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I would like Occupy Wall-Street to push for corporate reform. Corporations are not people and should not be given special privileges. Corporations should not be allowed to own stock in other corporations. And here is why… (more…)

“Nexus is a business management system for recyclers developed by AEON Blue Software & Development. Nexus is used by recycling centers, scrap yards, metal recyclers and exporters, smelting plants and paper processors across the United States.[citation needed] The software is in its second generation and has received consistent accolades from industry magazines such as Recycling Today[1][2][3], Scrap[4], Waste Advantage[5][6] and SDB Magazine[7].”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Recycling_Management_System_(software)

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, to be truthful, I edited their Wiki report because the “consistent accolades” were all references to press releases and not really accolades at all.

I’m not happy with the program. It does print nice tickets. We used to have to use the calculator to figure all the tickets.

But the reports the program has are totally inadequate. Oh, the software developer says that everything is custom. He will write anything we want.

Well, not quite. He said it would be easy to have the program look up the names of vendors and check to see if they are on the do-not-buy list. Not so easy… We’re still waiting.

I had a policeman who wanted a printout of everything a certain customer has bought from us. Evidently, other scrap yards may have the capability to produce the report. It doesn’t work for us. All I can do is take 6-10 minutes and print out each ticket.

I have sent emails to the company and requested reports and changes. It got to be too many emails so they requested that I list what I want in order of importance. Here’s my list:

1. I want the problem of the extra drivers being added fixed.
2. I want a decent cash report
3. I wanted to be able to search on ticket set – This they did!
4. Cash purchase reports. The purchase reports are all accrual. I need cash basis.
5. I want a better search for customers. The only one that works is horribly slow. And I want a printed report for that customer.

I wanted to be able to avoid having to reenter all the tickets into Quickbooks. I shouldn’t have to. Should be able to print out a report of what we purchased for the day. Unfortunately, the only report I can print out is the total of what was weighed. We have tickets that go unpaid for a couple days, tickets that are informational and get deleted… Anyhow, I can’t get a cash-basis report of what scrap was purchased and paid for. I can’t get a report of the tickets in numerical order, or in order of customer name. I can’t get a report of the tickets for each inventory item.

It also adds extra drivers to vendors. This is a major problem. In order to avoid this happening we have to close the ticket screen between payments. Every single time.

And the cash drawer report. Oh, my! It was right once. Mostly it is wrong. We pay ticket “groups” but the ticket group still shows as outstanding so we mark it paid again. And it gets listed twice on the report. We add cash to the drawer. I thought that should appear on the report. So they added it. So now we don’t get a ticket total.

So my typical morning. I prepare the Leads report. I go through and look up all the missing information. Often it is missing because of the additional drivers mentioned above. I upload the Leads report.

I do a spreadsheet. I enter each ticket from the individual paper tickets we keep. Then I take the cash report and enter it onto my spreadsheet. (It doesn’t export to Excel.) Then I take the columns and copy them and sort them so I can compare the actual tickets to the cash report. That way I can find errors on the cash report and in the tickets saved.

I print out the material purchased for the day. I just take the actual money that we spent and fudge the numbers to approximate the same ratio as the accrual report. Not accurate, I know, but it’s the best I can do without posting each ticket to QuickBooks.

The program has no instructions because it is “continually evolving”. There are no installation disks. If a computer fails or we replace a computer, we have to contact the company to install the program on the new computer.

It basically came with no reports. All the reports have to be custom done. It is only supposed to manage inventory. Everything else is an extra that the software company will do for you when they have time. Right now they are so busy installing the program at other scrapyards that they have no time to fix our system.

As long as you enter everything correctly, the program will work smoothly. Unfortunately, we have alot of user errors. Tickets entered under the wrong name (have to delete the ticket and re-enter under the right name); one employee deleted an inventory item without knowing that it permanently deletes it from all the records, another deleted the bank account – now it doesn’t print checks – I put back the bank account but we lost the format for printing checks. I can’t correct a ticket that was written on a previous day because I would have to unpay the ticket and when I would mark it paid again, it would be marked as being paid today. I would have to change the date on the computer to get around this but that is totally impractical.

Here is their latest response to my request for reports:

“Our software is custom software, every feature, every report, every button was put there by the needs of a customer. We are not in the business of creating excess, unneeded, or unwanted items in the software, it is not cost effective nor is it efficient to do that. When a customer has a request, we add it, if there are no requests for a specific item, we do not add it unless we feel it will be beneficial and cost effective to do so.”

Now really… I’d like you to sit down and think of every single report you need in a year for your bookkeeping program. List them in order of importance. You have ten minutes. If you miss listing one report, you will have to request it and possibly wait weeks or months before you can get it.

Is that what you want when you buy a $10,000 computer program?

I got the book “Working with the Ones You Love, Conflict Resolution & Problem Solving Strategies for a Successful Family Business” by Dennis T. Jaffe, Ph.D, 1990, Cornari Press, from the Columbus Public Library. I thought the book was pretty good.

Managing Workplace Negativity