“We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said, “so we need to keep track of the time between when people contract and make application with a lender and how long it takes for them to win loan approval.
“When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was backlogged, it was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have almost five hundred houses in our backlog.”
Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details, Bowie found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers as well as he wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,” he said, “and the biggest thing I found was the condescending attitude of the people in the sales centers to someone who knows nothing about it.
“I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my requirements, and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your requirements are wrong.’ And that was the case until I got to Clinton Computers.”
Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget sheet—a basic common-sense rule of software and hardware shopping. If you’re working with documents, at least nonconfidential ones, then show them! Do so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you have one. Explain as clearly as you can just what kind of paperwork you’re computerizing. Here, incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie and Boland in an apple-to-apple way. Accounting programs can be much trickier than data bases and spreadsheets, especially for companies with unusual circumstances like Boland’s—that is, all those subsidiaries in a small-to-medium business. It’s clear, though, that whatever happened, Grothoff and Bowie communicated much better than she and Boland.
“At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan processing and budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was budgets.”
He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here, however, for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than he did. Grothoff persuaded him that most of all he needed a data-base program—one that would help him track loans on hundreds of houses. It would store information and rearrange it in patterns he needed. He might not want full copies of all loan-processing reports, for example. Instead, he might want just the names of the home buyers, say, or just the foundation costs of each house. Or he might want the program to tote up all the foundation costs or perform other arithmetic, including complicated multiplication and division or calculation of ratios and percentages. And with a program like dBASE II that’s possible. Like many of its rivals, it will do some complex calculations, not just shuffle facts around. There are many books on dBASE II—yet another advantage and indication of its popularity. (Two good choices are dBASE II User’s Guide by Adam B. Green and Everyman’s Database Primer featuring dBASE II by Robert Byers.)
Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if you’re an executive like Bowie:
1. The CREATE command lets you begin a file.
2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or cabinet. It’s just the space on the disks holding records—say, the house-budget summaries for your homes.