercentfirearms.com.

[Capt. Speirs]

Slightly off topic; what do you use for a transaction serial number? My ATF agent said to use the month and year with a sequential number to make it easier to find specific guns. For Feb this year it would be; 0210xxx, xxx = sequential number 001, 002, 003, etc.

[tenpercentfirearms]

Slightly off topic; what do you use for a transaction serial number? My ATF agent said to use the month and year with a sequential number to make it easier to find specific guns. For Feb this year it would be; 0210xxx, xxx = sequential number 001, 002, 003, etc.

My problem with that system is it is too easy to end up duplicating numbers. So we now use our point of sale receipt number. What is nice about that is it makes referencing back and forth from the A&D to the POS really easy and since it keeps assigning numbers as I sell them, no duplicates.

Now your ATF agent might not like the idea that your number system has gaps. For example, if I sell you a gun on 14567, some ammo on 14568, and then another gun on 14569, then I have a one number gap. Nothing in the regs says that you have to use control numbers, nothing says they can't have gaps in your number system, and more importantly, you can organize them in three different ways: alphabetical, chronological, or by control number. When the area rep kind of didn't like my gap sequence, I simply told her I wasn't organizing them by control number, but by chronological order. She accepted that and we moved on.

[kemasa]

If you are going to use the year and month, I would suggest having the year first so that the numbers always get larger, rather than being all over the place. It also helps if you sort by that field since otherwise all the same month will sort together for each different year.

[ugimports]

Slightly off topic; what do you use for a transaction serial number? My ATF agent said to use the month and year with a sequential number to make it easier to find specific guns. For Feb this year it would be; 0210xxx, xxx = sequential number 001, 002, 003, etc.

I use:
YYYYMMDD-HHmm

right now would be:
20100223-1615

long, yes, but i use a computer to generate it. And I'll never have duplicates because if I have 2 people doing paperwork at the same time I just shift one by a minute.

Conceivably you could have duplicates, but that's not a scenario a 1 man shop will run into.