Accounting Packages

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004, Guy Templin wrote:
>Bill,
>
>I would like the info just in case. I have been using RealWorld for about 18
>years now and it has become a habit and if it isn't broke don't fix it.
>Actually I would like to find a good filepro accounting package which would
>make transferring data from our order entry/invoicing program to accounting
>a little easier.

I just called my customer, but the person who knows about this was out of
the office.  His wife wasn't sure whether the company is still around.

>I used to use a program  called TwoWay to transfer data, however several
>years ago the company went missing and I have set up transferring myself.

I wrote my own procedures to transfer data between FilePro and RealWorld a
bit over twenty years ago (actually Profile 16+ on a Radio Shack Model 16,
and the Tandy version of RW) because I wanted the ability to do reasonable
queries and data entry which RW didn't really allow.  TwoWay came out a bit
after that.  At that time I had been using Xenix for about two years, and I
used a combination of shell scripts, awk, and pipes to do the interface.

FWIW:  I started Celestial twenty years ago this month shortly after the
board of directors of the company I was working for fired the Chaiman of
the Board, and the President, leaving me as the senior surviving officer,
V.P. of Finance and Admin -- a job I hated.  I was hoping to get the
President's job, but the board brought in a bean counter who had just left
a bankrupt pharmaceutical company, and who brought in a D.P. guy who
thought the IBM System 36 was the answer to all problems.

>Your points are well taken.

I loosely based the accounting systems I wrote on RealWorld with some
FilePro features as well.  I originally wrote it in FilePro on the Model
16/6000, but ran into a stone wall with number of open files, and generally
not having the referential integrity built into the Unify RDBMS.  Using
Unify required a lot of C programming to interface with their libraries and
handle screen interface, but it resulted in a very fast, easy to use
system.  I'm in the middle of converting that system to use postgresql as
the back end database, using python with curses for the heads-down data
entry interface.

Bill
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