The pleasure and the pain of new software

One of the things I wanted to implement in the bakery was some measure of cost control, inventory and sales tracking. Looked around, tried out demos of a couple of products. The integrated systems (front of house point of sale with kitchen computers and printers) were really nice but would have cost about $10K for a bare-bones starter system and with the size of the bakery, a POS is not needed. Ran into some programs costing under $100 but they were worth just that. There was a very powerful POS and Recipe and Inventory system that was an MS/DOS application that ran in a DOS window - free but didn't do what I wanted. I kept coming back to CostGuard The program has been under continuous development for twenty five years! It has a nice user interface; there is an optional Sales module that deducts the right stuff from inventory when you sell a bowl of soup or a breakfast burrito. The kicker is that it will print out a standard FDA Nutrition label. We will be wholesaling products in the near future and the Health Department really wants to see an ingredient list if not an FDA label. That is the pleasure. Now, I have to go through all the invoices and enter the separate ingredients and the cost. Then, I have to go through all of the recipes and enter the quantities. Then I have to run the pricing and nutrition labels for everything, set desired margins and adjust the cost of each item we sell... That is the pain... I should have everything up in a week or two and this will greatly help me look at the cash flow.