Last year I wrote this blog post about choosing a program that did inventory and some basic accounting. At that time I was focusing on jewelry software so I could avoid a lot of extra work with a chart of accounts [very bean counter term for categories to track money] and double entry accounting [you spend money here and thus the same amount of money goes into another bucket like inventory, supplies, etc]. But it also HAD TO work on a Mac computer as a native program; no running Windows on a Mac.
I started with Beadia since it was for the Mac and very simple. I found many bugs and eventually I gave it up because the developer was not fixing the issues I found.
I should note that I have this uncanny ability to find bugs in software. I found some very deep (this is a term which means the average person would never, ever come across them) bugs in a software tool/package back in 1995 such that the company paid for me to come to their facility to discuss, with their developers, how I came across them. While there they fixed and I tested. Over the years I have had friends tell me they DO NOT want me to test their software. But I am getting off track.
Earlier this year I moved onto Bead Manager Pro. I worked with it for about 3 weeks and then spent the money and purchased a license. I spend several weekends slogging through all the receipts I had kept since late 2008 entering EVERYTHING - hammers, files, rolling mills, wire, sheet, stones, solder and even workshops and books. You name it I had a receipt for it. BMP's inventory valuation methodology was not exactly what I wanted which was FIFO (First in First Out) but did a weighted average which was my second best choice, and along the way of entering items I did a physical inventory (what I really had vs. what I have purchased over the years).
And of course I found a bug. The program has the ability to "make" a product using items in (raw) inventory and then will add up the costs. You can then add the labor and mark-up, and then you know what FINISHED items you have so you can sell them. I was trying to assemble/make a bracelet and the program would not let me use less than one ounce - I had .75 troy ounce of silver wire in inventory and i wanted to use .25 troy ounce and it kept telling me that I had ZERO in inventory. I wrote to BMP about this and let me say that the tech support in the beginning was rather poor. I was first directed back to their help page, which I had said in the email I sent that the answer was not there. This first response took several days for me to get. So, I responded as such and it almost 3 weeks to get it sorted, a new version was sent to me to test/verify, and then I could move forward [A new version was then sent to the user base soon afterwards].
When I finished EVERYTHING last month I went to print out some of the reports so I had a year end inventory valuation from last year. This would help my accountant with this years income, purchases, and cost of items sold.
Hold on to your web browsers people cause can you guess what happened next??
Yup, I found TWO more problems; I would call them bugs but once is a limitation of the BMP system. So let's go through them in order.
FIRST ISSUE:
When printing, the report does not scale to fit on the paper which is in landscape mode. I know many of you have used PDF's, Word, even Excel and you can tell the printer dialog box to scale the page to FIT on one page (horizontally) so it does not have some text hanging as an orphan on another page even though vertically the total contents will be on many pages. I selected the columns I wanted to print; I then set the width (a description field) such that some text even wrapped and then hit the print preview button. That is when on the screen the text was CUT OFF - yup, it did not even push onto another page IT WAS CUT OFF. Even when the actual print dialog box came up and I checked the scale to fit page check box - IT WOULD NOT SCALE.
I was not a happy camper to say the least.
Once again I filled out a support ticket on the BMP website. Several days later I got an email back telling me to refer back to specific page. Well I had been there and I had removed the columns I did not need; I NEEDED ALL THESE COLUMNS. So, again I replied and after a few other emails it came down to: 1) that was the way the software was. 2) maybe I print the information twice each with a sub-set of the columns and just match them up.
SECOND ISSUE:
I then decided that I would just export the data to a spread sheet and do the report from there. The ability to select columns to get the data you want is fairly reasonable if you have worked with report writers before, if not good luck. I found the columns I needed and did the export. That is when I found several items missing from the export. Into investigation mode I went. The system does have an inventory number and one would assume that this was the key (a primary key in database terms) used to distinguish between items even if the description was the same. OH NO MY FRIENDS it turns out that item 057 which was Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Round) did not export because 056 Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Square) some how caused a conflict. This happened for the majority of the wire, sheet, and my jump rings.
At this point I was done. DONE, DONE, DONE I say!!!!
I have just finished spending another 3 weeks of evenings finding another business accounting program that allows me to also do inventory PLUS migrating all my data from the BMP system to this new program.
