“I’ve since found out that for $400, not ,800, I could have bought an accounting package that would do exactly the same thing I wanted.”
So why didn’t he buy it?
“Why spend another $400 to delve into it further and then find out it isn’t what you wanted?” Boland asked. “I think it’s stupid to spend money at this point. I have a system I know I can make work within certain limits. I’m still in the learning phase, and I’ll probably still be there for another year, for all I know.” I thought he was too patient. If his software system was a dog—perhaps not for everyone but for him—he should change it. Four hundred dollars was a pittance compared to Boland’s total investment of $20,000.
Ideally, too, as he said himself, he would have gone to a consultant in the first place, not just any consultant but one familiar with accounting. And yet it’s understandable why he acted as he did. Why repeat the mistakes he’d seen at other companies? Why not frugality? Better to be out $20,000 than $50,000 or $100,000 after paying for a mini, a consultant, and the other trimmings. His computer wasn’t making or saving buckets of money for Clinton Cycle and Salvage as of early 1983; but it might in the future as he got his software under control and could, for instance, easily put salesmen on commission.
He told me, moreover, that he would soon stop farming out the company payroll—up to seventy people—to a computer firm. He also was mastering an electronic spreadsheet. He did not plan an accounts receivable program, because Clinton Cycle collected quickly through checks and credit cards, but an accounts payable one was in the offing.
“It’s going to give me the companies’ names, the payment terms, the volume I deal with them each month,” Boland said. “It will flag when the bills are due, and it will also generate checks.”
He was also going to crank up a mailing-list program, using a list of all buyers of new bikes within the last three years—a sensible project, considering the market for accessories and repeat sales. Obviously, here, as in other applications, the more information built up on his hard disk, the more his machines would justify the $20,000 investment. The benefits of computerization for Edward Boland might not be immediately dramatic, but with his stick-to-itiveness, sooner or later they’d almost surely come. Boland’s battles with computers were to continue. When I caught up with him in spring 1984, he said he’d bought yet another computer system.
Charlie Bowie: Data Base and Spreadsheet
Remember the customer who was raving happy about his software—also bought from Sue Grothoff at Clinton Computers?
That’s Charlie Bowie, who, when we first talked, was a vice-president of Washington Homes and manager of its Southern Division. He told me he expected two Zenith micros to save his company perhaps as much as $50,000 a year, maybe more.