Bid to build a small business finance project?

[MichaelBluejay]

Apologies if this is the wrong category for this post -- none of them looked really relevant.

I'd like to hire someone to build a simple small-business booking program, and SuperCard seems like the quickest way to build it, which would keep my costs low. I'm looking for something like Liquid Ledger. That's what I'm using now, but it's *really* buggy and has some other annoyances. I'm not really wild about any of the finance software I've seen. LL has the idea right but the execution is kind of poor.

There are two special requirements which will make it harder (from a SC perspective). The first is that I'd like the ability to enter transactions line-by-line on a single card, rather than having to enter each transaction on a separate card. The second is that I'd like the data to be stored in a separate file from the app, because I'm frequently backing up my data to the Internet. So unless a project with no data can be kept to under 200k (which seems unlikely), I'd want the data to be separate. (LL keeps separate data files, but they're enormous -- a few megabytes for data that would take only a few hundred K as a FileMaker document.)

If there's any interest in this then please suggest a rough range (lowest to highest cost), and if it looks plausible then I can spec out a complete set of requirements.

[supercardus]

Michael,

I think you might help folks here out a bit if you had a ballpark number on what you expect this project might cost. LL is a $49 program. Building an application from scratch with a polished interface that does everything LL does with external storage may easily take someone 100 hours or more.

[MichaelBluejay]

Thanks for the reply. I think a developer has a better idea of how much time this should take and how much their time is worth than I do, so that's why I hoped to get some bids. Your suggestion of possibly 100 hours is very helpful. (My wild guess was about 40 hours, so this is in the same order of magnitude.) If other developers agree, then I guess the next question is, what's the going rate for a SuperCard developer?

I see two ways to price the work: The normal way would be that I own the output and could sell it as my own product, to recoup my development costs. If the cost to me is low enough I'd want to go this route. But if the cost to me is rather high, then another idea is that the developer would own the output and could sell the product as his/her own, in exchange for giving me a lower development price. I'm open to ideas.

[supercardus]

My wild guess was about 40 hours

I thought my guess of a hundred hours was pretty conservative. It was of course based on a guess of exactly what would need to be done… program design, interface design, report design, scripting basic behavior, report generation, scripting the paging of data in and out from an external source, and QA. I know few, if any, individuals that could accomplish all of this in under three weeks.

And of course without a detailed specification outlining the exact behavior and feature set you wish to contract, one could only guess what it would really take. Even with a comprehensive specification, the amount of effort to accurately bid a project comparable to a commercial application would IMHO require significant effort (as would the spec). This is why I suggested a ballpark budget so folks can gauge if your expectations are realistic before expending that effort.

I guess the next question is, what's the going rate for a SuperCard developer?

Well I pay the local shop $90/hour for what I evaluate as minimally skilled labor (changing oil, replacing brakes, flushing a cooling system, etc.), and my gardener charges me $75/month to come every two weeks to mow my lawn for 20 minutes (computing to about $112/hr). I live in California and things may be more reasonable in other states, but I 'think' you can assume anyone worth there salt would garner at least this much per hour.

I see two ways to price the work: The normal way would be that I own the output and could sell it as my own product, to recoup my development costs. If the cost to me is low enough I'd want to go this route. But if the cost to me is rather high, then another idea is that the developer would own the output and could sell the product as his/her own, in exchange for giving me a lower development price. I'm open to ideas.

These are two valid options. But the latter one is very hard to find unless you bring some compelling ideas to the table. Most programers don't want to be, or don't know how to be in the software selling business. For those rare individuals that can succeed in both, well… they are usually hard at work on their own ideas.

[MichaelBluejay]

Thank you again for the reply. I guess this all might be moot if I don't get any good bids. One person replied who said it would take up to a year and whose price could be $12k, which is more than 100 hours @ $100/hr. Another seemed to want to build it according to the interface he preferred, not mine, and wouldn't even look at the Liquid Ledger app that I suggested as an example of a good interface.

Anyway, I've thought of a couple of things which could make it possible for me to put this together myself with my meager skills, and I'm going to be on a ship for a week soon without Internet access, so I might try to take a stab at it during that time. The first is a way around needing to be able to enter and edit data line-by-line, rather than one-record-per-card: I can have a dedicated area on the card to enter or edit transactions (so I don't have to have a gazillion fields to account for), and from all the data I just list all of it line-by-line under the transaction-editing area, using the table data add-on that I saw around here that someone had created. That will simplify things considerably.

The second is that SuperCard has commands built in to handle external datafiles. I don't know why I was thinking it didn't, maybe just because I'd never seen any projects which used them. So this part is pretty easy, too.

If I can't get something running on my own, I will likely try to hire a developer for up to $10k for this project. I think I could reasonably sell 200 copies @ $50 to recoup my costs. I also think I might have been wrong about SuperCard being the cheapest development environment. If I go to elance and someone uses a more traditional language that takes 2.5x longer to develop, but charges only 1/4 as much (programmers work pretty cheaply there), then that might save me some money.

[supercardus]

I've thought of a couple of things which could make it possible for me to put this together myself with my meager skills

Note that this is the best way to transform meager skills into competent ones.

I also think I might have been wrong about SuperCard being the cheapest development environment. If I go to elance and someone uses a more traditional language that takes 2.5x longer to develop, but charges only 1/4 as much (programmers work pretty cheaply there), then that might save me some money.

Keep in mind that you are talking about folks in other areas of the world where 25% of what you might make in the U.S. is a damn fine wage… but 2.5 x SuperCard Dev Time for the same app in a low level language is wishful thinking IMHO, and my past experience with offshore talent is that it can be a bit of a crap shoot.

I think it is a wise decision to try and tackle this yourself. Enlist (and pay for) help when you need it as opposed to having someone else do it from the ground floor up. This is exactly what SuperCard was designed for.

Best of luck.