Fake Brains software continually develops
Software should increase productivity, not frustration. A note from 2018 on what we shipped that year and why we build every line of it ourselves.
The best part of working at Fake Brains is the pride the team takes in AccountScout. It is handcrafted, made in-house, and built with quality and efficiency in mind.
The world keeps changing, so we should too. All of us are trying to find more efficient ways to work, and the software people use every day either enables that or gets in the way. Software should increase productivity, not frustration.
AccountScout is the nerve centre for newspapers and media companies, and we all take pride in the quality of what we ship.
So what was new?
The 2018 release went out to every customer on an active service contract or SaaS plan, at no additional charge. Four things stood out.
The activity manager
Typically used by a manager, or whoever is responsible for productivity, but equally useful to an individual tracking their own work.
It shows all activities by any user in the system. Managers can assign tasks — daily, weekly, monthly, annual — and follow progress. It tracks open and closed activities and shows percentage complete by user, which gives a fast read on how the operation is running and where work is piling up.
As with the rest of AccountScout, the reports and pages behind it are customisable, so the view can match how you actually manage.
Append timestamp
Lets a user add multiple layered notes inside a single activity.
The problem it solves is a familiar one: somebody creates three separate activities to record three things that happened on the same task, because there was nowhere to put the second and third. Now the history of what happened, and when, lives on the activity itself.
The retail manifest report
Shows changes made after deadline — amendments or changes since a selected date, or a specific time of day, for ads placed in any issue, before and after deadline.
If you have ever tried to reconstruct who changed what between the deadline and the press run, this is the report for that argument.
Search by email address
A small change with a large effect: clients can be found by email address, searching both contact and advertiser addresses. Requested by customers, which is where most of this list comes from.
Also in this release: Report 4.3.12, the Classified Deadline Summary. It estimates page counts by classification along with their parent classifications — useful at deadline for high-volume classified output, where seeing the space required helps maximise the page plan and cut waste.
We also added the ability to print Retail Ad Copy in other image formats such as JPG and PNG, where previously printing from within AccountScout was limited to PDF.
On learning it
New features can feel like a lot at once. That is what the support team is for, and there is a video library covering most of it.
Why we do it this way
Our founder and lead developer, Pat Pfeifer, put it plainly at the time:
We are a fun, engaging team always looking for ways to be more efficient. I want AccountScout to reflect that productivity and efficiency. We have given hundreds of upgrades to our customers because we believe in helping them create sustainable success.
That is a fair summary of what it is like here. We work together to find new ways to be productive, and when you are a customer you are part of that — we want to help you build something that lasts.
AccountScout is the nerve centre for newspaper publishers: sales, production, billing, retail, classified, and legal.
Related reading
Newspaper advertising software
The current platform, and how one advertiser record ties sales, production, and billing together.
About Fake Brains
Founder-owned since 1991, built in-house in Colorado, and not part of a roll-up.
For management
Pipeline visibility, operational reporting, and accountability across departments.