Why Custom Software?

From time to time, we all buy over-the-counter software products - and for good reason. Generally, they're economical - and, if they accomplish what we need them to do, it makes good sense... business sense.

But there are other times when one can be penny wise and pound foolish. When the software doesn't do everything you need it to do and you must resort to others measures to complete the routine day-to-day tasks, it makes better sense to have custom software developed for your company.

As an example, approximately 50% of the software currently utilized by our company, Wade Instruments and Service, is commercially available from many retail sources and perform quite well. The remaining 50%, we've developed specifically to meet our more targeted needs. And even though we developed these applications in house and at cost so to speak, some of them still required a significant investment in time and resources - in the end, it still equates to expense.

Having said that, those initial investments today seems miniscule when compared to the time and resources we've saved over the past 10 years. For example, when our company first started, we used a readily available (and popular) software suite to create our invoices and service reports. Realizing that we were spending way to much time creating and organizing these documents, we developed our own software application to do the same job and automate the documentation. This resulted in a time savings of up to 90% to perform an even superior task. 

In yet another example, one of our clients, nationally known Something New Florist of Canfield, Ohio, does elaborate work for large weddings, events and parties, not to mention a yearly gig at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their old process for developing a contract proposal for a wedding or event entailed the use of a well known office software suite. Painfully, they typed and edited their proposal and manually calculated the sub-total, tax, deposit and balance due, not to mention the contract language. To their alarm, they discovered that by the time all the editing was done and the final contract proposal was drawn and approved, they had spent far too many hours in the creation of the document, one they knew could be made simpler and faster.

What we did for Something New Florist follows: We created a software program that was simple to use and dedicated to perform just one function... create event and wedding contract proposals. By incorporating pre-defined label categories and programming our software to complete all the necessary calculations, it has saved them countless hours. They now create contract proposals in about 1/3 the time they spent using the alternative methods.

Recycling the Source Code to bring prices down

You may not find exactly the right software application you're looking for in our Downloads area, but you may find one or two that has features you find useful. We encourage you to sample as many as you can, even if you doubt you'll ever need such software as they may also possess functions you'll want to incorporate into your own custom application. This is known as recycling or reusing the source code. The more source code we can reuse, the quicker (and more economically) we can create your custom software application.