A couple years ago, I developed an automated proposal generation system for some friends that run a small business. I got a call from them today to help them transfer the data over to a new system.
They were moving to a newer version of Quickbooks, which included the QuickBooks Easy Estimate product as an integrated part of the package. It is definitely an obvious choice for them to use that instead, since it will all be in one integrated package with all their other financial data.
The interesting thing is that this product does EXACTLY what the one that I developed a while back did: gives you forms to enter your data, and then transfers that data into proposal templates, which are stored as Word documents with fields that get populated from the database values. Then you have the filled out Word document that you can print out and/or further modify if needed. If you go to the web site, there are movies & tutorials that show how it works, and it is literally the same thing as the one I did, just slightly different looking screens for the input data.
I’m not saying that Intuit copied me or anything, but it is a nice validation of your design when you see a large software company that is the industry leader in this particular vertical market implement their solution to this requirement in the exact same way.
2 Comments
That was some good business jargon there at the end Jared. With such fluency in corprate-speak you should look into a career in office wall decoration/inspiration. I could take pictures of rocks and eagles and rivers and waves and stars and different colored people all holding hands for you, then you could write the deeply motivating and thought provoking stuff to put on the poster or whatever.
Either that or you could write mission statemnets.
That was actually more programmer-speak than corporate-speak; maybe a little of both blended together. After all, if you want to be a serious programmer you have to learn to communicate with the business people as well.
I do, however, strictly avoid the meaningless Dilbert-style buzzword corporate-speak, as that is pretty lame, and is easily recognized as such by most people.