Both the buyer and the seller, in this case, apparently lost the software gamble; they apparently came out on the wrong side of “necessarily.” Clinton Computers did not win, because it isn’t a fly-by-night operation. Boland’s name had come to me from none other than Sue Grothoff, who’d sold him the software. She had enough confidence in herself and her store to offer Boland as the source of a “candid” story, and my respect remains, especially after having talked to another business customer, raving happy about her ability to understand his company’s software needs.
Boland emphasized that Clinton wasn’t out to cheat him. “Sue is a very nice person.” And he liked the software expert there, too. “He knows how to change software, but you have one person trying to meet the needs of too many customers. He’s spread too thin. Clinton never gave him enough time to get the program running at my business. And we never could seem to get together to get the twelve hours of training they’ve promised me. To be frank, I think we spent the twelve hours trying to correct the problem I had rather than on training.”
Giving Clinton Computer’s side, Grothoff said, “Because of changes that Ed wanted in the software, it took longer to adapt the program to meet his needs. And that used up the twelve hours.” Evidently, Boland and Grothoff stayed on good terms, because she later sold him a new Kaypro portable for home use.
But with his big computer system at work, Boland—for one reason or another—seems to have suffered more than his share of woes.
“Accounting Plus,” said Boland of the software he bought there, “is a very good program, but it was designed for one single company to be subdivided into departments. You could have six departments, everything from sales to used parts, and it will work beautifully. But it wouldn’t for what I wanted. It would not treat a motorcycle store, for instance, as a subdivision of a holding company. I could not pull off separate profit and loss statements or separate balance sheets.”
Clinton Computers, to its credit, referred Boland to a consultant familiar with the source code of Accounting Plus—a part of the program that would enable it to be customized. The consultant took in Boland’s North Star computer system as a trade-in. He sold him a Delta microcomputer and TeleVideo terminal in return, along with a hard-disk system upgradable to 70 megabytes. With the software customization included, the cost came to $20,000, minus the $12,000 trade-in. The consultant, like Clinton Computers, didn’t know as much about accounting as Boland had hoped. But through sheer tenacity Boland at least got himself a halfway usable program.
“I had the software changed,” he said, “so that instead of one company with departments in it, it now reads a holding company with subsidiary companies. The software was changed to print out separate balance sheets and separate income statements for me.
“On the income-statement side this machine will ask me if I want a consolidated or individual by-page income statement. It will print out a holding company and then, in successive order, on each page, the income statement for each company. When I go to the balance sheet, it will ask me that same question.
“If I tell it I want individuals and a consolidated by page, it won’t do it. I must ask it individually each time for company one, then company two, right down the line. I have to give the computer individual instructions to do that.
“And that was the best my consultant could do to change the software. It got the job done, but not all the way.