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Pretty interesting reading that, Clive. It inspires me to tell a story, mainly to illustrate what was probably a missed opportunity.
I got my first pc in 1986, and it (mysteriously) came with a copy of a financial program called Pegasus. With the pc costing two small cars, I didn't have another car's worth to buy a financial software program.
Pegasus was a menu driven system, and certainly did the basics just fine. It had a general ledger, debtors ledger and creditors ledger, all of which integrated beautifully, plus could produce a perfectly accurate income statement and balance sheet as long as you numbered all the accounts correctly.
But it was incredibly basic and I got frustrated at its limitations, with two in particular -
So I wrote my own accounting package from scratch in Foxbase+, based on what I had learned from Pegasus. Took me 6 months and I deployed it at financial year end 1988. From there I added a whole lot of functionality that I saw was missing in Pegasus. Things like:
It gave my business a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and that's all I saw in it.
It was only in 1994 that my accountant at the time remarked to me that my program was the best small business accounting package for service industry businesses he'd seen and I should consider selling it as a product in it's own right.
I was busy building a pest control business, and was starting to consider franchising.
I wasn't an accountant or a programmer, and had no intention of becoming one either.
Windows was coming down the pipe, and when I looked at Foxbase for Windows, I realised I was going to lose a whole lot of time I could ill afford just getting on top of the GUI issues Windows was going to pose, let alone dealing with the actual rewrite that a Windows world was going to force on me one day like it or not.
I just went "stuff it - focus on your existing plan."
With the benefit of hindsight, quite possibly one of my dumbest decisions.
It got sold and deployed in a few other businesses, one of which at least kept running with it until Windows XP finally killed it, apparently. Personally, I kept using it until I came across QuickBooks in 1999 - and was absolutely smitten with its elegant solutions to age old problems with accounting software in general, particularly the dependence on account numbering and financial periods. Switched to QuickBooks at end of financial year 2000 and never looked back.
I got my first pc in 1986, and it (mysteriously) came with a copy of a financial program called Pegasus. With the pc costing two small cars, I didn't have another car's worth to buy a financial software program.
Pegasus was a menu driven system, and certainly did the basics just fine. It had a general ledger, debtors ledger and creditors ledger, all of which integrated beautifully, plus could produce a perfectly accurate income statement and balance sheet as long as you numbered all the accounts correctly.
But it was incredibly basic and I got frustrated at its limitations, with two in particular -
- You could only work with balance carried forward debtor statements - no "open transaction" statements where you could allocate a payment received to particular invoices, and
- The only information on the statement line item was the date, invoice number and amount - I wanted to introduce a comment field for each invoice which would come up on the statement line item as well.
So I wrote my own accounting package from scratch in Foxbase+, based on what I had learned from Pegasus. Took me 6 months and I deployed it at financial year end 1988. From there I added a whole lot of functionality that I saw was missing in Pegasus. Things like:
- A sales rep tracking and reporting system
- Line item selectable inclusive, exclusive or exempt GST calculations
- Writing forms in process of capture to an array rather than directly to the database
- Data integrity verification on startup together with a rollback system if the data had been corrupted (pc's were so vulnerable to blips in the power supply back then, weren't they
) - Period data archiving for all the data that was normally flushed with a period end
It gave my business a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and that's all I saw in it.
It was only in 1994 that my accountant at the time remarked to me that my program was the best small business accounting package for service industry businesses he'd seen and I should consider selling it as a product in it's own right.
I was busy building a pest control business, and was starting to consider franchising.
I wasn't an accountant or a programmer, and had no intention of becoming one either.
Windows was coming down the pipe, and when I looked at Foxbase for Windows, I realised I was going to lose a whole lot of time I could ill afford just getting on top of the GUI issues Windows was going to pose, let alone dealing with the actual rewrite that a Windows world was going to force on me one day like it or not.
I just went "stuff it - focus on your existing plan."
With the benefit of hindsight, quite possibly one of my dumbest decisions.
It got sold and deployed in a few other businesses, one of which at least kept running with it until Windows XP finally killed it, apparently. Personally, I kept using it until I came across QuickBooks in 1999 - and was absolutely smitten with its elegant solutions to age old problems with accounting software in general, particularly the dependence on account numbering and financial periods. Switched to QuickBooks at end of financial year 2000 and never looked back.
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