Accounting Software Technology

Far too many companies select and purchase accounting software without having a clue about the product's underlying technology. Even today DOS-based applications written in Cobol continue to sell at record-breaking levels. I believe that the root cause of this madness is that many companies focus their evaluations on features, features, features – and little else. It seems that as long as the product has a given set of features, it doesn't matter what the underlying technology consists of. It could be a system written in FORTRAN using a VisiCalc database and running on an original Nintendo box, and many people would still purchase the product as long as it has a few obscure features that they feel are important to their company.

Why is this important? Let's think about this logically. Technology changes very rapidly. Many current technologies will be obsolete in just a few years, or in some cases, just a few months. Old technologies are not made obsolete by “new technologies”, they are made obsolete by “improved technologies”. What I mean is newer technologies are better technologies that offer more power, more functionality, more capabilities. Eventually newer technologies overshadow older technologies to monumental degrees.

Most older accounting software solutions contain far more lines of complex code compared to a similar product developed with more current technologies. In 1995, Gary Harpst of Solomon Software excitedly showed me their latest Solomon IV product that was written in Microsoft Visual Basic. Gary touted how Solomon was able to develop an extensive solution with just 300,000 lines of code compared to 15 million lines of Cobol code used to develop the older Real World product line. Since then Solomon has increased its lines of code more than five-fold – but it is still lean and mean compared to other Cobol based products. Consider for a moment how much faster a company could review or debug a product, or add functionality to product that contains dramatically fewer lines of code. All other factors being equal, surely the product with equal power but dramatically fewer lines of code will have a brighter and stronger future ahead.