Our staff is finally back at work on the new accounting software. The move to our new location took longer than expected: mostly because the weather stayed nice. It was too tempting to work outside, thank you climate change. This property is almost a half acre, and it was very overgrown. Now there’s less to do come Spring.
The first task is to fix about 20 small bugs that turned up from testing over the past few years. For example, one happens if you enter a purchase refund, then void the deposit, then change the amount on both, then un-void the deposit. It handles the money OK and it marks the purchase as Paid, but it shows the wrong payment method. Regular purchases work OK so we just need to put the same code into voided/unvoided refunds.
We’re tackling bugs first because the programming is in familiar code. It’s a good way to get back in the groove after a two-month absence. So much evaporates in that much time. Especially during the stress of house-hunting, closing and moving.
During the gap, I realized that the end results will be very hard to market. The project has taken far too long. It will be like trying to sell a ghost.
We are finishing the new software because we need it for our own bookkeeping, and because some users already paid for it long ago. But that doesn’t even come close to paying for the many programmer-hours we’ve invested over the past six years. It’s not obvious how to recoup that, let along become profitable again.
I think we will have a free beta version, then keep it free for a while. When there are folks using it and happy, then we can figure how to make money from the app. There are many possible options.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
