Hi. I’m Debbie Fox, George Fox’s wife. We are opening a very
small retail store and are making the software decision. I know
that this thread has recently run…I have already reviewed the
archives. I have two additional questions.
Has anyone maintained their customer database, inventory and
sales records on a database program (eg. Microsoft Access or
ACT)? These detail amounts could be summarized and then posted
to an accounting program (at a fraction of the cost).
Separately, does anyone have any experience with Jewelry
Computer Systems (JCS)? How does it compare with Ibis?
Thanks
I wrote my jewelry business program in LOTUS APPROACH. I do
everything from ledger inventory, sales, customers,
suppliers, shows, employee info, rep etc., etc. Yes,
I was a computer programmer before I retired to jewelry, but I
can still generate a catalog with pictures and text. If you have
a “little” computer know how, or have the desire to learn,
writing your own business program is so much cheaper and
will fit your business like a glove.
Nina: I too wrote an application in Dbase II in 1984 to handle my
inventory, that’s all it would track. I am sure that you would
agree that developing an application from the ground up in
Visual Dbase or Visual FoxPro would be a time consuming task.
Most jewelry applications contain from 250,000 to 500,000 lines
of source code. That’s from 3800 to 7800 pages of source code.
My time was more valuable either at the bench of managing the
business. For a good package, such as The Jeweler from Ibis, you
can spend about $2,500 and the developer has invested from
$70,000 to $100,000. They are continually updating the
application and working on any error correction. My calculator
tells me that I can recover the $2,500 much easier than I can
afford to invest the time and money in application development.
Regards,
Roger Kitchens
www.jewelrycreations.com/roger