When I am done here, I will delete all evidence of BMP from my Mac and say GOOD RIDDANCE. I write software for my day job and this was just too much.
Next week I will tell you about the software I did find and how I migrated my data and how it meets my needs.
I started with Beadia since it was for the Mac and very simple. I found many bugs and eventually I gave it up because the developer was not fixing the issues I found.
I should note that I have this uncanny ability to find bugs in software. I found some very deep (this is a term which means the average person would never, ever come across them) bugs in a software tool/package back in 1995 such that the company paid for me to come to their facility to discuss, with their developers, how I came across them. While there they fixed and I tested. Over the years I have had friends tell me they DO NOT want me to test their software. But I am getting off track.
Earlier this year I moved onto Bead Manager Pro. I worked with it for about 3 weeks and then spent the money and purchased a license. I spend several weekends slogging through all the receipts I had kept since late 2008 entering EVERYTHING - hammers, files, rolling mills, wire, sheet, stones, solder and even workshops and books. You name it I had a receipt for it. BMP's inventory valuation methodology was not exactly what I wanted which was FIFO (First in First Out) but did a weighted average which was my second best choice, and along the way of entering items I did a physical inventory (what I really had vs. what I have purchased over the years).
And of course I found a bug. The program has the ability to "make" a product using items in (raw) inventory and then will add up the costs. You can then add the labor and mark-up, and then you know what FINISHED items you have so you can sell them. I was trying to assemble/make a bracelet and the program would not let me use less than one ounce - I had .75 troy ounce of silver wire in inventory and i wanted to use .25 troy ounce and it kept telling me that I had ZERO in inventory. I wrote to BMP about this and let me say that the tech support in the beginning was rather poor. I was first directed back to their help page, which I had said in the email I sent that the answer was not there. This first response took several days for me to get. So, I responded as such and it almost 3 weeks to get it sorted, a new version was sent to me to test/verify, and then I could move forward [A new version was then sent to the user base soon afterwards].
When I finished EVERYTHING last month I went to print out some of the reports so I had a year end inventory valuation from last year. This would help my accountant with this years income, purchases, and cost of items sold.
Hold on to your web browsers people cause can you guess what happened next??
Yup, I found TWO more problems; I would call them bugs but once is a limitation of the BMP system. So let's go through them in order.
FIRST ISSUE:
When printing, the report does not scale to fit on the paper which is in landscape mode. I know many of you have used PDF's, Word, even Excel and you can tell the printer dialog box to scale the page to FIT on one page (horizontally) so it does not have some text hanging as an orphan on another page even though vertically the total contents will be on many pages. I selected the columns I wanted to print; I then set the width (a description field) such that some text even wrapped and then hit the print preview button. That is when on the screen the text was CUT OFF - yup, it did not even push onto another page IT WAS CUT OFF. Even when the actual print dialog box came up and I checked the scale to fit page check box - IT WOULD NOT SCALE.
I was not a happy camper to say the least.
Once again I filled out a support ticket on the BMP website. Several days later I got an email back telling me to refer back to specific page. Well I had been there and I had removed the columns I did not need; I NEEDED ALL THESE COLUMNS. So, again I replied and after a few other emails it came down to: 1) that was the way the software was. 2) maybe I print the information twice each with a sub-set of the columns and just match them up.
SECOND ISSUE:
I then decided that I would just export the data to a spread sheet and do the report from there. The ability to select columns to get the data you want is fairly reasonable if you have worked with report writers before, if not good luck. I found the columns I needed and did the export. That is when I found several items missing from the export. Into investigation mode I went. The system does have an inventory number and one would assume that this was the key (a primary key in database terms) used to distinguish between items even if the description was the same. OH NO MY FRIENDS it turns out that item 057 which was Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Round) did not export because 056 Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Square) some how caused a conflict. This happened for the majority of the wire, sheet, and my jump rings.
At this point I was done. DONE, DONE, DONE I say!!!!
I have just finished spending another 3 weeks of evenings finding another business accounting program that allows me to also do inventory PLUS migrating all my data from the BMP system to this new program.
When I am done here, I will delete all evidence of BMP from my Mac and say GOOD RIDDANCE. I write software for my day job and this was just too much.
Next week I will tell you about the software I did find and how I migrated my data and how it meets my needs.
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