[Cialug] Courier V.everythying modem

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Feb 22, 2011, at 6:00 PM, Tim Wilson wrote:

> If a dealer started sending several (or many) bills of sales to the state that had skips in the numbering sequence, it could be a tip off.  I'm not saying that is the case but I find it hard to believe that the only reason they are still using printers that are hard to maintain (you can't go to the local Best Buy to buy a new ribbon for the printer) is because their systems are antiquated.


Really? Because the health insurance industry processes billions of dollars a year through COBOL systems with fixed-width fields that can't handle two dependents with the same birthday and with no common data interchange formats to process claims or accumulator data between different systems. And not just small businesses -- it's the industry standard top to bottom. 8 line items per claim, length-limited fields, no case distinction, dates as ASCII data, etc. The fact that an invoice system at a car dealership hasn't been updated for 10 years doesn't surprise me in the least.

Think what a big hassle it is for companies with in-house business-systems staff to convert their account or sales systems. Now imagine you run a business with 1 on-time desktop support guy and maybe phone support from your sales system vendor. Who is going to do the data migrations to get all your old data into a new system that works with a new printer? Or setup the commissions policies in the new system. Or make sure it integrates with your accountant's software? Small businesses are notorious for running old software and hardware until it gives up ghost.

That being said, I don't know anything about the regulations. It's possible that impact-printed forms are a requirement; no one has bothered to check either way. I'm just saying they don't provide any significant security against fraud, if that is the motivation for a regulation, and I'm making a countering supposition that the carbon-copy forms might exist to support the printer as easily as the other way around.

	Zach

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