You start out with paper forms up the wazoo, then you move on into the struggle of getting a word processor document to add and subtract (yes, that could be programmed before the WYSIWYG days), then maybe you migrate onto spreadsheet templates and artwork them so as to start to integrate the marketing process.

Yes, folks, this is what I looked like trying to automate the business and run it at the same time - not a pretty picture.

All the while, you keep searching for the software program that will do the job for you.

But you keep coming back to your accounting package as a tool to do the short and dirty proposals. And you can never keep up with the training - so all the systems are used only barely.

And as always, there are new supervisors to train, your associates to train - and never enough time to do it all and tweak the program to work better.