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The HP4550N Color Laser
An HP4550N color laser printer is included with every copy of The GoldBook software as an integral part of the package.
The GoldBook's output has been tuned to produce exceptionally good looking graphs of high durability, year after year, on this very stable color printing device.
QueryCalc
The GoldBook was created using QueryCalc, the premiere report writing tool on the HPe3000.
More than half of all of the in-house Summit client credit unions now use QueryCalc as their primary report writer, and you're very likely one of them. But if you're not and you would like more information about QueryCalc, please click on the image above.
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Information is Power.
The GoldBook is something entirely new. Designed specifically for the governing board of a credit union, the GoldBook is over 100 pages of monthly management reports. The GoldBook is targeted to a credit union's CEO, its CFO, its board, and its marketing department, filled with information that most management teams would otherwise have to simply guess at. The GoldBook was
created to illustrate the credit union's fiscal health, who its
customers are, and what products and services they're using.
The GoldBook was also designed to be sufficiently attractive so that it can be placed on the CEO's desk and shown with pride to visitors. And it was designed to be inserted month after month into the credit union's corporate library in order to create a living history of the credit union's health, community reach and growth.
The most important questions any business must ask of itself are: Who are our customers and what products and services are they using? What are our most profitable enterprises, and what's not? What market segments are we not yet serving? The GoldBook is designed to answer these questions and more.
The GoldBook is intended to be produced each month, wholly automatically on your HPe3000, in batch, using nothing other than QueryCalc and printed to a network-connected HP4550 color laser printer. The only user intervention necessary is the assembly of the books themselves, and that requires only a few minutes.
The vast majority of the information within The GoldBook is presented in graphical format, simply because that is the form by which most people can readily understand what is occurring within their business. Every attempt was made to insure that the information density of the book was maximized, so that no two pages directly duplicate information. Each page was designed to stand alone and to present information not found elsewhere in the book.
The GoldBook is a "data mining" software product, and it digs deeply. A standard 50,000 member credit union will require six to ten hours of computation on a fast machine to prepare the data for the questions we feel are important to be asked. However it does not require a "data warehouse". It uses your original, live data. Moreover, The GoldBook presents a very light touch to the database and to the machine as a whole and can be run completely in the lowest priority queue, when time is available.
GoldBook Design
The GoldBook is a series of reports programmed to make great use of AICS Research's premier report writer, QueryCalc. About half of the Summit client credit unions now use QueryCalc as their primary report writer, and you may already be one of them.
However, whether you are or are not currently a QueryCalc user isn't important. If you don't currently own QueryCalc, a silent license will be provided at no cost with your GoldBook license. Although you won't be able to write your own reports with this silent license, it will allow the GoldBook reports to run automatically, in background, whenever you schedule them.
We're very concerned about producing the very highest quality reports, month after month, year after year, with the greatest possible accuracy. But we're also concerned with the end quality of the final product. To insure that quality, we have included within the price of The GoldBook a free HP4550 Color Laser printer that is to be devoted primarily to the production of the GoldBooks.
Further, we would like to go so far as to even recommend the paper and the binders to be used. The paper is Hammermill Laser Print Long Grain 8 ½ x 11-12M-S24/60 3-Hole Punched paper. The binders are Avery 1" Framed View Binders in Navy Blue, although a variety of colors are available. Both of these products are commonly available throughout the United States at stores such as Office Max, or online through agencies such as Quill and Viking.
The Price
The price of The GoldBook is $25,000, with that price including an HP4550 color laser. The annual maintenance fee, after the first year, is 16%. A non-refundable down payment of $3000 is required at the time of your order to cover the shipment of the color laser.
The GoldBook is not only priced much less than a one-time visit from a major consulting accounting firm, this price is a one-time cost. The GoldBook will continue to produce its reports monthly, for as many years as you care to have them created.
Customization
The GoldBook is a drop-on product. Almost no customization is necessary, nor even desired. The GoldBook is intended to become a gold standard for Summit credit unions, a set of reports that are identical at every consuming organization, allowing them to be immediately compared, one credit union to the next.
Some very minor configurations are necessary when The GoldBook is first installed, such as you providing the names of your branches and the like, but that's essentially all that needs to be done. The only truly unique customization requires you to provide us an image for the cover and chapter heading pages. This image can be anything you would like, perhaps your logo, a picture of your building, your lobby, your city, or your people.
Questions & Answers
The GoldBook will assume its greatest value when everyone who uses it produces the same reports. However, that is not meant to suggest that the reports that are contained in the current GoldBook are the only reports that will be produced.
We inherently expect that you and your co-using organizations will provide excellent suggestions as to what other forms of reports should be included in future releases of The GoldBook. In that regard, user suggestions will be submitted on a regular basis to the entire group of users for comments and votes as to which reports should be included in subsequent editions of The GoldBook.
As with all new products, the greatest rate of change will occur in the first year or two, but we never expect The GoldBook to become completely stable. However, because of the community nature of the product, we don't want to modify the product willy-nilly. Rather, we believe that it is important to proceed forward in a well-agreed upon manner.
In the GoldBook's beta trials, a credit union's board spent three days in retreat meticulously going over the information in the GoldBook's graphs, analyzing what each of the pages meant to their operation. If the GoldBook doesn't change the way you conduct your business, then it has failed in its primary task.
Many of the changes will be internal to your credit union, but a portion of those actions will almost certainly be targeted mailings. If you're already a QueryCalc user, we will be pleased to show you how to isolate the members of interest and write each of them a highly personalized, very good-looking letter, or perhaps just generate mailing labels. In either case, we're pleased to help.
But even if you're not a QueryCalc user, we're pleased to offer suggestions as to how you can find and extract the member information that you need to provide some other tool the necessary information to produce similar mailing material.
In fact, it's quite easy. QueryCalc produces its output in PostScript, the graphical description language nearly universally used by all graphics printers, including every magazine that you read.
These PostScript output files can be converted into Portable Document Files (PDF) that are suitable for the web or for e-mailing. QueryCalc inherently produces PDF files that are very small and very efficient, and thus download quite quickly.
I've put up a complete month's GoldBook here, presented in its natural four chapters. If your credit union also employs Branch Accounting, a fifth chapter would be produced for each of the branches.
The PDF files must be "distilled" from QueryCalc's PostScript output. That can't be done on your HPe3000 directly. Rather, the files have to be transferred to a PC and distilled there. The process is quite simple to set up and we're pleased to show you how to do it.
You have almost all of the pieces of the network in place now and we're pleased to show you how to set up your first HPe3000 networked printer in just a few minutes.
The coaxial cable that runs from the back of your HPe3000 to your DTCs is a local area network. To connect the color laser to this network, all that you need purchase is a small device called a hub, which will generally be priced at $70-90. Once you've installed that, talking to the printer is only a matter of a few configuration settings on your HPe3000.
If you are an on-line client, you will telnet into our server and print your GoldBook copy(ies) to your HP4550N color laser at your facility. All of this goes very quickly and with an almost indistinguishable ease from those organizations that have their own HPe3000's in-house.
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Is the GoldBook likely to evolve over time?
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