What Began Boldly 30 Years Ago Continues to Energize

Retrospective

It was really more than 30 years ago; we had worked until 2:00am almost every night for 3-months and it came down to taking too much time doing software part-time. We scrounged for some cash, financed what we could (house on the line) and the articles of incorporation were officially filed on January 5th, 1996. FinSoft was launched.

It began when a 24-hour sleepless (focused and possessed) session to layout the wish-list, business plan, what screens needed coding, etc. It evolved into much more. The first product was AssetWriter field exam software and version 1 did not even have a word processor. Joe was auditing, Don was coding for FinSoft and others and we survived year-one.

Lesson #1: Double The Budget

“Joe’s 80:20 rule.” You dream up 100% of what you want and you get 80% of it done for 100% of your budget. The other 20% needed changed and some gets done, but other priorities come in and you spend 100% of your cash getting 80% of that done.

Sometime in 1998, Huntington Bank came to us, and they wanted to download data to calculate ineligibles electronically. We didn’t have the funds to pull it off, but Huntington agreed to pay for 1/3 of the initial release and would “walk” if it did not work. And so, the journey into electronic ineligibles began. We wrote our own parsing engine (now in version 4) and we got it up and running. We poured all of our profits back in, year after year and grew it. Over 30,000 hours invested so far and we’re not done, but AssetReader is by far the best in the business.

We moved from VB5 to VB6 to DotNet programming languages and each rewrite was a significant investment. We continue to invest substantially each year, to this day.

Lesson #2: Create and It’s Not Work

“The Write brothers had it and so do we.” The Wright brothers’ “dogged determination” is often cited for their unyielding, resilience and methodical problem-solving in the face of numerous setbacks. But we had other advantages, a senior software engineer and a CPA that was an ABL insider with over 11 years of field exam experience at the time (19 years before Joe’s last field exam). The Write brothers were bicycle mechanics (so was Joe).

For many years it was 7:00am to 11:00pm 7-days a week. Our kids thought that 7-11 was our schedule and not a convenience store. But along the way, we made friends and found our footing. Our customers are friends and we like to think that we treat them as if they were our only customer. The partners here get along better than most married couples; a touch of Nirvana in the quest.

We created a ton of stuff in this space of time. ABL-Help (now in year 28):

AssetWriter field exam software
AssetReader data download software with AR and Inventory ineligible calculations and audit stats
AssetArchive to gather time-series analysis from AssetReader and identify anomalies in the data, plus a related confirmations module
AssetReader-Web and portal to put AssetReader in the cloud
AssetWriter-AI to let AI deliver A-game field exam writeups in minutes.
ABL-Help as the industry guide to ineligibles, definitions, diagnostics and fraud alerts
ABL-Train for self-paced on-line learning.

We’ll now have over 2000 hours in prompt development for AssetWriter-AI and about the same amount of time in AI related code before it is released. Joe’s 80:20 rule did not apply because the time and financial budgets were unlimited, and we’re now experts in planning significant projects.

Lesson #3: Stay Energized

“What’s new makes you young again.” The AssetWriter-AI project has been a blast to learn new stuff. For people that try AI in a browser search, that is like driving a car. To do AI right, it is more like building software and writing a thesis. It appears that significant planning and techniques are needed to do prompts right. With programming AI, it is more like the film industry with pre-production planning, production, and post-production tweaking. Seeing and mastering all three has been energizing. The next new thing can’t be far away, we’ll learn still more new stuff. Bring it!

When you consider that we started with Windows 3.0 and a 1GB hard drive (not a typo) and screens were running around 800 X 600 resolution at the time, it is a massive change in technology from a 1GB drive to AI in 30 years.

What’s next? Now that we’re warmed up, there is more to come on the AI and BI side to improve analysis and reduce operating costs. Stay tuned…