>Has anyone used AccountMate (VFP5.0b) and or written addon components, heard any news about the softare ???

I've finished switching our in-house accounting from SBT to VMP; while I like much of what they've done, I was sorely disappointed to find that even when you buy the source code, you are not provided the source to their class libraries. This can make integrating other applications tough, although there are good data import facilities in the existing code for many standard sorts of things (import invoices, vendor invoices, journal entries, etc.) although other things I would've liked to see with built-in imports were not present.

Customization of menus is handled well (data driven), as are report customizations and additions, and in most cases, if you buy source, you can modify form behaviors easily enough, but again, the source behind the classes is not there, so detailed investigation of a a form class can be frustrating. I found myself having to cut and paste certain changes that, were I given access to the control's inheritance hierarchy, would have best been done with a change to the parent class rather than the control instances. I found certain aspects of their default numeric textbox data enbtry fields frustrating, for example, and would very much like to have been able to alter the base behavior for the clas rather than handling it instance by instance.

If you want to add menu points that fire your own code, it's fairly easy to do.

I didn't like much of the behavior of their default form manager, and I'd really have liked to be able to add SDT easily to augment or replace thir own index and cleanup code.

What code I did see was better than the code I'd been exposed to in SBT, but SBT had the clear advantage of giving all the source code when you bought source. Since our business uses both an in-house-developed order processing/warehousing/production management system, and a third-party shipping and logistics product (Pitney Bowes' Ascent system), I was disappointed at the lack of access to the business object classes, which could have been integrated much more cleanly if the classes were available in source. As a result, we found it necessary to integrate the shipping system into our in-house systems rather than use any of the invoicing and inventory management in VAM, and we decided to handle processing credit cards on our side of the fence rather than exploring the options for credit card validation and processing in VAM.

Overall, it's a nice product, but I'm disappointed at what they consider 'buying source code' to mean. Given the policy of the company and the experiences we had with our vendor, I'd hesitate to recommend it to other companies where extensive, custom modification would be needed to meet the business needs. I'm glad, for example, that our WIP and royalty processing systems didn't need to interface with VAM beyond the need to create vendor invoices and validate that vendors were in the VAM database.

If you're considering this for a production environment of your own, I'd make very certain that the vendor you deal with knows both the product and accounting well; I can provide horror stories where the vendor was less knowledgable than I might've liked. I didn't do an adequate job of qualifying the vendor's ability to accomplish tasks with his own firm's resources, and this put serious delays in our implementation of the product. We just finished our end-of-year processing with VAM, but rather than having the system live in the December/january timeframe the vendor felt he could delivery, we didn't even have workable data conversion from SBT to VAM until late March,and we're discovering problems in how the data was moved from SBT to VAM even after several months of live operation.

The problems I outline immediately above are an issue not with VAM, but with the reseller. it isn't VAM's fault that the vendor didn't understand that, while demo SBT conversion code was available for free/low cost, the people who developed it did not intend it to be a free conversion product, but a demo of their capabilities; they wanted several times the money budgeted by our vendor to handle just the conversion. This required me to get more involved with conversion and integration than I'd have liked, and since the time I don't spend working in-house is generally either billable as a consultant, or lets me explore other aspects of software development, this lack of proper qualification of the vendor resulted in a cost of conversion that was nearly an order of magnitude mre expensive than anticipated.

In brief - if it's close to your needs, it's a good product. Some simple types of customization are handled well, and standard import facilities will allow you to integrate the most common accounting documents into VAM fairly easily. If you plan to do extensive modification, there are limits to what you get in source, and your vendor may not be as knowledgable as he seems on the surface.