Slashdot Mirror
Software for Membership Tracking and Inventory?
ZeLonewolf asks: "I'm a consultant to a customer who owns two franchises of a fitness gym. The computers they use to keep track of members and inventory run DOS programs written in the early 90's by a company that has long since gone out of business. My customer needs an upgrade badly. Replacement software to keep track of members and handle check-in and membership expirations, as well as inventory and point-of-sale data, costs $5,000 and up, so a free software solution is desirable. Does GnuCash do the job? Have Slashdot readers successfully set a small business up with Free/Open Software? What software have you had success with?"
Goals for a future release: Database Independence.
I seem to recall from the firebird-support (and firebird-architect, for the feature of querying data and getting a tree back) email list that the Compiere people are trying to get support for other db back-ends as well, and firebird/interbase is at least one of them. Firebird's free, so that could help.
Just by the thumbnail:
keep track of members and handle check-in and membership expirations, as well as inventory and point-of-sale data,
, it's pretty much impossible that you could build a custom system for less than $5K, even if you did it Access and outsourced it to India. Once you get a grasp on the scope of these things, $5K is pretty cheap.
The open source Clubdata project might be of interest.
boakes.org
I've spent about six months or so repairing a botched installation of Quickbooks (http://www.quickbooks.com) and setting up an inventory and accounting system for a small distribution/wholesale concern. Aside from the fact that QuickBooks was designed by accountants who obviously hate all techies, and despite the additional badness of possessing an inflexible and proprietary back-end with a five- or ten-seat 'concurrent use' limit, Quickbooks possesses the following serious advantages:
:)
1. Price. A one-year subscription to Quickbooks Pro, including tech support, costs $85 a month, which means that you get the whole accounting package for a little over a grand. (You can cancel your subscription and keep your seats.) That's a steal, especially since I'm computing this in Canadian dollars.
2. QB Pro comes with an SDK, so you can buy third-party extensions to attach your database to ODBC, etc, which mitigates the allergy you might have to proprietariness. Also, people like www.numbercruncher.com have developed very complete sales/invo add-on packages for Quickbooks, which are worth taking a gander at if Quickbooks built-in inventory system is insufficient. (It'll probably be sufficient on its own, however, unless you're doing something weird.)
3. You really, really don't want to roll your own accounting system. Funny thing is that an inventory system must be pretty tightly integrated with an accounting system in order to work well. (ie. inventory adjustments should alter the accountant's info about what assets you have on hand; double-entry bookkeeping dictates that the difference in the asset account must match an occurrent change in an income account; valuation must be performed by averaging the cost of each order of a given inventory item type; etc.) You don't want your client to get to year-end and then find that his books don't make sense. The IRS and Revenue Canada both hate that sort of thing, and your client will likely pass the hatings on to you. Don't leave him up that particular canal without a gondola pole.
4. Quickbooks is really easy for end-users to use. Ease-of-use is paramount when you're going to let the minimum-wagers at the counter enter info.
5. Intuit sells a POS for QuickBooks. Never tried it, but I'm sure it works well.
6. Quickbooks might be too dinky for your client's business, but that's okay: It comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try before you buy. If quickbooks isn't enough, go get $10,000 of AccPac like everyone else.
7. Message me for more info about what I've seen work and not work.
- undoware.ca