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When Hartmarx sold Kuppenheimer, this direct-sales women's clothier found itself out of an accounting system - and into a much better one.
Barrie Pace, a Chicago-based, $50-million, direct-mail purveyor of women's business clothing, had a mere four months to implement a new accounting system. Its parent company, HartMarx, had sold Kuppenheimer, the Atlanta-based tailored men's wear company, which also had handled accounting for Barrie Pace's catalog sales. And the company had to act quickly.
It elected to replace its external minicomputer-based system with an internal, PC-based system that allows the company to produce reports on a timely basis and gives it instant access to supporting data.
Another bonus of the system overhaul: Screens and reports can be modified whenever needed without involving a programmer's services.
Barrie Pace chose Solomon IV for Windows, a product made by Solomon Software of Findlay, Ohio, and hired Skokie, Ill.-based SLSF Systems Management to implement it and customize it to their needs.
Linda Perri, controller at Barrie Pace during the systems transition, says "control and flexibility" informed her decision to go with a PC-based system. "With the old minicomputer-based system," she recalls, "our division was at the mercy of programmers at the sister division's office to make any and all modifications to the system, even for something as simple as changing the format of a report. These changes were expensive and often took a considerable period of time.
"Another problem was that we had a very difficult time getting access to data, except at the end of the month, when we received voluminous reports," Perri continues. "Trying to track down the answer to a question in the middle of the month required a tedious search through paper support documents."
Clear and secure. Perri says she chose Solomon IV for Windows primarily because it offered a secure, easy-to-understand audit trail. The system also allows the user to quickly view general ledger account history information and drill down to supporting...