Correction: www.ColumbuSoft.com came on-line, the site still is up.
The product is not maintained. Buyer beware.
Link to site: www.columbusoft.com
The next casualty I wish to discuss is VisualAccounting.com (site goes to cybersquatter) and Columbusoft. (now the site is off-line)
Accounts for Visual Basic was so much better. The people who worked on Accounts for Visual Basic, were honest, hard-working and truthful people who could account for everything: the profits and inventory.
No so with Accounts for Delphi.
Accounts for Delphi has colorful history. The source code was originally written in Clipper and ported to Delphi... and like many Delphi products, never maintained for the next 10 or so years. The owners milked money from unsuspecting users who brought broken product. This went on for nearly 10 years, (from 1998 onwards) and promoted on the Delphi Companion CD.
Ripoff Report.
http://www.ripoffreport.com/small-business-services/columbusoft-paul-fer/columbusoft-paul-ferrara-accou-dycc4.htm
The typical story is someone is in need of some accounting solution, and uses Excite, AltaVista or Yahoo (during those days) to search for the term Delphi and Accounting. Since the product is called Accounts for Delphi, the first 10 hits would be ColumbuSoft.com.
Emailing Paul (the owner), you would get very prompt replies - asking about how the product is, and how much it costs. On his website, he would explain how high-end Columbusoft is, how good the inventory system is (it actually is very poorly done) and a month after buying the product, Paul would then simply ignore the user.
For example,
the product was written in DBF (Database) aud used BDE alot. Besides that, the product fell apart when used. The inventory system had very serial-number scheme which didn't work on multiple PCs (add two items and it would lock-up because SYSxxx.DBF) would be locked for no reason.
The reports would never correctly print out more with texts more than 80-characters (depending on which printer or which driver you use). To admit, Paul later fixed it by adding true-type fonts, but didn't fix the underlying problem of slow reports.
The reports were very simple. If somebody did ever notice, the GL calculations were wrong, AFD would be in batch mode Posting and unposting would make the GL unaccurate. The instructions were to add your own code, yeah, right.
The inventory system had no correct FIFO, LIFO. If you entered wrong inventory numbers, there were no way to easily correct it.
The job posting were so simple it made mockery of accounting. There was no valid job posting number, no valid dates (Paul later fixed it by adding 4-digit dates) and later on, the thing would collapse because having two dates, it was frequent serial-number errors that caused much grief.
For the price of (US$500 (for base) and US$400 * 8) or US$3700, you would supposedly get high-end accounting system with full source code. What you got was shabby code, bad help files, and no technical support. (Paul later updated his site to US$300 for the base and US$250 per module and with discounts).
In the end, when someone filed report to ripoff report, that was the start of the end.
p.s., Nick, product manager of Delphi - if you are reading this, can you remove Accounts for Delphi from the companion CD. it's full of bugs.
p.s. #2: Nick, thank you for reading this blog. I do not see Columbusoft Accounts for Delphi anymore on the Delphi companion CDs.
p.s. #3: Nick, if you can remove Columbusoft for Delphi from all the whole Embarcadero site, that will be wonderful.
[20th April 2010 - links updated]
Article update #1 - March 2013
1) See Website obituary - Columbusoft.com
The product is not maintained. Buyer beware.
The next casualty I wish to discuss is VisualAccounting.com (site goes to cybersquatter) and Columbusoft. (now the site is off-line)
Accounts for Visual Basic was so much better. The people who worked on Accounts for Visual Basic, were honest, hard-working and truthful people who could account for everything: the profits and inventory.
No so with Accounts for Delphi.
Accounts for Delphi has colorful history. The source code was originally written in Clipper and ported to Delphi... and like many Delphi products, never maintained for the next 10 or so years. The owners milked money from unsuspecting users who brought broken product. This went on for nearly 10 years, (from 1998 onwards) and promoted on the Delphi Companion CD.
Ripoff Report.
http://www.ripoffreport.com/small-business-services/columbusoft-paul-fer/columbusoft-paul-ferrara-accou-dycc4.htm
The typical story is someone is in need of some accounting solution, and uses Excite, AltaVista or Yahoo (during those days) to search for the term Delphi and Accounting. Since the product is called Accounts for Delphi, the first 10 hits would be ColumbuSoft.com.
Emailing Paul (the owner), you would get very prompt replies - asking about how the product is, and how much it costs. On his website, he would explain how high-end Columbusoft is, how good the inventory system is (it actually is very poorly done) and a month after buying the product, Paul would then simply ignore the user.
For example,
the product was written in DBF (Database) aud used BDE alot. Besides that, the product fell apart when used. The inventory system had very serial-number scheme which didn't work on multiple PCs (add two items and it would lock-up because SYSxxx.DBF) would be locked for no reason.
The reports would never correctly print out more with texts more than 80-characters (depending on which printer or which driver you use). To admit, Paul later fixed it by adding true-type fonts, but didn't fix the underlying problem of slow reports.
The reports were very simple. If somebody did ever notice, the GL calculations were wrong, AFD would be in batch mode Posting and unposting would make the GL unaccurate. The instructions were to add your own code, yeah, right.
The inventory system had no correct FIFO, LIFO. If you entered wrong inventory numbers, there were no way to easily correct it.
The job posting were so simple it made mockery of accounting. There was no valid job posting number, no valid dates (Paul later fixed it by adding 4-digit dates) and later on, the thing would collapse because having two dates, it was frequent serial-number errors that caused much grief.
For the price of (US$500 (for base) and US$400 * 8) or US$3700, you would supposedly get high-end accounting system with full source code. What you got was shabby code, bad help files, and no technical support. (Paul later updated his site to US$300 for the base and US$250 per module and with discounts).
In the end, when someone filed report to ripoff report, that was the start of the end.
[20th April 2010 - links updated]
Article update #1 - March 2013
1) See Website obituary - Columbusoft.com
