We're a little different. We started out a software team of one accountant and one engineer - who live in small businesses, both our own and our clients. Others have joined us along the way, as either customers, developers, sales staff, programmers or dealers. We're still small, but the product is solid. We're not out to impress you with a flashy corporate image - just to get you to like our software.
We're living the 90's business model5 - the Internet based business. While we may actually have a machine around the place that can still make floppies, we generally distribute our software over the 'Net. Some WinFlex subscribers get their updates delivered in their e-mail box, ready to run. Others get them off of our ftp server. Our Manuals are on line6on either our server or yours, and are extensively hyper linked. There are also flat versions that can be printed for the more linear thinkers in your organization.
The WinFlex business applications have been evolving over the last decade or so.7 Since we're a small company, and very close to our customers, we've seen how they run their businesses. We listened to them when they told us things that would make their life easier. Just about every management report in WinFlex was written at the request of one of our clients, and been fine-tuned at the request of other clients. Program logic to handle new functions8, Screen layouts, Menu layouts, all of our best ideas have come from our clients. We've been slow to add flash - indeed some would say that our screens pale in comparison with the slicker accounting products for Windows. (Let's leave the Mac out of this, for now9). Maybe so, but our products are fast, easy to use, and will save you time running your business.
Just ask our customers.
~~~ The Footnotes: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Please - if I hear the
term "Accounting Solution" one more time, I think I'm going to throw
up.
2. Anybody remember the days of
running "Peachtree" on TRS-80 computers? How about "State of
the Art" on Sage IV's?
3. Notice - I did NOT say
programmers... well, accountants are generally pretty crummy programmers,
too. (Generally. There are exceptions.) Still, well designed but poorly
coded software gets the job done. Poorly designed but well written (coded)
software rarely gets the job done.
4. The software company may be
a small business, and may even use their own product, but guaranteed
that the person using it is probably not the person who wrote it or designed.
I could tell you stories.....
5. Sorry.. a bit of business school
buzz wording.. won't happen again. Really.
6. OK, so they're not ALL up there
yet.. I'm typing as fast as I can!
7. Actually, since spring of
1984. I teamed up with Peter in 1985. The rest, as they say, is history.
8. For example, some states now
require collecting sales tax on shipping. We saw what a pain it was for
one of our customers to handle this, and now WinFlex computes taxes selectively
on freight by tax identifier. Total change? About 12 lines of code.
Time
saved? About 15 minutes a day billing. It's now part of the standard
package, making all of our client's lives easier, and WinFlex Accounts
Receivable was one of the first products to offer this feature.
9. One thing the Mac has always
done is have pretty screens. For whatever reason, however, accountants
and most businesses want something on their desk that can trace its roots
back to IBM. Tradition or something. Go figure. Flexware International
LLC's product (hereinafter referred to as "Flexware") is really slick
on the Mac - it just doesn't, as of this writing, do Windows. If
it did, we wouldn't have bothered spending the better part of two years
writing Windows code!