DacEasy

» see daceasy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In April 1985 six people in Dallas put an entire accounting department onto a single 5.25-inch floppy disk and asked $49.95 for it. One estimate put more than four hundred firms in that market at the time, and the equivalent function from any of them ran between $1,500 and $3,000, because you bought each module separately. DacEasy integrated accounts payable, accounts receivable, billing, a double-entry general ledger, inventory and purchase orders into one program.

The company was Dac Software, Inc. Kevin Howe was president and principal founder, an Oklahoma graduate with an MBA from SMU who had been vice president of new product development at Taylor Publishing, a maker of high school yearbooks. Jose Hurtado was a Mexico-born certified public accountant and programmer who had befriended Howe while consulting for that same yearbook company. Hurtado wrote almost all of DacEasy himself, in compiled BASIC.

It worked immediately. Dac sold roughly four thousand copies a month between April and July of 1985 and eighteen thousand in August alone, and by October it topped the charts for personal computer accounting software. Support was a $50 annual contract that covered phone calls running over an hour. By June 1987 the first version had sold 170,000 copies and the company had taken more than $3.7 million since its founding, at which point version 2.0 shipped, rewritten from the ground up in C and spilling onto a second floppy.

This is American small-business software from the DOS years, which puts it in a part of the record I can read and cannot remember. I was a year old when it shipped, and my own first computer turned up thirteen years later, running Windows. Accounting packages are also the least romantic corner of this industry, which is exactly what makes the story worth telling: nothing here was sold on a demo or a magazine cover, it was sold on a number printed on the box.

~ the case file ~

~ forty nine ninety five ~

The price was the strategy and the strategy kept working. In late 1987 Dac released DacEasy Light for smaller businesses, stripped of inventory and forecasting, capped at 2,200 transactions a month and 800 checks between reconciliations. It moved over twenty thousand copies in six months. A payroll module was another $49.95 on top.

In November 1987 Howe's old employer bought the company. Insilco Corporation, a Connecticut conglomerate that already owned Rolodex and the yearbook business Howe had come out of, paid roughly $35 million for Dac Software, in what was then among the largest acquisitions of a software company anyone had made. Dac had sold 300,000 copies of its main package by then. It stayed in Dallas and kept running itself.

~ the windows order ~

Hurtado left to start a rival accounting company, M-USA Business Systems, named for Mexico and the United States. In February 1989 Dac bought the rights to Lucid 3-D, an early multi-sheet spreadsheet built by a group in Dallas, and shipped a new version of it that year. In late 1989 it began work on DacEasy for the Macintosh.

Then came the order that shaped the rest of it. Plans for a Windows version were scrapped on Insilco's instruction. In December 1990 Dac rushed version 4.0 out in time for Christmas, bugs turned up in its number-crunching engine, and the release was recalled the following month. That same January, Insilco filed for Chapter 11 and started selling what it owned. According to Howe, the buyer lined up for Dac was a group of Texas oil barons, until Sage Software of the United Kingdom came over the top at $18 million. The sale closed in May 1991.

~ nineteen more years ~

Under Sage the company renamed itself after its own product and grew to 280 employees in 1994, then shrank to 230 the year after. On 27 April 1999 the archive still found daceasy.com serving its own front page, headed "DacEasy, the Award-winning Accounting Software Developer, Online" and listing a product line that by then covered payroll and point-of-sale. By 11 May 2000 that same address was serving Sage Software's homepage out of Irvine, California, with DacEasy demoted to one entry in a product menu beside BusinessWorks, MAS 90 and Peachtree. From January 2002 the address gave up even that, answering with a bare redirect into a /daceasy folder on Sage's site.

The brand lasted nineteen years longer than the firm that made it. Sage went on selling an accounting suite called Sage DacEasy until 2019 and then stopped; there are no new licenses, only upgrades for customers who already had one. daceasy.com still resolves, and it still forwards into sage.com, to a product page that will not open without clearing a Cloudflare check first.

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