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?"
$5000 for an assumed lifecycle of 3 years comes down to about $137 a month. If your customer can't afford that, especially for what is likely to be a piece of business critical software, he should consider a different line of work. My work consists of helping customers evaluate Free / Open Source Software for businesses, and those that only look at FLOSS because it is free as in beer invariably end up not implementing FLOSS. Those who use FLOSS because of other reasons, such as source code availability etc, usually end up as success stories. Yes, FLOSS is a very powerful tool for the small business market, and my customers range from the 2-man-band kinda organisations, as well as the top of the Fortune 100, but if your business isn't worth an investment of less then $200 a month for your core system, you have to reasses your priorities.....
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
I've written a point-of-sale system myself, and a fully-featured, relatively bug-free system might cost at least $100,000 to write. It's a LOT more work than it first seems to make it easy to use, for example. Retail operations are far more complex than they first appear.
The open source Clubdata project might be of interest.
boakes.org