Ever since Spire 1.0 was first released in 2015, it has been improving significantly both in terms of features and stability. Since the program has been steadily expanding it is becoming more complex, and it was time to bring in some additional resources for quality assurance and product development.

The exciting news is that Rick Notman is joining Spire in this quest to create ‘perfect’ software. Rick was formerly with BusinessVision, where he started as a Tech Support Rep and finished as the VP of Information Technology 20 years later.

[Back story for those not familiar with this software: BusinessVision was created in the 80’s and was acquired by Sage in the early 2000’s; Sage announced end of life for BV around 2011, at which point the makers of BVEssentials (a popular 3^rd party add-on) launched Spire, which incorporated the features of BV and BVEssentials but adopted a modern SQL database.]

Rick brings a ton of ability, relevant experience and, most importantly, passion for making great software that enables business owners to run their businesses efficiently and effectively.

And if that’s not enough, Spire is augmenting their internal testing processes with software that tests the software. It’s called Ranorex, which is a multi-platform automated testing tool that will improve the stability of future releases.   Using this tool, Spire’s User Interface is run and results are validated prior to release.   Generally, the use of test automation tools like these are limited to companies with large IT groups such as Seimens, Cisco and Yahoo. Spire has arrived!

Spire 2.7 and 2.8

Now let’s get caught up with the Spire versions. Spire 2.7 was released in June of this year; its main job was to speed up lookups and processing in large data sets – as in more than 1,000,000 inventory records as an example. Yes, some very large companies are now using Spire!

Spire 2.8 is due out shortly and will include:

• Integrated Credit Card processing, which means that when you choose a Debit or Credit payment method within Spire, it automatically sends the transaction to the payment gateway, which is Pay Firma, a Canadian company located in BC.
• A historical inventory report, which will allow you to run an inventory listing based on a prior date, such as any month end.
• Auto installation of Spire updates on client computers (once the company decides to apply a particular update and the server is updated).

A physical inventory count module is next up in Spire 2.9.

As always, please feel free to contact me should have you have questions or comments, and especially if you would like to see how Spire can meet your business needs.