>Not a mystery, no, but they are large, complex applications. It's taken me 6 months to write an app with about the amount functionality of _one_ module in Pro Series. I just can't imagine one person sitting down to write AP, AR, GL, IC, PO, PR, PO, SO, and all the other stuff that goes with it, from scratch, and getting it done in less than a few years.
>
>Look at how long it's taking Red Wing to get their VFP version all done, and they're a large company with a staff of developers. There's a lot of packages out there, and none of them were just whipped up overnight.
>
>So, yeah, I think it's kinda funny having a person announce they're going to write their own accounting software package as if it were no big deal. :)
>
WE wrote our own and it has all of the pieces you mentioned except payroll which we have put on the back burner for quite a while now. When I sit back and try to add up the time it took, I will admit it was substantial but not years. We are just now completing a rewrite to move it into multi-tier architecture and the second time thru was pretty easy.

Why did we write our own? Several reasons:

1. We wanted source code
2. We did not want to pay royalties
3. We wanted consistent "look and feel" with the rest of our apps. Most of the accounting "foundations" out there at the time had the attitude.."here is our accounting, you may add your specific sales order screens"
4. We had a client willing to pay for it because he had some special requirements.

For one, his company is really a conglomerate with several incorporated entities (TOTAL SALES > $400M). He concentrates in one industry but has several different companies, each doing different aspects of the industry. Because he has clients that are MEGA sized, they could not care less which of his companies sent him an invoice, they paid whichever of his companies they felt like. So his cash application module that we built automatically handles the correct inter-company journal entries for posting cash to an invoice from one company while the actual check deposit was made in another company.

5. It was fun. And now we sell a variety of apps, each tailored to a specific industry and/or functionality but they all have our identical accounting modules at the core.

Now on to that Payroll module!!!.

Ken