zlacker

My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'.

It was developed by a single guy in the IT department and she liked it.

About 5 years ago the company was acquired, and they had to move to their COTS 'enterprise' system (Maconomy).

All staff from the old company had to do a week long (!) training course in how to use this and she hates it.

In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)

>>RobinL+(OP)
I still think MS Access was awesome. In the small companies I worked it was used successfully by moderately tech savvy directors and support employees to manage ERP, license generation, invoices, etc.

The most heard gripe was the concurrent access to the database file but I think that was solved by backing the forms by accessing anything over odbc.

It looked terrible but also was highly functional.

>>RobinL+(OP)
> In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)

That's my assertion - those things like 'Time' can be developed by an AI primarily because there is no requirement of an existence of a community from which to hire.

It's an example of a small ERP system - no consultants, no changes, no community, etc.

Large systems (Sage, SAP, Syspro, etc) are purchased based on the existing pool of contractors that can be hired.

Right now, if you had a competing SAP/Syspro system freshly developed, that had all the integrations that a customer needs, how on earth will they deploy it if they cannot hire people to deploy it?

>>spockz+Y
Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming.

It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surprised how well the system worked.

Ever since I've marvelled at how easy it was to build something highly functional that could incorporate complex business logic, and wished there was a more modern equivalent.

>>RobinL+R1
Maybe a combination of AirTable and PowerBI/open-source alternative? Or just ms access backed by a proper database?

>>spockz+V6
Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that.

[1] https://www.getgrist.com/

>>jon-wo+Ue
Just another yay for Grist here! I've been looking for an Access alternative for quite a while and nothing really comes close. You can try hacking it together with various BI tools, but nothing really feels as accessible as the original Access. While it's not a 1:1 mapping and the graphical report building is not really there, you can still achieve what you need. It's like Access 2.0 to me.

>>spockz+V6
Access as a front end for mssqlserver ran great in a small shop. Seems like there was a wizard that imported the the access tables easily into sqlserver.

I've not seen anything as easy to use as the Access visual query builder and drag-n-drop report builder thing.

>>lelant+c1
Not to mention Sage's midline - Sage100 is incredibly cheap and effective for it's cost. I mean it's ridiculous what a mature software can do. Everything under the sun basically for a pittance.

It's certainly not "SAP 10 million dollar deployments". we see implementation rarely run into 6 figures for SMB distributors and manufacturing firms. That's less than most of their yearly budget for buying new fleet vehicles or equipment