ANTHISTLE SYSTEMS & PROGRAMMING LTD. 563 Patricia Drive, Oakville, Ontario, CANADA L6K 1M4 Telephone 416-845-7959 (Area Code will change to 905 Oct.4th. 1993) 3rd. April, 1991 REGISTRATION FOR PAYROLL USA ============================ PAYROLL USA is a super payroll program - user friendly, menu driven, pop up windows, on line edits, and it comes with built in interfaces to Lotus 123 and Symphony, other programs which can read .DIF files, also programs which can read dBASE III / dBASE IV .DBF files, so that you can easily use those popular programs to create your own additional custom reports, do further analysis etc. The PAYROLL USA system is complete in itself, handles large or small (1 employee and up) payrolls, does all calculations, prints Pay Checks (Regular Pin Feed or Laser) or Pay Slips (with an option to transfer pay directly into employee bank accounts). Prints Check Register, Payroll Register, Lists of Employees who had a particular pay or deduction item (example list for your health insurance carrier of who paid what premiums), etc. It also provides a printed Summary Journal Entry which can be rekeyed into any accounting system or even used with manual accounting. The Registered User Version includes Quarterly Government Reports and Year End W-2 Printing (W-2's can be edited before printing). PAYROLL USA requires a computer with at least 512K of memory and a hard disk installed. If you are not a Registered User then you have the time limited trial version with the 1991 Federal Taxes. These Taxes are OK for 1991 so you can try the system out (but keep your pay dates and system clock dates prior to end Mar. 1994 or the system will stop working). State Taxes are user updatable, but Federal Taxes are not. You must become a registered user if you want 1992 Federal Taxes, the W-2, 941, 940, and Quarterly State Unemployment print programs, and the data encryption program. SHAREWARE PRICE --------------- The ShareWare SPECIAL price of PAYROLL USA is U.S.$149.95 -that may sound high for a ShareWare product but after you have looked at the programs you will have an appreciation of the work and the skill which has gone into crafting this masterpiece. This is the Rolls Royce of PC Payroll Systems. Development costs have been very high, and the market is more restricted than for most programs. It is of interest only to business owners and accountants who have an IBM PC XT or IBM AT or IBM PS/2, or compatibles (including 286 and 386 machines), and who do, or wish to do, their own payroll. It is not therefore going to have the wide appeal of, for example, a Word Processor, or a general Menu Program, which private individuals as well as companies might want to buy. The per copy price is largely governed by the likely number of copies which will be sold. At $149.95 it will repay its cost many times over in savings of time for your Bookkeeper or Payroll Manager, not to mention the increased accuracy and reduced frustration. You could not develop something like this in house without adding 3 or 4 zeroes at the end of that figure. Sad to say, some companies have tried. You may also want to compare it to the Payroll Modules offered by several accounting packages at $799.95 and up, or the IBM Accounting Assistant Series Payroll Edition at around $700.00 for the PC, or with one of the IBM System 36 Payroll Programs at around $3,750 or $4,500. There is also a mandatory U.S.$50.00 annual fee for Tax Updates. The updates are a complete replacement of your existing programs and any other improvements or changes to the system will be included. You are therefore always assured of having the most recent release of the PAYROLL USA System. Your first year's tax update fee is included in your Registration, example if you Register for 1991 the 1992 tax updates will be sent to you free of charge as soon as they are available. Please mail us a check or money order. We have banking facilities which can handle regular U.S. Checks and Money Orders. Postage from the U.S.A. to Canada as at February 1991 is 40 cents for the 1st ounce (11 cents higher than U.S. Domestic Mail) plus (on heavy letters) 23 cents each additional ounce. There is a file called INVOICE.TXT on your program directory for your ordering convenience. If you prefer to phone in your order and happen to get our answering machine please leave a message with your name, company, address, phone number and what it is you are ordering then immediately mail us your check in payment (if possible with the order form INVOICE.TXT completed to confirm correct spelling of name and address for future updates). At the present time we do not take credit cards, but we will not delay shipment of your order while waiting for your check though this policy is subject to change if we start getting bad checks or none payments. It is pointless for rip off artists to phone in orders and not pay for them as the programs they receive will be useless anyway after the next Federal Tax change when our tax update service will not be available to them. In the case of monthly reminders being required for slow payers additional processing fees will be debited to your account and tax updates will not be available until all outstandings including these additional costs have been cleared by certified check or money order. Go ahead, try it out, use it if you wish, but please do not let that stop you from Registering right away. The number of Registrations we get, and the time frame we get them in, will influence our marketing plans for the future. This in turn has an influence on price. We do not see it going any lower, but poor response may force a loading for sales expenses so we can profitably sell it by more conventional means. Please note that these fees cover your contribution to writing the program and distribution media only, in particular they do not confer ownership of the program, nor are they high enough to spend hours on the telephone answering questions. The odd simple query we don't mind, but if you are on to us for more than a total ( of all your calls) of 30 minutes we will have to bill you U.S. $45.00 hour (75 cents/minute) consulting fees for the excess time. All telephone calls are at your expense, if you leave messages for us to call you back long distance it will be on a collect basis, the price we are charging is not high enough to do it any other way. The fees were set based on the assumption that the programs will be used on one computer at one location. If your organisation does Payroll at multiple locations and you have it in mind to purchase one copy then copy and distribute the programs to all locations, then you are obviously costing us money. The same principle applies if you are for example an Accounting Practice with multiple partners who will each want their own copy to process their own clients payroll. If this is your situation then please contact us with the circumstances and we can discuss a group rate. MAILING DELAYS -------------- Please do not wait until the last minute to Register. December and January are very busy months for us and additional delays may occur then due to peak loads. In normal circumstances your check takes about a week to reach us, the disks take about a week or 10 days to reach you. Remember to use 40 cents postage when mailing your order and check to Canada. Some