First time around was in 1983 when I had to give up my firstborn to settle a lawsuit. Ferox Microsystems, Inc. needed a replacement product fast. RCS (my firstborn) had hit the market in 1980, gained some traction, and was re-introduced as Micro DSS/Finance in 1981 in a publishing deal. It was one of the first financial modeling languages to run on a personal computer. It was sold as MicroModeler in the UK, and did quite well.
Encore was introduced late in 1983, prematurely as it turns out. We nicknamed the Exec feature in the early version "Stack Overflow" to give you an idea of how it performed. By 1984, most of the bugs had been fixed, and it started to gain traction amid some pretty dicey financial conditions including a couple of layoffs. We didn't go under, but lost momentum, and hung on by the skin of our chinny, chin, chins for a couple of decades more.
The tools were different 40 years ago, and there was a lot of hard work involved to get the simplest things to work.
I'm not saying AI is not useful for younger developers, but for those of us in danger of aging out of the profession, it is a life extender. Yes, we may have "lost a step," and no longer have the speed and for sure our memory is shot, but OMG how AI can make up for our foibles and help us harvest our earned experience.
It helped that my career took a detour these last 10 years, and I've been ensconced in a successful SaaS company called Issuetrak as CFO and advisor to my brother Hank, the founder and CEO.
Every software developer should be sentenced to years of using their own product in the wild. It has an amazing impact on the usability of the software over time. That has been my experience with Encore.
Encore is for every business manager or entrepreneur making strategic and financial decisions to guide a company. A good, well structured financial model deepens the understanding of how the business works. Always-on charting connected to the grid means the numbers are always shown with context. It makes it easier to spot errors and do sanity checks on the projections.
Also, Encore is for the accountants, analysts, and financial managers feeding management useful information on which to base decisions. These people have to stand behind the numbers they report. Encore is all about helping them understand the numbers and upping the quality of their work.
What are the specifics?
For the decision makers, it is having a financial model pre-loaded with history, and projections based on visible assumptions and logic. Reports at the push of a button. Charts, comparisons, drilldowns, search. Solid numbers on projected profits, and cash flow. You feel in control.
For the supporting staff to build the plumbing and keep the trains running on time, it's all about accuracy, efficiency, maintainability, and sneaking out for bike rides in the middle of the day. Encore enables all of the above, and I have experienced them firsthand.
This incarnation of Encore started back in March 2025 when my brother Hank called me up with this wild and crazy idea. Usually he starts these calls with, "Are you sitting down?" This time I didn't immediately roll my eyes.
So we started exploring the idea.
And yada, yada, yada: here we are.
We'll trickle out the details in the coming months. Let's just say that after that call, Hank and I became 50/50 partners in our new venture, Ferox LLC. He's Mr. MoneyBags and Mr. Cheerleader. I'm Mr. DoAllTheWork. He's had the good sense to leave me alone during the development phase, while at the same time spurring me to embrace new technologies. I had to prove to my older brother I could.
So in the age of AI, what took so long? It's been 19 months after all.
That's a whole 'nother story, coming soon. In the meantime, download the free trial and give it a spin. Let us know what you think.
Encore:
For the love of numbers.
Putting the fun back in finance.
Again.