Balmori Software Inc.

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Once upon a time, we here at Balmori Software launched a new ad image. It featured a stuffed toy bear leaning against a battered anvil. Through the years, people have asked us, "What's the story behind the teddy bear and the anvil?"

Let's look at its elements in turn. First, the bear. It's of course an artifact from childhood. It awakens feelings of comfort, friendship, and security. To adults, it's a figure from a cherished, less complicated stage of our lives.

Now the anvil. It triggers the same mental pictures regardless of the culture you're from. Most people see in the anvil a simple, durable piece of equipment for making honest, useful things. Things like plowshares and chisels and shears. Wrought iron chairs and doors and gates. Medieval knights' armor and samurai swords and stirrups. For most people, then, the anvil is a symbol of robustness, of solidity, of indestructibility. And of honest usefulness.

And so the teddy bear and anvil are images charged with positive associations for most of us. The teddy bear conveys that Balmori Software products are user-friendly, familiar, comforting. The anvil says that Balmori Software solutions are reliable, robust, and designed for heavy duty.

What does "user-friendly" mean?

User-friendliness means that business people enjoy immediate, concrete benefits from a software solution. Without needing computer programming knowledge, and without needing elaborate, time-consuming training. It means software solutions that are easy to use, easy to learn, easy to master.

Why is user-friendliness important in a work setting? You be the judge. A new user can learn a user-friendly software solution faster. And a faster learning curve = cheaper training cost = becoming productive sooner rather than later. A new user will make fewer mistakes maintaining it. We all know that mistakes = rework = slower processes = more expense.

Users will engage with a user-friendly app with more confidence. In contrast, both novice and experienced users will use a hard-to-use application with reluctance. And it makes workers more likely to retreat back to manual processes, thus defeating its purpose.

Bottom line: A user-friendly solution gives the user a deep confidence in his command of the software.

For the business owner, user-friendly software means ready access to usable business information. Inventory stock on hand. Receivables ageing. Customer ledgers. Collections lists. Therefore, a workplace where basic information is accessible - and crystal clear.

It means a workplace where information is not guarded by a special priesthood. It means a workplace where everyone can instantly get the transaction information they need. It means a more efficient workplace. And a more efficient workplace means a lower-cost business, a more profitable business.

Now the anvil. The anvil of course evokes durability, simplicity, and usefulness.

What is it that makes a piece of business software robust, and heavy-duty, and reliable? It's not just about using a development platform that can handle 50 million transactions. It's not just about writing code that's resistant to hanging and crashing.

What is it then that makes a business application robust? We at Balmori Software feel robustness is about long-term credibility of the data. A business solution is robust if all the information it contains are mutually consistent and you can count on it to stay that way.

For example, if the chief accountant looks at accounts receivable and then at collections, she should see no gaps or overlaps or inconsistencies between the two reports. Plus, both reports should be consistent with the customer ledger.

A manager should be able to look up fourteen-months-ago sales as easily as last month's sales. A solution is robust if it will let a disbursement clerk print a cheque only if there's an existing accounts payable and a PO and a payment authorization entry.

Ultimately, robustness is about having strong audit trails. An audit trail is a piece of evidence that a business event has occurred. An official receipt number is an audit trail of a collection transaction. An invoice is an audit trail of a sale transaction. Every transaction in a piece of software must have a permanent audit trail.

Furthermore, a well-designed application will not only preserve the audit trail. It will also make the relationship between transaction and supporting document "unbreakable."

For example, a well-designed business solution will automatically reduce the inventory balance the very instant you post a sale. No need to manually update the inventory level after every sale. Likewise, a well-designed application will update the receivables balance the instant you post a collection.

Robust business solutions banish encoding errors by reducing occasions for data encoding.

They give the businessman confidence in the integrity of his data. It is strong audit trails - and skillful programming - that give data this all-important integrity. Strong audit trails are the concrete manifestation of "robustness."

To create software with strong audit trails, you need more than someone who can program a pretty dialog screen. You need a developer with deep understanding of both programming and accounting and finance. You need a vendor and developer with deep understanding of systems and procedures, controls and audit trails. You need programmers who not only can deploy disciplined logic, but who are also conversant in the practices and conventions of commerce. In the world of software development, you can't assume that those skill sets always come together.

Balmori Software has from the start believed in the primacy of strong audit trails. Strong audit trails have been a defining quality of our software solutions. They are our competitive advantage in the markets we serve. But Balmori also wanted from the start to build a reputation for user-friendly software. Simple, easy to use, heavy-duty software. Solutions that regular people can deploy quickly. Solutions that they can live with, trouble-free, for many years to come.

These are all the positive notions we wanted the world to have in mind about Balmori Software solutions. These are the reasons we paired off the teddy bear and the anvil.

The end. - rsr

Title:   The teddy bear and the anvil

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Questions? Reactions? Write to balmori@balmorisoftware.com.

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