do get through at the domestic 29 cent rate but most are returned to sender by the U.S. Post Office for the 11 cents extra postage - it only slows things up. To speed things along you can also phone in your order, and if you need super fast service then overnight delivery is available to most urban (populated) areas for an extra $20.00 . DISK SIZE --------- Please be sure to mention if the 3 1/2 inch 720K disk size is needed (for PS/2 and most portables), else we ship on 5 1/4 inch 360K disks. WHY WE TIME LIMITED THE WORKING PROGRAMS ---------------------------------------- The Slide Show is not limited in any way, but you should be aware that the ShareWare trial version of the working programs, which are otherwise fully functional, will stop working if either the current date or the pay date are beyond the expiry date (end March 1994). For all practical purposes this is not really a time limit at all as it is a very generous 3 years from release date and the Federal Taxes in this program will be well and truely obsolete long before then. It might even protect you from inadvertantly calculating long obsolete taxes. We feel this limit is necessary for two reasons: 1. Not enough people voluntarily pay for "ShareWare". -------------------------------------------------- Unfortunately the advertising of some of the Disk Copying Services encourage this by emphasising words like "FREE" or "$5.00 a Diskfull". Please do not confuse ShareWare with Public Domain (P.D.). P.D. software is free, but there is little of that for business use and to the best of my knowledge there are no P.D. Payroll programs for the IBM PC. ShareWare is Copyrighted Programs which you can try for free and purchase for less than Commercial prices. It can be low cost, but never that low. The money you pay to Disk Copying Services for disks is solely for their copying time, materials, postage, handling, other overheads and profit. It does not pay for the ShareWare programs on those disks. It only pays for the opportunity to try them out. Do not be misled into thinking otherwise. The program developers receive no payment from the Disk Copying/Distribution services, the arrangement exists only because it provides a distribution channel to get those programs into the hands of people who want to use them and are willing to voluntarily pay the modest Registration Fee asked rather than 3 to 5 times that amount through regular sales channels. Please consider that when you buy a program through regular channels you are paying more for the Distribution Costs, Advertising, and Packaging, than for the program itself. Because of various abuses several ShareWare authors no longer release new programs as ShareWare. The future of ShareWare depends on the willingness of end users to pay for programs they use regularly, if it dies it will be a pity because it was a good idea for program developer (free distribution) and end user (try before you buy, low cost) alike. 2. To protect the future commercial marketability of this system. -------------------------------------------------------------- Payroll is strictly a business application. ShareWare distribution has done O.K. for us since 1986, particularly in recent years, but we have a feeling that our program is still only reaching a small fraction of its potential market. We suspect most business owners have never heard of ShareWare so we may consider using more conventional sales methods (at a higher price to cover sales costs.) We do not think we would still have that option if the system were available for free and with no restrictions in the ShareWare market. We have to protect our huge investment in development costs and maximize our return on investment. Note that if we change marketing methods existing ShareWare Registered Users will continue to receive support. We cannot replace the expired programs overnight, so allow a month for postal etc. delays and mail your payment in plenty of time before a federal tax update or program expiry. Federal deductions will be obsolete 1-1-1992 and the price may increase October 1992 so please do not leave it until the last moment to pay. As soon as you decide you wish to use the system put a check in the mail. The sooner we get you on our mailing list the sooner we can start advising you of enhancements etc. If you do not Register, we do not know you exist and if something comes up you should know about we cannot tell you. Because of the way ShareWare is passed around we may not even be aware that the BBS or Disk Copying Service that you got if from have it, so we cannot tell them either. If you want to tell us where you got it from when Registering it would help us to know where to send revisions, and to build records of who is selling the most copies for possible future business development plans. We cannot afford to provide you with free software. We are giving you the advantage of trying the system out for the cost of disks and postage, or download time, before you decide whether or not you like it enough to pay in full for it, but we are not giving it away. We think that is fair - don't you. Year end is a busy period, new Registrations then are subject to delays so do not wait, Register now - also take advantage of the SPECIAL price for early Registrations, we will guarantee that price until end October 1992 after that it MAY be increased substantially (depending on how many Registrations we get). PRINTED DOCUMENTATION / PACKAGING --------------------------------- To keep the price reasonable we are not supplying pre-printed documentation or any fancy packaging at the ShareWare price. These only push the price up without adding anything to the usefulness of the programs. The various documentation files on these disks, and the Slide Show, together contain far more information than would be in any pre-printed manual. Because of the high set up costs involved in printing, manuals tend to get carved in stone and not be updated as often as they should be. (Which program author wants to throw out a couple of thousand expensively printed manuals everytime a minor change is made). Keeping them on disk allow us the flexibility to quickly make changes to the documentation as new enhancements are added. LEGAL DISCLAIMERS ----------------- The programs are be subject to the usual disclaimers, as follows: Anthistle Systems & Programming Ltd. makes no warranty, either express or implied, including but not limited to any implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, regarding the programs and makes all programs available solely on an "as is" basis. In no event shall Anthistle Systems & Programming Ltd. be liable to anyone for special, collateral, incidental, or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the purchase or use of the programs and the sole and exclusive liability of Anthistle Systems & Programming Ltd., regardless of the form of action, shall not exceed the Purchase Price (excluding Annual Update Fees) Paid. Moreover, Anthistle Systems & Programming Ltd. shall not be liable for any claim of any kind whatsoever by any other party against the user of the programs. Governing Law - The above statements shall be construed, interpreted and governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario, Canada. Christopher Anthistle, President, 3rd. April, 1991