Welcome to Masterpiece Manager V11 Help System

Welcome to the Masterpiece Manager V11 Help System. It is designed to help you quickly learn how to use the Masterpiece Manager V11 cloud based inventory management system for Art Galleries, Antique Shops and Artists. Along the way, you will learn the basic steps for creating a management environment we believe you will use "All Day - Every Day." You will also discover some of our favorite tips so you can be more productive with this management tool.

These quick and easy lessons take you step-by-step through the process of setting up your system. In just an hour or so, you will be ready to begin using Masterpiece FOR REAL.

This help system is meant to mimic the actual look and feel of the software. Once you click on the appropriate module, you will be taken to some text to learn how to configure the system and add information. This includes setting up your Company, Staff, Taxes, Categories, Mediums, Stock Locations, Contacts (artists/vendors/customers), adding Inventory, and making transactions such as regular sales, returns, quotes, approvals and leases.

If there is a corresponding video to the help section, that may also be included, typically found at the bottom. However, you can also see our video channel here.

NOTE: This help system is constantly being updated to reflect any new changes or updates within Masterpiece Manager version 11.

ARTIST VERSION: Many functions such as QuickBooks integration, email marketing, interests tab and reporting are not included in the Artist version of the software. As such, images of menus and screens shown in this help system may not exactly reflect what you see on your screen if have purchased the artist version.

Masterpiece Manager V11

Design Background

The Masterpiece Manager system has gone through several iterations and is currently on Version 11. It was originally produced to manage a photographic art gallery in Breckenridge Colorado, starting in 1994. Items sold at the gallery included many different combinations such as Unframed Photographs, Framed and Matted Photographs, Books, and Postcards. The pieces on display could be totally owned by the gallery or totally on consignment. These were easy to manage. The bookkeeping became difficult when a consignment piece (which was still owned by the artist) had the gallery's mats or frame on it. We looked for software to handle these headaches, but there just wasn't anything we liked available. The one or two art systems out there were hard to use, and seemed to be based more on collections than a retail operation.

This system will easily track who owns what. It will then produce a variety of reports which will keep bookkeeping to a minimum. Once a piece is entered in the system, the gallery manager will not have to worry about that piece again unless it changes for some reason (i.e. a frame is added or mats are changed). The system will compute the consignments due for each vendor based on sales for the period. It will issue management reports showing the total costs and net profit for the period. (These can be protected so that only authorized users may access this information).

The system was written using Lamp stack. The data is YOURS. We do not hide it in any way. We made a decision to move V11 to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. This makes Version11 the first and only truly Cloud-based solution in the world for the art business!

Rather than to continue with a traditional web hosting convention - one in which Masterpiece would buy, host and maintain the servers to support Version 11 - we decided, we would do it right! This meant moving the entire application to the largest and most robust Cloud infrastructure on the planet - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/. This was a gigantic endeavor that cost us an additional several months in development. But it was the right move.

Version 11 is a revolutionary approach to solving art business issues. It is important that we support this with the very best technology for now and the future. Many of the leading companies in the world have chosen the Amazon Cloud: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/. Some of these you will recognize like Ericsson, ETSY, Newsweek and the Washington Post. Others you won't. What they all share is a vision for where the future of technology is going. Cloud Computing is the obvious answer.

The great advantage that EC2 provides us is an infinitely scalable and redundant computing environment that is not dependent upon any physical resource or networking device. If any piece of equipment ever fails, the Cloud immediately shifts resources to new equipment and the system continues humming! There are no single points of failure. Even if an entire region is hit by a disaster, EC2 will automatically move Version 11 to a new location for hosting. As a result, EC2 guarantees that Version 11 will be available 99.95% of the time. This means that the total downtime in a given year will be less than 8 hours!! Regardless of how large Masterpiece becomes, we could never buy enough resources to support this type of guarantee. While we do frequent backups of the system, you can still MAKE DAILY BACKUPS by exporting your data to spreadsheets that you can open with Excel.

The system is also fully scalable. By using a MySQL database, which is a type of database technology that is the most widely used in today's computing environment. Here, the data is stored in a very structured format that provides high levels of functionality. MySQL databases are generally more robust, secure and have better performance than other older database technologies., large gallery operators can connect multiple computers in multiple locations - in REAL time.

The system has come a very long way since 1994. With all of the different versions, literally hundreds of new features have been added over the years. But we have also been careful to keep each part of the system as easy to use as possible.

License and Warranty

There is unlimited user access to your profile, unlimited user accounts and unlimited computers that can be used. Before purchasing the subscription to Masterpiece Manager, you would have been required to review and sign the license agreement that you agreed to as part of the setup process.

You may also obtain a copy of the License by contacting us at:

Masterpiece Solutions
PO Box 642
Parker, CO 80134

System Requirements

PC or Mac based browser

Minimum

Because Masterpiece Manager V11 is cloud-based, it can be administered from any web browser on a PC or a Mac.

You must have a constant internet connection to use the Masterpiece Solutions cloud based software.

Getting Started

The best way to work with the Masterpiece Help is to simply click on the category and then sub categories in the menu to the left. We encourage using the help full screen and flipping between Masterpiece and Help so you can learn to navigate the Help and learn how to find what you are looking for as we update the Help periodically. This is a good reason to use caution on printing the help as we update it periodically.