Who are our clients?

Since 1999, we have developed more than 50 systems for companies in a wide variety of industries including logistics planning, vocational education, architectural services, facilities management, entertainment and catering, equipment hire, sign fabrication, electrical contracting, sustainability services, risk assessment, self-storage and more.

The most common task is to keep track of the status of jobs and clients and the associated financial and logistical functions to support them. The charactistics of the jobs and services and the way the business finds and interacts with customers is often specific to the individual business.

General-purpose packaged systems may not support some mission-critical aspects of the business process. A custom system can include all of the data and functions to support the business as it currently operates. A packaged system is always going to need to be configured for your business and will often require changes to your business procedures to fit the package.

Most of our clients are business owners who just want to be able to improve the way their successful business operates. They want a system which supports their business rather than changing it to match the way other businesses operate.

We also have some clients who are corporate managers who need a solution to a particular problem within their department, section or branch which their centralised corporate systems do not provide. We work with the internal IT resources to ensure that the departmental system works within the existing corporate infrastructure and standards as much as possible.

 

Operating Platform

We develop systems which use the more advanced features of Microsoft Access. Because MS-Access is an integral part of MS-Office, we can integrate seamlessly with other Office products including Excel and Outlook.

By default, we use MS-Access databases in ACCDB format to store the data. Access provides a robust file sharing database platform up to 10 concurrent users and up to 4Gb of data, however when a larger system is required, we work with MySQL to provide a database platform which is scalable to any size. We still use MS-Access as the front-end so the same system works exactly the same way, using ODBC to connect to the MySQL database.

Usually, the client provides the production environment, which can be an internal office system or a hosted (aka cloud) server such as Amazon Web Services. Alternatively, we can provide a fully managed hosted system which you can access from anywhere on any device.

 

Development Platform

We develop in Access 2010 to provide options for clients with older versions of Office. You do not need to have a full version of Microsoft Access on every client machine. Free run-time versions are available from Microsoft. Our systems are delivered to you in fully accessable accdb format so you can engage alternative developers later if you choose (subject to our terms and conditions).

The MySQL database and ODBC connectors (community version) are also available free of charge. We can install, configure and support these for you as part of the project.

We use several third party components which further extend the capabilities of our systems including:

• HTML editor
• Email sending
• Tree view object
• SMS gateway
• PDF documents
• Web site interfaces

We also have many pre-written modules which makes development faster (and less expensive) including:

• Database re-linking, checking and schema management
• Card layouts and printing
• Email/mail form letter editor with merge fields
• Customisable invoices, receipts, purchase orders, credit notes, etc
• Date range popup calendar with option like "last month" and "year to date"
• Simple add-to-list option for drop-down fields
• Global form style settings

 

Get a free quote

Please lodge an online enquiry below or send an email to our enquiries email (see Contact page) with your contact details and a description of the system you would like to have built. We will contact you to discuss your needs and work out a detailed scope. Then we can then provide a fixed price quotation.

It will speed things up if you can provide in the description:

• The business context of the system
• The business objectives and key functions of the system
• How you would like to manage communication with other developers and/or staff
• Implementation services required (training, documentation, ongoing support)