The third major phase of software development on paperight.com:

• adding support for VAT (now that Paperight is VAT registered),
• A5 document downloads and PDF generation,
• high-res cover downloads (for outlets who want to produce high-end products and their own marketing materials), and
• improved product workflow and management features.

General report-back

This project went smoothly although there were delays on our side and Realm’s, mainly in the testing stages, where we had to test some complex VAT-support issues around invoices and statements and couldn’t allocate proper time to this. However, the delays did not have a noticeable impact on our business.

Objectives achieved

 

Objective	Aim	Outcome
A5 printing	Books that are easier to read, leads to greater customer and PR enthusiasm for the end product	Done. This has been just as important as we hoped, greatly simplying outlet’s lives. Lots of positive feedback in discussions with users.
High-res cover downloads	Lets high-end outlets create attractive front covers and promotional material	We’ve seen some take up of this, particularly for promo material (e.g. Juta used these covers for a store poster), not so much for covers (outlets actually find it too much hassle to print a separate jpg as the cover; so we’re addressing this in a future dev project).
VAT support	Provide automated VAT-compliant invoices and statements between us, publishers, and outlets.	Done. This is a major statutory requirement. No user feedback yet.
Improved PDF generation	Speed up the content team’s ability to get documents online, and reduce the file sizes of downloads	Done. The new PDF generation workflow is a huge improvement, drastically cutting doc creation time, and resulting in consistently smaller file sizes than in our old InDesign-based workflow.
Improved document management	Ability to control a book’s visibility on the site Ability to change the 80/20 earnings split between Paperight and rightsholders for specific documents	Done.

 

Objectives not achieved

None.

Measures of success

 

Planned	Outcome
First: do the new features function as expected?	Yes.
We expect to see A5 documents outselling A4 documents (with the exception of matric exam packs) by 2 to 1.	This is hard to measure because we have sold no documents that are available in both A5 and A4 simultaneously. That said, A5 is outselling A4 overall, even though there are far fewer A5 books than A4 available. This is in part because we’ve changed many of our bestsellers from A4-two-up to A5, and removed the two-up option completely.
We would like to see a noticeable increase in revenue, and as importantly, an increase in the number of outlets actively promoting the service to their customers.	Our revenue continues to grow on target by over 40% per month on average.
We would love to see traditional booksellers register as outlets, given that we now offer products that ‘look like books’.	All of Juta’s 10 stores and Caxton Books (a major supplier to the schools market) have registered. We can’t attribute this directly to A5, but our pitch to them generally is stronger by being able to offer A5.

 

Budget

Original budget: R139080.00

Actual spend: R139080.00

Returned to pool: R0.00

Item	Budget	Actual	Return to pool	Comments
Functional specification	6840	6840	0
Software build 3.0	84360	84360	0
Theme support, purchase notification emails, registration form improvement, record and timestamp all logins, company account closure improvments	34200	34200	0
Read only PDF’s, listed publishers titles, outlet GPS locations	13680	13680	0
TOTAL	139080	139080	0

 

Outputs and deliverables

Functional specification and working software code on paperight.com.

Learnings

When working on something as complex as multinational VAT support and automated documentation for three-party agency sales (Paperight, publisher, outlet), it’s important that you:

• write everything down very clearly as you go
• keep one master document of current thinking in as concise a form as possible (multiple docs or outdated notes are unhelpful and even misleading)
• work quickly while the discussions and decisions are fresh in the mind.

Exit/Sustainability/Viability

This was a once-off project. Ongoing maintenance and support will be done on an ad hoc basis with Realm. A future project will move all code to an open-source repository, increasing our options for involving other developers for future maintenance.

Conclusion

Great project, despite some delay (as much ours as Realm’s) and testing issues.

Next steps

We have conducted further development projects with Realm Digital, and will continue to build on an excellent working relationship.