December 28, 2010

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Question

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Ken

    My company recently purchased a smaller company, we bought the entire company.  All active contracts, inventory, and even opened an account with that company's monitoring service, not to switch all the accounts. My question is, should the billing software involved in the purchase still be supported by the software company, having the original disk and owning the company name it was purchased under. Does the software company have the right to refuse us use of the software insisting we purchase new copy. 

    The sale did include the name of the company and any future leads the website may generate until the site providers contract expires and the site is closed.

Thanks for your advise

Ron

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Answer:

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    Without doing any research, it seems to me that a company that owns the software has a right to determine how it's going to be sold and used.  It sells and distributes that software according to its sale terms, which are agreed to be the purchaser at time of purchase or before the software is activated.  If the software is made available only to the first user, without the right to transfer, then I think that would hold up. 

    Not too different than the terms in a Standard Alarm Contract that provides that the subscriber can't assign its contract.  Keep in mind that the terms of your deal with your seller is not binding on others, such as the software owner.

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comments on auto pay and credit scores

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    My local bank does our ACH's for $.05 each.  We decided a long time ago that we didn't want to hire an accounts receivable clerk, so, EVERY account we do is on auto pay. Either bank draft (ACH) or credit card autopay. Every once in a while a customer has given resistance, but, we have never lost a sale. The only exception we do is for those customers who want to pay a year in advance. 

    Most of the big alarm companies will only do autopay now unless customer is high, high credit score.

Ken Hagerty

Arkansas Security

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Ken: 

    Do you or anyone on the list have the name and contact information for how to get Beacon or other such credit score reports on potential customers?

Thanks!

David Myers

Myers Protection Services

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Ken,

    ADS Security uses ACH Direct.  www.ACH-Payments.com or wakey@ach-payments.com 

    They provide excellent service, great rates and best of all - full integration with our accounting software, SedonaOffice.  This integration makes the ACH/CC transactions very easy and requires much less time than our previous setup with our bank.  Since we are in acquisition mode, we have seen many companies in the security business that are making their lives way too difficult by using cumbersome and inefficient methods of payment processing.

Patrick Ritter

VP/Controller

ADS Security – Nashville, TN

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Leaving leased equipment in place

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Hi Ken,

    This is in response to John from NY regarding the calling of the leased system to deprogram it.

    I would suggest it would be likely to not find out that you had to deprogram the system until after the telephone had been shut off. Also, it is usually not easy determining what all of the telephone numbers of the new tenant are and most times you have to be pretty lucky to find which of the new phone lines the system is now connected to. Usually it is disconnected by the new telephone installer.  Internet and radio or cellular monitoring can complicate this situation even more. I do not think there is any simple solution. 

Gene

Reliable Alarm

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