Quickbooks vs Pastel Accounting

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

I take my hat off to any Pastel support person!

When I made that comment I had tongue in cheek somewhat. Because to support the product, you really do need skills

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

If anybody is interested in the history of Pastel, and how it came to be (not even the current owners know...) I will post the background

[Dave A]

Go for it, Clive.

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

The history of Pastel is very much wrapped up in the history off accountiing software and the history of South Africa. Not much of this is documented and most of it I have to dredge up from failing memory, with the result that I can’t pinpoint years all that accurately.

To really grasp how these different packages came about, you really have to adopt the modern view of so-called Channels.

THE ADVENT OF DESKTOP COMPUTERS
At the time when IBM finally gave desktop computers business respectability, all financial and accounting software ran on mainframes. Cobol programming dominated the accounting environment and it was dramatically out of reach of all but large corporations and conglomerates.

Smaller businesses all over, and pointedly, their accountants and auditors were left with largely manual written systems. This was not so long ago; up to the early 80’s. For smaller businesses, this was really a problem when it came to being audited. Those days there were not the restrictions and auditor services that there are today; auditors took books beyond trial balance and did absolutely everything else.

This meant they simply had to have the books. Businesses could not do without the books, so auditors had no choice but to arrive en-masse and do the work at clients; getting in the way, endless tea and biscuits, boardroom occupied for weeks on end someone was always unproductive because “the audtors are busy with my journal”.

The time was ripe for computerized accounting systems where the “books” could simply be printed out multiple times and the auditors could simply get on with it.

The scene in South Africa at the time was somewhat bleak. Disinvestment and sanctions were rife and we were always lagging so it was natural that the industry looked towards a local solution.

THE BEDFORD ACCOUNTING / COMPUTER ASSOCIATES CHANNEL
In the mid 80’s there was a product called Bedford Accounting. I have no idea who owned or developed it. This product soon caught the attention of Computer Associates and in the late 80’s they bought it, prettied it up and launched it is Accpac Simply Accounting. This was during MS-DOS days.

It was stable, simple to use and blazingly fast by todays standards, like all MS-DOS applications were.

It was a modular system, initially consisting of GL, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. Each were a stand alone product but that interfaced on an ad-hoc basis; in GL you imported the generated Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable batches.

By now, if you are an old fart like me and remember early Pastel, it should sound familiar.

There were a bunch of competitors “developing” similar products, but Computer Associates had an ace up the sleeve. In the late 80’s they also bought a spreadsheet program that was packaged with Osborne portable computers, called VisiCalc. They jazzed it up and re-launched it as SuperCalc. At the time, it’s main competitor was Lotus123.

But they were smart; they gave SuperCalc direct access to AccPac’s database. Suddenly accountants could do magic. Extracting data from multiple accounting databases meant they could compile presentation financial statements directly from the source, combine multiple companies and basically look like heroes.

I recall in the late 80’s having to compile monthly management information for FNB for a retail group that I worked for. I used this combination of products to produce usefull management information (MIS was a dark art those days). Within days I had a delegation from FNB management at my office requesting that they be allowed to present the report pack as an example to the other clients of what management statements should actually look like!

THE PASTEL CHANNEL
During this time, Pastel released their product. It was modular, like AccPac. It worked, was easy to use, ran in MS-DOS and because it was locally made, somewhat cheaper.

I remember evaluating it and comparing it to Accpac. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing; the similarities were astonishing. Even the account numbers allocated to the default set of accounts were the exact same as Accpac, and they still are today! At the time, sanction busting was the norm and any intellectual property was fair game in SA. Why it amused me so was CA acquired the product from Bedford at an undisclosed price, but it would have been substantial, whereas the Pastel guys acquired it for nothing.

When GST arrived in SA, it was a simple matter for AccPac users. It was already built in and you simply switched it on and set the percentage. Other folk, including the original Pastel users, had a difficult time of it at first.

The Accounting profession loved Pastel. It was relatively cheap and they unwittingly “marketed” it pretty aggressively to their clients. Now all they had to do was install a backup on their system and they had their own copy of client data. Now they could use all manner of sampling and computer assisted audit techniques (CAATS) without leaving their office. Previously we had to write Cobol programs to interrogate data, book computer time at the IT department and almost always had to run them after hours. Now we HAD the actual DATA and could do all manner of things.

There was a rumour in the late 80’s and early 90’s that the term “Partner “ linked to Pastel products was an oblique reference to Audit Partners.

There is more to relate; how other channels really accelerated and how Pastel didn’t. But I’ll bore you.

[Justloadit]

And are you happy with it? Is there anything that you could do on Pastel that you can't do on Quickbooks?

Can not complain, it does what I want. Drs Crs, age analysis, outstanding Drs/Crs, transaction report and VAT.
You can do it with out going on a course, and off course no yearly license fee required

[Dave A]

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 -

• 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.