What Makes Professional Consignment Software, Professional?

What makes professional consignment software, professional?  What makes one programmer better than another?  Something I’ve learned over the years and something I take pride in, is paying attention to the details.

In Liberty Consignment Software, when you type in text fields — specifically, when you’re adding new consignors — Liberty lets you put in a bunch of blank spaces at the beginning and the end:

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I think this looks…sloppy.  I personally think professional software, shouldn’t do this.  And what’s more, there’s actually a name for this — rather, a specific function used to prevent this.  It’s known as trim and it’s how you automatically remove (i.e. trim) leading and trailing blank spaces from a string.  This is important, because “Name” is not the same as “    Name    “.

Now, whatever — it’s just blank spaces, right?  This can both look bad, as well as cause issues when searching, printing, managing accounts, etc.  A great example of where this can lead to actual, time-consuming issues, is when adding an account for a consignor that already exists — the check to see if any consignors with the same first/last name exist, will fail to validate, because “Cindy Jones” is not the same as “    Cindy      Jones  “.  So then you end up with duplicate accounts, items entered-in to disparate accounts, money owed in disparate accounts, etc.  If it’s ‘the best consignment software on the market’ though, I think things like this, shouldn’t happen.  If you don’t think it’s a big deal, then you haven’t taken that support call hundreds of times, helping a storeowner make sense of why they have duplicate accounts for the same consignor, with items and money split between multiple accounts.

So a simple, but professional difference between Peeps’ Consignment Software and Liberty, is we pay attention to the details.  You can’t even enter blank spaces when adding accounts — not blank spaces alone.  If you type a name, then go back and force blank spaces at the beginning, we automatically trim this:

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I was working with a customer today and was reminded that again, that just because software has been around for 25 years, doesn’t mean it’s the best consignment software out there.  And even if Liberty finally fixes this, it’s been that way for 25 years, so fixing it only validates (no pun intended) the very issue I’m talking about.