New Vehicle Repair Garage Software: www.vhrs.co.uk

Some program! its an Access database! £300 Wise up mate!

The message from "Marty1a" contains these words:

And frankly, anyone who can claim that database software is - "an exciting, brand new product" is really weird.

To be fair to the original poster, how many how would a database like this take to knock up? probably 2-3 hours including the paper screen/databse design. Then maybe what 1-2 hours making sure it works properly?

Then the guy will have to offer support of the software, what kind of IT illiterates are you going to get using this let alone trying to write it?

I think £300 is a bit excesive for a 1 user license but then again, how many back street garages that could use something like this would need more than 1 machine running it?

Just my 2p's

Tim

Bear in mind the guy is going to have to have purchased a copy of Microsoft Office XP Developer to be able to knock up runtime versions of Access, now they arnt cheap, so not everyone can create legit versions...

but I'm not convinced...

I was/am trying to knock together a similar thing for a charity, but I don't want to ching out the £££'s for a legit version of Office Developer for something that I'm not going to be making any ££ on myself!

Tom

2-3 hours to write then 1-2 to test? ha In my defense, the system has been in development for over 2 years now, not 8 hours a day 5 days a week mind you.. There are thousands of lines of code behind it. Also I can tailor any part of system to how you want it, to a certain extent. how many software companies offer that type of service? Support is also built into the cost so if there is a problem you don't have to wait a week until I email you back. The customers who I have sold it to already are very happy with it.

[snip]

This area of support is not new on other computer platforms, I expect it's a bit of a novelty on windows though.

and so they should be at 300ukp.

Steve.

Unipart already do a similar package called KIS (Keeping it Simple) it's features are about the same and that too costs about 300 ukp which also includes support.

Steve.

I use a program called "car care"

Free demo - and its only a few quid to get the reg key - it may seem american but works brilliantly in the UK!

Douglas,

Just to make it clear, I wasn't saying that it was necessarily knocked together in a few hours, what I was saying is that would be an absolute minimum and hence I could warrent the asking price. Knowing that it took over 2 years, now that would be impressive to see sold at anything less.

I wasn't saying it was overpriced, in fact like I say, quite the opposite, I am also a firm beleiver in giving the customer what they want. We have a standard framework and write the rest of the system around what the customer specifies. Cost a fair bit mor mind you.

If you want to pay less and end up with a product that is good but could work for you better but the company/author won't undertake the work OR the support is crap OR both then you should have paid the extra :-)

Oh and an outlay of £300 shouldn't take that long to recoup and if it does, you probably wouldn't be doing enough work to warrent the software anyway.

Hope this clears up my comment Douglas, good luck with you venture. Most people who comment probably don't know quite how much work goes into a saleable product, coming up with the idea, what should it do, GUI design, Basic program functionality, easily modifiable code for "not so essential" parts, testing, implementation, support.

All adds up :-/

Tim

Thanks Tim for you kind words. You are correct, most people do not fully understand what goes into writing a saleable piece of software.

Had a look at CarCare and within a few minutes of use it prompted me "Data Type conversion error". Now will your average car mechanic understand what this means? Also it doesn't seem to print out invoices which suggests double the work (Once on the PC and once on paper) Im not knocking this product in anyway, just comparing.

System looks OK, but How on earth did Nichola Johnston manage to knock out a clutch in only 30k miles?