As a software developer (or I suppose any type of builder), it's satisfying to see your work or design actually put to use and used by the intended audience. Perhaps even more so when the work is mission-critical and used in real-time financial processing. At the same time, it's a bit of burden to know that tens or hundreds of millions of dollars will be flowing through code that you wrote.

Some (especially the readers of this blog ... I hope) would see it as an important responsibility. But since I'm talking about it here, you know that not all think that way. Here's a small sample of a paradox system that processes $180M to $250M worth of transactions and revenue annually. 

;NOTE: Comments added by the anonymous submitter -- originally uncommonted
;get the size of the string of last month's number and
;pad with 0 if required
if size(string(month(today())-1)) =2 then
 quote="'"
else 
 quote="'0"
endif
 
;get the 1st day of last month.
;notice, subtracting 15 days from today to get last month, then taking last month's year...
date1=quote+string(month(today ())-1)+"/01/"+string(year(today()-15))+"'"
;pad today's month with 0 if required
if size(string(month(today()))) =2 then
 quote="'"
else 
 quote="'0"
endif
;get the first of the month
date2=quote+string(month(today()))+"/01/"+string(year(today()))+"'"
;now that we've gotten last month's first date and this month's first date ask the user if
;that's what they want to process.
if msgquestion("PROCEED?","Do you wish to query for "+DATE1+" to "+DATE2+"?") = "No" then
 date1.view("Enter first date of month...")
 date2.view("Enter last date of month...")
 if msgquestion("PROCEED?","Do you wish to query for "+DATE1+" to "+DATE2+"?") = "No" then 
  return
 endif
endif

And some nice additional info from the submitter ...

The rest of the application calculated month ends in the same manner; i.e., starting January 1st and ending February 1st. As part of month end closing, the end users would manually adjust the books to account for the extra day of revenue. That worked well until the day the person who handled these adjustments was on vacation. Hilarity ensued when the replacement wasn't aware of the need to manually adjust the entries.

Nonetheless, upper management still refused to authorize changing the production accounting system (which by the way will turn ten years old in 2006). Although they're still in business, the company's stock went from the mid-$20's to a penny stock during the time I was there.

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