Early in June we rolled out the last part of the agency addition. This removed the distributor connection to publisher and required resetting it to agency.
The month has been pretty much devoted to perfecting and improving this. Thank you for bearing with us while we went through this.
The benefit is that you can now get supplier (agency) reports and it will make distributor management easier.
What is an agency? An agency is the organisation that has distribution rights for a publisher/imprint in a region. The system assumes that an agency will use one distributor who will stock and deliver the titles.
Normally agencies do have a single distributor but there are exceptions to this. In some cases there is a 'sales agency' but the titles are stocked and delivered by someone else.
In the sales agency situation our advice is to split the agency as required. For example Bookreps in NZ represent New Holland who are distributed by PDL and Hardy Grant who are distributed by United. In this case you would make two agencies, a RRUnited and a BRPDL so that you can connect them to the correct distributors but still retain the information about who the agency is.
In the future we could look at adding an exception system that would enable you to link agency and publisher to a different distributor. This is something that we can discuss at the next Circle user meeting in Auckland in August.
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