Mechanical contractor needs your help

The L.J. Kruse Company of Berkeley, CA, is a mechanical contractor that uses plenty of Macs in its mixed office environment. But that could change without your help.

The company offers plumbing, heating and cooling and design-build services to the community and the construction industry. They currently use PCs for accounting and job costing and are moving forward to purchase orders. They use Macs for all of their document handling, according to Kruse’s Gary Navo.

“We have a service division where we dispatch plumbers for small jobs (water heater installs, etc) and a contract division where we bid larger jobs,” he told MacCentral. “Our range of work is US$100 to $2 million. We developed a customized spreadsheet for all of our pricing on the Mac, but our accountant is a PC guy who didn’t know of any good Mac accounting software. Right now we have two networks that don’t communicate with each other. We have seven Macs and 12 PCs. In addition, there are five PowerBooks.”

Last year, each management person had both a Mac and a PC, but secretaries had PCs only. As Kruse has grown, the management that’s been added has been getting PCs only. Now they’re wondering if they need two networks. And they’re considering phasing out Macs.

“We started on the Macs in 1994, and I have a pretty good knowledge of Mac OS 9,” Navo said. “We have an IT person who comes in for all of the networking and PC stuff. Most of our IT cost is PC or network related; 95 percent of our Mac problems are dealt with by me in five minutes or less.”

Kruse’s business volume is $10 million per year with about 60 employees. To help keep their Macs, they’re looking for a software package that does fairly complex accounting, construction project management, and, hopefully, the ability to import info from Excel. If you know of a product in the $15,000 to $25,000 range that would fulfill those requirements, drop Navo an e-mail.