At the Batch for Books panel at Winter Institute last month, Batch for Books CEO Fraser Tanner updated the audience on the introduction in the U.S. of the electronic invoicing system that is widely used in the U.K. and 78 other countries. Owned by the Booksellers Association of the U.K. and Ireland, Batch is free for booksellers and, besides handling invoicing, it can be used for payments, stock returns and more. (Publishers and other suppliers pay to be on the platform.) To great applause, Tanner said, "Batch is coming to America." A moment later, to even greater applause, he added, "Batch is in America."
He described the "phased rollout" as "a journey." Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan have signed on, and "more suppliers will follow." (He encouraged booksellers to urge publishers to join Batch.) For now, Batch is adding groups of 20 bookstores at a time and plans to speed that up. "It's a learning process for bookstores and vendors and their systems," he said. Batch is adding a staffer in the U.S. "to look after booksellers and booksellers alone. We want to make sure you have a good experience."
The panel included three U.K. booksellers who use Batch and two U.S. booksellers--Tegan Tigani of Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, Wash., and Ron Tucker of Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.--who are part of the U.S. beta test of Batch. The three British booksellers all lauded Batch and emphasized that they and other U.K. booksellers use it in somewhat different ways. (Tanner stressed the versatility of Batch, saying, "People use Batch how they want it. You use it how it suits you.")
Antonia Squire, owner of the Bookshop, Bridport, England, said that "ultimately, as a payment system there's nothing like Batch." She added that it saves a great amount of time, which is important in her "tiny shop. I spend about five or six hours a month on accounts."
Nic Bottomley, co-owner of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath, England, and president of the Booksellers Association, said his shop pays 90%-95% of all invoices through Batch, with the exception of non-book items, a few tiny local publishers and a foreign language supplier. He noted that all invoices are electronically loaded into the store's system, "effectively creating an online archive for all invoicing."
He praised Batch for its "speed, the fact that it's all in one place and the certainty of payment. It helps how you organize yourself around the financial elements of the business." Using Batch also is important for relationships with suppliers, he added: " 'I pay on Batch' goes far."
David Prescott of Blackwell's, the academic book retailer with 28 shops in the U.K., said that "the vast majority of our top 25 suppliers are on Batch," which is now automatic. He called Batch "absolutely hugely transformational," even though Blackwell's actually makes payments separately. One example: "We can do a returns request for a publisher or distributor [for all 28 stores] and run it in an hour." He noted, too, that Batch has reduced to 10 minutes from two hours the amount of time needed for processing a typical big shipment of titles in September.
The British booksellers said Batch had been relatively easy to learn, with Bottomley calling it "a very clean and intuitive system." Tanner noted that for U.S. booksellers, Batch offers how-to guides and will create videos. --John Mutter