Milton Frank Plumbing provides residential and light commercial repair, remodel, and new construction services in the Houston, Texas area. From a one man operation they have grown to a 15 truck company. They were PHCC 2005 Contractor of the Year and have been featured in several articles in industry publications.

Over the years they tried a number of different methods to manage their business from manual cards to custom programs to general accounting systems augmented by spreadsheets. None of them were entirely satisfactory and all required double entry.

Finally Milton and Patty Frank attended a national PHCC convention, with the sole objective of visiting the software vendors exhibiting during the trade show. Patty Frank states, “We visited with three of those present, signed up for more information, and went home to wait. One company sent us a demo disk to preview. One company called and set up an appointment in our office and the third company never called us back. I’m sure you can guess which one of the three we eventually bought from! It was Compusource Corporation; they made the effort to understand our business needs.”

Patty further relates, “Although we were probably Compusource’s worst nightmare, the implementation went smoothly! I know we were terrified of the whole process. I think I woke up with the cold sweats for weeks after implementation, visualizing crashes and disasters that never happened. Oh, we had our glitches, mostly caused by user error. The Ascente system gives us a more accurate and complete picture of our company. We get better information in a timelier manner.”

They have 6 to 8 users in Ascente all the time, taking calls, entering work orders, generating purchase orders, researching customer history, paging and dispatching. Patty states, “There are never any speed issues with the software and we benefit greatly by everything being in one system.. It handles all our system needs from taking the initial call through accounting. There’s no double entry.”

Other staff members that use the Compusource Ascente software relate the following comments:

“It was easy to learn and very user friendly.” -Receptionist

“I think one of the best features of Ascente is that we are able to look up a new street or area that may not appear in an older key map by clicking the map icon on the call taking screen. It will automatically look up the address you have entered. This saves us a lot of time that was wasted searching for new streets.” –Customer Service Representative

“The accounting is really strong. Information flows automatically from the operational side to accounting. There is little chance for non accounting users to mess up the accounting data.” –Accounting

“The Teletrac GPS interface shows both the location of our service calls and our trucks. It’s cut down on our drive time and lets us get more calls done in a day.” –Operations