The mostly rural area where I live has a lot of small "mom & pop" places which have been slow to computerize.
One of my regular customers runs a service business, and up to five years ago was still doing everything when pen and paper, from scribbling bookings on a notepad, to writing up completed jobs in a daybook, to weekly totaling of amounts for apportioning payments to staff. The latter was, as I understand it, taking several hours one evening each week.
Gradually, I've extended the custom software I wrote for them to the point that it now handles everything from the basic bookings right through to weekly reports and monthly invoicing for account customers. (All running under DOS4.01, by the way!)
I set up a remote system so that the owner can operate from home some evenings, tranferring data over a simple dialup connection and then having calls forwarded.
Since then, both locations have been equipped with DSL, and the boss has become a little more computer-savvy (I think she's been reading too much about Skype), so I'm hearing suggestions about providing a VoIP voice link to provide call-forwarding and a no-charge method of dealing with office-to-home queries during the day (local calls, including call-forwarding are all chargeable here).
I could certainly set it up, and arrange for the data transfer to go over the DSL as well, but I would have reservations about switching from a solid, dependable system to this, especially given that the cost of those forwarded calls is probably only a couple of pounds a night at most.
As it stands, the only thing the system is dependent upon is having power at both ends and POTS service. Even during a recent outage when our remote unit was completely cut-off from its parent C.O. we discovered that the office and owner's home happened to be on the same line concentrator, so could still call each other. DSL was out for over 10 hours until the link was restored, of course.
