BOOKS™ Manual

BOOKS allows many configurations, depending on your office's situation.  The needs of a one-person office will differ greatly from that for a multi-user office with numerous financial advisors, sales assitants and order clerks.

Before you start installing BOOKS, the firm Compliance officer, Branch Manager, or Operations Manager should think about how you want your office to operate.  Do you want to use an order clerk who is alerted whenever a Financial Advisor writes and order? (That requires a network and special replication arrangements.)  Or, do you want each FA to enter his or her own orders to the floor or trading desk.? (This is the most common arrangement.) After you have done that, then choose the right configuration for you.

Put one copy of BOOKS on a server or master computer, with each FA starting his own session over an office network.  Each advisor calls in or enters his own orders. Because of its simplicity of installation, this is a solution often used for offices with up to five Financial Advisors with a moderate number of orders. If you have more advisors or if you have many orders, use option 2. You may start out with this arrangement and later move to option 2 if BOOKS starts to run slowly.  Click here for instructions for loading on a master computer
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Put a copy of BOOKS for each FA on his or her own computer, then pick up the each FA's records automatically using the replication engine built into BOOKS.  This is the preferred solution when you have an order entry clerk transmit orders to your trading facility, or when you have many Financial Advisors who write a large number of orders. Click here for instructions
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If you do not have a network or if you have FAs in remote locations, you can have a Master File in your office and then use BOOKS' built-in Import and Export capability to bring the other FA's records into your master file. This method requires human intervention to run the Export and Import procedures. Click here for instructions on Import and Export. For larger offices, Advisorsoft strongly recommends a network.

4.  If you are a home office of a small brokerage or investment advisory firm, and have many advisors in multiple offices with different  branch numbers, use this alternative:
Use the standard installation feature for a single copy to install multiple copies of BOOKS in a different directory for each branch on your computer.  A common directory structure is to have a BOOKS directory and then the separate directories as subdirectories of BOOKS. Install one such copy for each separate multi-advisor branch.  Import the associated home office data for each such branch into its own copy of BOOKS^™. You can now generate separate reports for separate branches.  In addition, BOOKS^TM will perform faster than it would if you combined all offices into a single Master File.